seiyuu3

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.

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.

Received V cards from the official fanclub on the day but only just got around to post it - Nana-chan is here to remind you all that you’re a lonely otaku!

Still, tasty Nana-chan picture is tasty. She is so edible in this picture that I must infer a line from “Cosmic Love”:

Amai chocolate mitai, hitori jimeshitai
like sweet chocolate, I want to have you all to myself

The PV was released today on Yahoo! Douga. So the usual. Video below.

I have a softspot for stop motion animation, so I like what they did in this PV in general. I’m not sure about the fetish cosplay though (cheerleader, megane look). I always did find the section at around the 4:10 mark of which the synchronisation for all the different looks of Nana-chan to that particular line of lyrics, all framed in a comic book style panel, quite catching to the eye.

Amazon JP delivered my package containing my copy of Mizuki Nana’s 17th single “Starcamp EP”. The short of it is that I was kind of surprised how much I enjoyed the single from the music stand point - I have not seen a single second of the tie-up anime “Rosario + Vampie”, not even the opening nor ending, so I approached this single purely as just more songs by Nana-chan. My original opinion of “Astrogation” holds - I enjoy listening to it when it comes up on the playlist, but it’s not one I would actively seek out to play as it doesn’t stick to my mind. “Cosmic Love” reminds me of some of the cute songs from Nana’s second album “Magic Attraction”, which I kind of enjoy. “Dancing in the velvet moon” turns out much better in recording compared to the version that Nana-chan performed at the last session of her Live Formula tour and was definitely the highlight of the single, and with a ballad “Soratokei” wraps it all up in one neat complete package. When Nana-chan claimed that this is an “all A-side single”, she wasn’t joking, as even though the songs aren’t mind-blowingly outstanding, the quality is definitely there.

However, ther was one major problem with this single. While I’m no audiophile and will not claim the ability to tell the minute difference between hi-fi equipment and a decent pair of bookshelf speakers, but one doesn’t really need to be a audiophile to tell that “Cosmic Love” and “Dancing in the velvet moon” had problems - there were massive clipping in the recording. Now on the other hand being an engineer who took some signal processing classes, I was able to quantify this by quickly looking at the waveform of the recording - and sure enough it confirms my suspicion. The recording for “Cosmic Love” and “Dancing in the velvet moon” was recorded way too loud and the majority of these two songs’ volume was over the normal threshold. To illustrate this let me show you the following:

The waveform on the top is from “Cosmic Love”, and the one at the bottom is “Meg Mell” from Clannad’s OST, which was just something I grabbed off the shelf at random. Without getting all technical, let’s just say that you want to clearly see the peaks of the waveform fall within the celling and the floor as in “Meg Mell”, and not touching and/or concentrated at the top/bottom as in the case of “Cosmic Love”, “Dancing in the velvet moon” is in the same boat as “Cosmic Love” but I’m not going to put up the graph. So if you found that the sound of these two songs on Starcamp EP sound rasped and was wondering, no it’s not what it’s suppose to sound like. At least I hope the people at King Records weren’t intending it to sound like this…

Seems that I am bitching about company failures alot lately.

Title speaks for itself.

This is actually the first time I’ve heard the song in full. Quite a mainstream Jpop sounding song, and hardly one that puts up any sort of challenge to Nana-chan’s abilities. It’s catchy enough for a pop song, but like most mainstream pop it’s going to come and go really quickly without leaving much of a lasting impression. Then again that’s probably what they were going for anyway. At least it seems they’ve got a (slightly) bigger budget for the PV than usual, I mean check out the CGs! :p

Mizuki Nana’s 17th single “Starcamp EP” goes on sale next week - to all you people coming in looking for downloads and torrents, check the release date first ya fools! And for the record this site does not provide downloads and torrents - anyway this means that heavy promotion is about to begin. Yahoo Japan is going to stream the PV for Astrogation starting this Friday, and Nana-chan is scheduled to appear on television program “Oto Riko!” on the 18th. In the mean time a 15 second long commerical can be found below.

On a sort-of related topic (related to Nana-chan anyway), I was made aware of this certain scene from episode 17 of Majintantei Nougaminerou:

LOLZ at the two guys that were obviously drawn to cover the two Ns of “Nana”, so this can’t be a fluke. Looks like someone at Madhouse is a Nana-chan fan. If you are wondering where the source pictures are from and for, they are from the canned sweets which were sold on the recent Live Formula tour as part of the tour goods.

Info on Tamura Yukari’s new album is now up. Titled “Izayoi no Tsuki, Kanaria no Koi”, it will be released on 27th of February, which is also Yukarin’s birthday (she’s turning 17, again). The first pressing will come with a DVD containing the PV to one of the songs in the album “Chelsea Girl”. The release of this album also means that there would be plenty of new songs to look forward to for her Budoukan live in March.

Since both King Records and Yukarin’s own homepage fails at images, it is again up to Amazon JP to save the day with a nice big image of the cover.

Chihara Minori will also be releasing a new single on 26th March. Title is not yet known. I think there’s a good chance that we might get to hear it at the final sessions of her live tour.

Horie Yui just released her highly anticipated album “Darling” yesterday. The promotional train for this album is insane - Yui was literally on the cover of every single seiyuu magazine, with hm3 running a cover special which spans 3 consecutive issues no less. We’ve even spotted a big poster ad at Akihabara station (no pictures, sorry). No doubt it is part of VIMS’ plan to get back some lost ground now that a few of the other seiyuu artists are nibbling at Yui’s heels. Will be keeping an eye on the Oricon charts to see whether the big promotional effect is going to pay off or not. sent might also have a word or two on the album later on now that his copy came in.

Finally, one release that surely fell under the radar for many people is Takahashi Mikako’s album “sweet” which was also released yesterday. Not only is the album fully produced by Mikako herself, she also wrote the lyrics and composed the music to every single one of the 10 tracks in the album. Apparently it took her 3 years to do all of this. Mikako is a decent enough singer, I’m tempted to buy it, half out of respect for her effort and half out of curiosity.

The small image is not because of bias, just that it’s the biggest image I could find.

Picture taken from Amazon JP. Don’t ask me why the official page hasn’t got a decent size picture but Amazon does.

The complete tracklisting was also revealed:
1. Astrogation
2. COSMIC LOVE
3. Dancing in the velvet moon
4. Soratokei

Astrogation’s composer and arrangement is credited to Sumiya Jun. You can find some of his past works here. I think this is the first time him and Nana-chan has worked together.

First a happy new year to you all. seiyuu3 is currently reporting from Osaka, energy all spent just after attending Mizuki Nana’s countdown live at Grand Cube Osaka.

At today’s concert, Nana-chan announced the title for her 17th single. The title is “Star Camp EP”. According to Nana-chan, the title came from card number 17 of a tarot deck, “The Star”, as this is her 17th single, “Camp” represents where everyone gathers together to have fun, and “EP” as in Extended Play, as this single will contain 4 songs. The big news is that “Star Camp EP” will be the Feburary opening theme song for mainstream TV music program Ongaku Senshi Music Fighter, which broadcasts on Nippon Televison Network. Readers with good memory might recall that “Orchestral Fantasia” - one of Nana-chan’s song from her latest album “Great Activity”, was featured as a power play song for the same music program in November last year. Nana-chan providing her song for this program as an opening theme is a huge achievement, as going through the list of artists whom also performed songs for the program will get you familiar big Jpop names such as Hamasaki Ayumi, TRF, EXCILE, hitomi, Every Little Thing, to just name a few. This might give Nana-chan a shot to get some more single sales, though I doubt we would see record breaking numbers as the coupling tracks for Gonzo harem love comedy “Rosario to Vampire” isn’t going to have what it takes to pull in the numbers like the Nanoha opening theme singles IMO.

Nana-chan is set to kick off 2008 in a big way.

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.