Confusion about the naming of Aldnoah Zero's OST/opening/ending song titles I have a couple of very closely related questions regarding composer Hiroyuki Sawano's choices in naming Aldnoah Zero's OST/opening/ending song titles.

I will be referencing the tracklist for Aldnoah Zero's OST (link here), in addition to some opening/closing songs that are co-composed by Hiroyuki Sawano including "aLIEz", "A/Z", and "&amp;Z".

First, most of the song titles include special/non-alphabetical/non-English characters (even if the title is clearly meant  an actual word like "robot" or "breathless"). Here are some examples:


R零B零T
BRE@TH//LESS
Ch19ヲFIRE★


Why did Hiroyuki Sawano decide to include all the special characters? Is there any significance in using them? To me, they are unnecessary, but I hesitate to claim that they are indeed unnecessary because they might actually have some meaning that I am not seeing.

My other question is why are some song titles seemingly extra-arbitrarily named? I realize that these are songs, so the composer can name them whatever he likes, but some song titles seem completely out of the blue to me. 

I realize that there are explanations for the names of some OST tracks in the wiki that I linked. 

For example, the song "AD2014-7.5/7.9-零・A" is named because "2014 07-05 / 07-09 [are] ALDONAH.ZERO's air dates on Tokyo MX and ABC respectively". 

The explanation tells me WHAT the song is named after, but it does not tell me WHY is the song named after something as arbitrary as an air date for the show. OST track titles usually relate to what the song actually attempts to convey to the listener, or relates to the scene in the animation, but I cannot see how an air date relates to either.

Finally, I do not understand where the openings/ending names come from. What do the names "aLIEz", "A/Z" and "&amp;Z" mean exactly, and why are they named that way?
seijitsu's answer does a good job of identifying what's going on with most of your examples, though I'll add that "Ch19ヲFIRE★" is meant to be read "Chikyuu wo Kasei" (1 = "i", 9 = "kyuu", "Fire" = 火 = "ka", ★ = 星 = "sei", "kasei" = 火星 = "Mars", but "kasei" also = 加勢 = "reinforcements"), which is something like "Reinforcements to Earth".

However, this goes a little beyond the recent-ish fad of including arbitrary typographic symbols for stylistic purposes. There's a broader context to this: Hiroyuki Sawano is a madman when it comes to titling his compositions. 

I invite you to consult the track listings for some of his other compositions. For example, Kill la Kill, which has incomprehensible monstrosities like "寝LLna聴9" (no, this doesn't make any real sense even if you've seen Kill la Kill and know Japanese). Or Owari no Seraph, with "1hundredknight:Y" being a number of steps removed from "Hyakuya Yuuichirou" (the protagonist's name). He's been doing this since at least 2011 with Ao no Exorcist, and has only gotten more ridiculous over time. My favorite example of this insanity is "凸】♀】♂】←巨人" from Shingeki no Kyojin, which Sawano indicates is supposed to be read "Kyojin Shinkou", meaning "Advance of the Titans" - but this is actually a pictogram of a series of walls, with a giant (巨人) approaching them. My god!

It's leaked over into his non-anime work, too - the soundtrack for Platina Data had gems like "nf壱III". I haven't seen Platina Data yet, and that probably has no bearing whatsoever on my inability to figure out what this is supposed to mean. He wasn't always like this, though - the soundtrack for Iryuu (the show that first brought him real recognition) is quite tame, with track titles like "unnecessary words" and "Blue Dragon".

According to one tweet of his, it's generally true of his soundtracks that the titles don't really have any deep meaning to them. "Don't think too hard about it", he says. 

So, yeah - Sawano is bonkers (he appears to get a good bit of lulz out of doing this), and beyond maybe decrypting his hyper-elaborate punny titles into a comprehensible human language, there is probably not much more to be said here.