seiyuu3

Chihara Minori announced 4 more sessions to her “Contact” live tour - according to reports it’s going to be at Osaka Nanba Hatch, Nagoya Diamond Hall and Tokyo Shinagawa Stellar Ball. At least this time the venues are of respectable sizes (all are 1000+ venues), and I get another chance at ticket draws as all my previous applications (5 goes) failed to get me any tickets.

Yamaha is releasing a music score book for Mizuki Nana. Apparently it will include some behind the scene off shots from live tours etc. I wonder if this has anything to do with the recent “I tried to play it” music boom on Niconico Douga - basically people who took videos of themselves playing their favourite anison with various musical instruments, and Hatsune Miku.

Some Nana-chan related “I tried to play it” links (requires Niconico Douga account)
1 Guitar player who played various Nana-chan songs
2 “Rush & Dash” drums
3 “Crystal Letter” on oboe
4 “Secret Ambition” on a koto

Old school famous seiyuu singer Kasahara Hiroko is re-releasing 5 albums from her earlier days. The trend of veteran seiyuu coming out and trying to recapture their music career seems to continue.

The Second Seiyuu Award has added a special new award - the Tomiyama Kei Award - to be award by the jury to the seiyuu that has the widest and broadest media reach as a seiyuu, or put simply the seiyuu with the most media “buzz” apparently. Personally I think the criteria is unclear and nature of the award seems iffy because it appears to be one of those “I can’t please everyone so I’ll just create another category” type of filler awards. Will wait and see who gets it and whether it turns out to be what I suspect the purpose of the award is what I think it is.

These should be enough to convince some of you to buy the Animelo Summer 2007 DVD.

“Rondo - Revolution” - Okui Masami and Mizuki Nana
“Revolutionary Girl Utena” OP - Original vocal by Okui Masami

“Seishoujou Ryouiki” - Takarano Arika (ALI Project) and Mizuki Nana
“Rozen Maiden Traümend” OP - Original vocal by ALI Project

Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first:

The video is bad, as in “zomg I see pixels”. Packaging leaves much to be desired as well for the full price. But get over it.

The sound is still linear PCM Stereo. OK, not 5.1, but the mixing is good and consequently the awesome songs are still awesome.

Rewatching all the songs, the awesome feeling is still there.

Multi-angle for the duets and last encore is epic win. They’ve finally discovered the DVD spec.

Must see acts: Suara, Jyukai, Nana (of course), all the duets, JAM Project, move, Takahashi Youko, Okui Masami. (Actually it’s really hard to leave people out of this list.)

Skippable: Bouken Desho Desho ~ Punk Desho version.

Major disappointment: They took out Dekaranger.

Verdict: Buy (Better with discount)

Link: Amazon.jp / CD Japan

Mainichi JP had broke the news - Nana-chan’s sixth album “Great Activity” ranked second on the Oricon Weekly Charts, bested her previous third ranking setted by her previous album “Hybrid Universe” and created a new record for the highest seiyuu album ranking on the Oricon Weekly Charts. While the official numbers aren’t out yet, I’d guess that the album must have sold around 28-30k copies in total (it sold 15k on the first two days before slowing down during the weekend). Congratulations to Nana-chan, and this is just yet more prove that she’s the top seiyuu artists out there at the moment, as no ones else is even coming close to the numbers she is selling - as she is selling almost double triple the amount of albums to her closest rivals.

As for the album itself, it’s a very solid album. It’s got good variety - a quality which I always value very highly - even though I may not necessarily agree with the genre of the songs they were mingling with. Though as always Nana-chan shows her incredibly singing ability and was able to handle anything that was thrown at her, and I’m most surprised by her dabbling into popular mainstream Japanese-style R&B music in Promise on Christmas. Although personally I have a deep loathing of any sort of Christmas love songs, but if I just switch off my Japanese part of the brain I can at least enjoy the vocals. I also really like the two other ballads in the album - ラストシーン (Last Scene) and Sing Forever. Others like Nostalogia and Chronical of Sky are not bad too. In general, it seems to me that the trademark hard-beat high tempo Nana songs had taken a backseat for once and the mellower songs were the highlights of this album - in contrary to the energetic title of the album - which makes this album much less instantly impressionable than the previous album “Hybrid Universe”. I personally applause that they carry over their willingness to experiment and change from “Hybrid Universe” onto this album, as even Elements Garden is losing a bit of their magic in Orchestral Fantasia, which did not live up to their previous offerings like Eternal Blaze, Justice to Believe etc., and don’t even get me started on Yabuki’s involvement in “Great Activity” again.

Also for those interested in album, do yourself a favour and pick up the first press edition with the DVD, the digest of Nana Summer Festa is well worth the little extra.

EDIT: Oricon news indicates that Great Activity sold 43k, looks like I’m off too, but in a good way.

Fresh out the gates - starting today at 7pm Tokyo time, Kingrecord’s web radio portal “Oh! sama” is running a limited time, one day only, streaming of the full PV for Nana-chan’s new song “Orchestral Fantasia” with all the usual locks and limitations. But since this is the age of Internetz 2.0 so naturally all videos gets archived at you-know-where. Enough rambling, video below.

“Orchestral Fantasia” will be the November theme song for Nippon Television’s mainstream music varity program “Ongaku Senshi Music Fighter“.

Minorin’s new album “Contact” officially goes on sale today and I got my hands on a, very literally, shiny copy. The fold out Minorin picture which spans 3 full folds is impressive, though the lyrics booklet could use a few more photos IMO. I can understand focusing on selling her on the merit of her voice, but it’s undeniable that Minorin is quite attractive, and her smile is especially charming, they should show it off more.

On the music side, so far my impression of it is generally positive, but I don’t think there are any tracks which quite swept me off my feet like my first encounter with “Shijin no Tabi”. Speaking of “Shijin no Tabi”, I’m very VERY annoyed that they decided to make a gapless transition between the ending of “Contact” - the track which preceeds “Shijin no Tabi” - straight into the pumping intro while competely cropping out the beautiful piano solo lead-in of the PV version, as it means I can’t listen to the track on repeat without feeling that the intro is missing something and it being abrupt. This means I’ll have to buy the PV DVD come December (not that I wasn’t going to buy it mind you) and rip that version instead. In the mean time I’ll just have to go back to looping the lower quality live recording which I made during the announcement.

If you’re enterprising enough, you’ve probably already found this on youtube but we’d thought we’d make it easy for you guys.

Enjoy!

Announced on her official homepage, うららかeasy (Uraraka easy) - her third personal album as well as her first self-produce album, will go on sale on December 21.

It’s going to be over 2 years and 3 months since her last personal album “Flower”. I’ve always enjoyed the soothing vocals of Fumiko’s songs, however I never really took a liking to Ueno Youko’s music and production in the previous two albums - the music were just a little bit too stale for my taste, thus the CDs never get much of a playing as I’m rarely in the mood for them. I used to think that if Orikasa Fumiko can find someone else to produce for her, I might enjoy her personal offerings a lot more (hey, maybe she thinks the same too), so I’m excited at the prospect that this album might be exactly what I’m looking for, and glad to know that she hasn’t fallen off the map completely in terms of her music offerings.

The cover of the single was released recently.

Titled 「君がくれたあの日」 (Kimi ga Kureta Ano Hi), it will go on sale on June 6th.

Simple but nice looking picture of Minorin, I like. ^____^

houkoholic: The Intertubes is faster than you! I’m looking at you King.

sent: Yeah King FTW :P

Notes: The PV is actually pretty cheap. It’s only cool because they made Nana’s costume look like Fate’s new Barrier Jacket in StrikerS. You know what they were going for (hur hur).

Enjoy!