Samurai Champloo — Departure & Impression (Full OST)

Shinichirō Watanabe had already done Cowboy Bebop with Yoko Kanno when he handed the 2004 Champloo score to hip-hop producers instead of a composer. The music came out as a run of Music Record volumes rather than one soundtrack: Departure is Nujabes and Fat Jon, Impression pulls in Force of Nature and Tsutchie. Battlecry, with Shing02 on the mic, opens every episode; MINMI closes them with Shiki no Uta.

These are the two albums in full, roughly two hours and twenty minutes end to end, and the screen is just the Departure sleeve — a white moon over blue, a pine branch, a kite — so there is nothing to look at. That suits it. The show cut fights to the drums instead of scoring them afterward, and stripped of the animation the beats still carry that timing, which is why this works better as work music than most anime soundtracks do.