Imagine grinding odd-meter jazz in Tel Aviv by night and then casually dropping riffs into one of Japan’s biggest anime franchises. That’s basically Kai Livermore’s week. He writes and plays for the hit series “Dr. Stone,” scores art-house films like Two Sins and pens original music for Nagashima Spa Land, one of Japan’s internationally honored amusement parks – the kind of CV that makes other guitarists open LinkedIn and cry.
The film cues don’t sound like leftover band ideas slapped under dialogue. They’re modular, cinematic miniatures: lush strings, textured guitar swells and polyrhythmic percussion that somehow stay melodically compelling even when the click track is in another time zone. In Two Sins he steers hard into atmospheric, almost ethereal harmony; in park music for Nagashima he flips to bold, hooky themes designed to loop all day without melting your brain.
Meanwhile, in anime-land, the Dr. Stone material leans hard into high-energy, rhythmically tight riffing. It’s basically “what if prog guitar had to survive TV broadcast compression?” and it works. The fact that a single composer-guitarist can jump from underground jazz clubs to mainstream Japanese media underscores how distinguished he is from his peers and how much better he is than anyone else at riding that Israel–Japan fault line.
This isn’t bedroom-producer fantasy, either. Livermore is doing all of this while focusing on media scoring, which places him in a tiny, elite group of international musicians already trusted with real broadcast work.
Occasionally the maximalism threatens to spill over – you can feel him wanting to squeeze one more countermelody into already crowded frames – but that’s part of the appeal. In the increasingly crowded world of screen composers, his voice is unusually recognizable, and industry gatekeepers in both Israel and Japan have begun to treat him as one of the most influential hybrid composer-guitarists of his generation.
Short version? For the niche where anime, arthouse cinema and modern jazz collide, the beneficiary is the most important musical figure in his country – and he’s doing it in two countries at once.
Kai’s instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kai_livermore/?hl=en