seiyuu3

It’s hard to pinpoint who is responsible for something like this - either the producers at Bandai Namco are closet seiyuu ota or that the huge commercial success of IDOLM@STER means the marketing guys are dictating that every music game by Bandai Namco must have otaku appeal. The upcoming Happy Dance Collection (tentative title) game by Bandai Namco for the Nintendo Wii will feature a mascot character voiced by Mizuki Nana, not only that, but Nana-chan will also be singing a whopping total of 4 original songs for this dancing game. Besides the Nana-chan songs, there will be a bunch of well-known J-pop, old and new anime songs, and of course let’s not forget, IDOLM@STER songs.

While no definite dates are given, the game is scheduled to come out this year. With the huge penetration of the Wii, this might be a great opportunity for Nana-chan to get her name out amongst the general population. For seiyuu (Nana-chan) fans like us, who could pass up the opportunity to dance to Mizuki Nana and iM@S songs? I don’t know about you but I’m buying this for sure.

(The original story ran at Kotaku, but obviously they wouldn’t notice the deep seiyuu angle of this story)

Early reports are out - Nakajima Megumi’s debut single released under her character Ranka Lee in Macross Frontier sold an amazing 35,000 to grab fifth spot on the Oricon Weekly Charts. Extra bit of trivia - All 4 Macross Frontier CDs released thus far had ranked in the top 10 on the Oricon Weekly Charts during their release week, proving the draw power of the Macross brand.

I’ve been rather enjoying the contrasting differences between the songstresses of Macross Frontier, and they did a particularly good job at matching May’n (as Sheryl’s singing voice) against that of Nakajima Megumi. While May’n has a powerful and confident delivery of a veteran performer that belies her true experience, Nakajima Megumi has a diamond in the rough quality which really adds to the overall experience of watching (listening) her raise that is captivating in a different way.

Now let’s just hope the series will continue to deliver great music.

Kitamura Eri first personal single coming up?

The Animate online store has an entry listing which essentially says “Kitamura Eri 1st Maxi-single” with a serial of LACM-4513, coming out on July 23rd. Since KitaEri has released numerous character singles for anime such as Seto no Hanayome and Kodomo no Jikan already I’d take it that this is going to be her first single under her very own name. I’m pumped for this release as I think KitaEri is another power seiyuu singer that has plenty of potential to make it big. However, LACM points to the single being released by Lantis, so there’s this looming bad vibe about this which I can’t shake off as well.

Either way, this is a good time to re-visit KitaEri’s Hyakka Seiran anisong covers to see why I’m excited:

Tamura Yukari’s Budoukan Live DVD set release confirmed

Anisong site Axive has reported that Yukarin’s historical live at Budoukan “Love♡Live 2008 *Chelsea Girl*” will see a DVD release on July 23rd (damn what’s with this day?!). A DVD release is expected and anticipated by many, but the real bit of news is that they are going to have a 5.1 soundtrack - a first for King Records’ seiyuu DVD releases I believe. Due to various circumstances I actually had to pass on this concert, and while there is no substitute for physically being there, at least a nicely mastered DVD with 5.1 soundtrack can capture part of the magic. Yukarin is taking one for the team here - as I’m sure depending on how this release is recieved that a 5.1 track for Nana’s Live Fighter concert for this year would be a given. So here’s hoping that the release will be good.

I have Minorin fanclub goods

Lazy man way to finish off this entry.

Deculture! May’n, currently better known as the singing voice of Sheryl Nome of Macross Frontier, has been added to the August 31st session of Animelo.

May’n is not too bad at live, having heard her free live at Bunkahousou not so long ago. Still not quite enough to push me over the fence just yet, but it’s getting awfully close for me to want to go to the Sunday session too. If only they would throw in Maaya or Nakajima Megumi into the Sunday line-up and do a massive Macross song session complete with JAM Project’s Fukuyama Yoshiki who was Basara’s singing voice, THAT would be enough reasons for me to go.

Mizuki Nana tops this week’s Oricon charts

Mizuki Nana’s concert DVD Live Formula sold some 16000+ copies in its first week, beating old-school famous Jpop duo CHAGE and ASAKA’s Live concert DVD released on the same week to claim first spot on the Oricon Music DVD Weekly, as well as ranking in 4th on the Overal DVD sales ranking. Note this is actually not the first time that Mizuki Nana had claimed top spot on the Oricon Music DVD ranking - her PV collection NANA CLIPS 3 was the first to do so. NANA CLIPS 3 was also the first ever seiyuu music DVD to rank first on the Oricon Music DVD Weekly charts. The result of Live Formula proves yet again that when it comes to seiyuu artists, Mizuki Nana is in a league of her own.

Following on, supporters of anisong singers and seiyuu artists has a lot to talk about in the past week when it comes to Oricon rankings. We first have Sakamoto Maaya/Kanno Yoko making a bit of history with the Macross Frontier opening theme song “Triangler” staying in the top 10s for 3 consecutive weeks, then you have May’n’s Sheryl songs ranking in 3rd on its debuting week. The power of Culture ™ is not to be under-estimated. Now when Nakajima Megumi releases her debuting CD as Ranaka Lee we will know for sure the branding power of Macross.

Kugimiya Rie’s appearance on NHK’s Anigiga

Now usually I have issues with NHK’s reporting (long story), but Kugimiya Rie’s recent TV appearance on Anigiga on the 14th May was actually a very nice piece of interview that is worth watching if you have even a remote passing interest in her. Her mentioning about how she was not much of an anime fan early in childhood due to her being raised in Kumamoto and how she utilise her interest in books to help her get into the voice acting was surprising, seeing how that there is an increase tendency for seiyuu to be huge anime fans as of recent. The other interesting thing was how her parents, wanting her to stay close to home, suggested her to be an announcer instead. I can’t picture this myself because her current vocal image is too deeply ingrained into my brain. For those who’s not fluent enough to watch the video raw, I still suggest you to watch the live adlib in the studio. The video file is now floating around on the Intertubes at the usual places.

I know it’s not a particularly flattering picture, but I like what she said there.

Chihara Minori loves Chinese dresses

Just an excuse for me to talk about Minorin, she posted a picture of herself in yet another Chinese dress (her fourth time). The dress (shown on the far right below) is a gift given to her by Inoue Marina. Let’s all give a big “Thank You” to Inoue Marina! Thank you Marina for indirectly giving us Minorin eye-candy!

Nobody beats her when it comes to “dressing up” though:

Can you tell who that is? (no clues in the tags, har har)

According to her latest blog post, Minorin will be releasing her second single of the year on August 6th. The title of the single is 雨上がりの花よ咲け (Ameagari no Hana yo Sake). The date suggests heavily to me that they are planning to get this out before Animelo for some promotional effects.

I wasn’t terribly impressed with Melty tale storage, and I’m starting to worry about Lantis’ spam tactics when it comes to their seiyuu and anime song releases - it seems they just don’t really know what to do with their seiyuu talents, they just know that they are popular and need to pump out CD after CD, but without actually finding the right direction for their artists to go along with.

Anyway, I’m still cautiously optimistic. So let’s see where this one will go.

PS. I’m now a member of Minorin’s official fanclub “Minori Smile Season (m.s.s)”, will be getting the fanclub goodies in a week’s time, woot!

So I got my Live Formula DVD from Amazon JP (great bargain there btw @ 4600yen, I’ll talk about it a little later, maybe) and I just had to re-live and share this mesmerizing moment:

It’s all about the arpa (Italian for harp) - the arpa in the composition adds another dimension to the music of the song which you don’t find often in your average pop-inspired anisong. The off vocal version of Heart-shaped Chant, one of the rare off vocals which I actually listen to, shows this off quite well, but watching it being performed live is yet another level altogether.

The arpa performer, both in the original score and in the video, is Agematsu Mika - she’s the sister of Elements Garden’s Agematsu Noriyasu (Eternal Blaze, Dancing in the velvet Moon etc) and is a renouned award winning professional arpa player. Her official page has an English version so you can read about her there. Apparently when they originally recorded the song, Agematsu Mika just went in to the studio and played her arpa impromptu. She deserves major credit for making Heart-shaped Chant into such a special song, without her arpa, I seriously doubt I would like the song as much as I currently do.

Just announced on the official website today is that Yukarin is going to attend the Saturday session of Animelo 2008.

With Nana-chan (Mizuki Nana), Minorin (Chihara Minori), Yukarin (Tamura Yukari), Kurinoko (Kuribayashi Minami) on the same day the Saturday session practically has all my top favourite female seiyuu singers covered - add in ALI Project and GRANRODEO and I’m totally sold on the Saturday session now. Sunday’s session on the other hand is still up in the air. While I’m 120% certain that Ishikawa Chiaki will sing “Uninstall” and I’d love to hear that song live, the line up on Sunday doesn’t quite appeal to me on the same level.

With Nana-chan, Yui and Yukarin all attending this year, this means the three top selling female seiyuu artists of the current generation are all at Animelo. With angela also in the line up this makes me wonder if King Records had decided to throw in their weight this year and stop letting Lantis gets all the glory. Perhaps we will see a DVD release by King Records this time, which may as well, since their seiyuu DVD release are better than Lantis - video quality wise anyway.

Animelo 2008 had added a few more names to the line-up in the last couple of weeks. While both Psychic Lover and savage genius were familiar names to Animelo, one that came out from the left was the announcement of Kurobara Hozonkai performing on the Sunday session.

Kurobara Hozonkai is Horie Yui’s strange little goth band that was born from her radio program “Horie Yui no Tenshi no Tamago” back in 2006.

Well they finally announced it - one of the hottest anisong events Animelo Summer is on this year and the official site is now open. A preliminary list of artists attending are already on the site - with familiar names such as ALI Project, Kuribayashi Minami, Mizuki Nana, Chihara Minori, Ishikawa Chiaki, JAM Project, Momoi Halko, Hirano Aya, and two new players GRANRODEO and angela.

This year’s key word is “Challenge” - and with that they are definitely taking some new organizational challenges by not only upping the venue scale from Budoukan to Saitama Super Arena (the capacity depending on layout can be up to double the size), but also splitting the concert into two days, with what appears to be different artists performing on different days. I’m a bit torn on this move - as much as I like the prospects of two days worth of awesome live performances of anisongs, I don’t like them leaving me no choices but to go to both days to see all the artists I want to see.

On a related note, one of JAM Project’s long time female member Matsumoto Rika broke news shortly after the closing of JAM Project’s domestic concert tour that she will no longer take part in JAM Project and JAM Project related events. While hopeful fans were praying that it’s a late April’s Fool, but the profile picture of JAM Project at Animelo reflected this change. It’s a big blow to JAM Project, especially that JAM Project is supposedly doing a world tour this year (and what’s up with that anyway? Hardly any news is out regarding the schedule). Otakon still has her listed as guest, but I guess it’s up in the air.