So Nana-chan appeared as a guest on the late-night TV music program 「音流 On-Ryu」 in order to promote her new album. Unlike her previous mainstream TV appearance on “Hey! Hey! Hey!” which was a provocative piece focusing on only the negative aspects of the otaku/Akiba-kei culture and taking numerous cheap shots at it, the approach for the 「音流 On-Ryu」 interview was a much less sensational piece, which made it a more enjoyable interview to watch.
While I won’t get into all the details of the interview, there were a couple of things which Nana-chan said which I thought were worthy of mention.
First, when asked what is the difference between voice-acting work and singing work and whether she treats these two areas as separate jobs, Nana-chan replied that to her there is no difference, because she thinks that both are a form of expression using the voice. While people of the seiyuu fandom might already recognise the truth behind Nana-chan’s comment, I’m happy to see that Nana-chan was able to make this statement on mainstream TV and to possibly bring more recognition to the job description of the seiyuu profession, especially with more and more seiyuu being able to crack into the top ranks of the Oricon charts.
Secondly, when asked about her new album “Hybrid Universe”, she said that for this album she was able to work with a number of new composers and musicans and thus it opened new doors and greatly widened her musical world. The title “Hybrid Universe” also represents that she was able to take all the different styles and combine it together to form this new universe of mixed style. Needless to say that I agree with her as I’ve already briefly touched upon this subject in one of my previous posts.
Expanding on this topic, having followed Nana-chan’s solo music career from her 1st album, it is great to see that she’s working with new composers to expand her musical style and continues to form her own image as a singer rather than relying on old formulas. No offense to Yabuki Toshirou since he was responsible for the rise of Nana-chan and I still respect him for putting out quite a few good tunes for Nana-chan previously, but one listen of his latest work “Primal affection” on the CD and I’m certain that it is time for Nana-chan to work less with him. This is evident because from the song it convey a sense of style regression back to several years ago, the period of when Yabuki was writing music for Okui Masami, rather than him writing music for Mizuki Nana. While this may be acceptable when Nana-chan was still a new face, it isn’t acceptable in current times when Nana-chan has more than enough to stand for her own image and style. So it’s good to see that the people managing Nana-chan’s career had the vision to see this and have already taken the appropriate steps in the right direction.
