seiyuu3

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.

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!

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.

Linky. You can also see part of the PV for the new song “Melty tale storage” there.

Nice pic, very classy. This could pass for an ad for cosmetics. :P Not hard to understand why even some girls would turn yuri for Minorin. The PV seems to be fairly similiar to what they’ve been doing so far - lots of standing around in big open space with Minorin doing her hand-waving thing. Well you either dig it or you loathe it.

Anyway, track listing is as follows:
1. Melty tale storage
2. Sandglass~Kioku no Ryushi
3. Echo of Melty tale storage [red strings ver.]
4. Melty tale storage (off vocal)
5. Sandglass~Kioku no Ryushi (off vocal)

Single on sale 26th March.

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.

I’ve talked about the Minamike’s seiyuu trio - Sato Rina, Inoue Marina and Chihara Minori’s manga effort here, and what do you know, they really are going to publish their work. From March this year, the Minamike radio show “Minamike no Minakike” will be collected and released in CD form, and according to the program’s site, the first pressing for the CD will come with the “Sensei and Ninomiya-kun” manga that the seiyuu drew. Not much else is known right know and checking the release schedule, it appears that there will be more than one CD for the program’s recording, so it’s unknown whether they are going to split the manga over the volumes or just release it on the first installment only.

Either way, I’m really interested in checking the manga out drawn by the three, plus I really enjoyed the radio show as well, so this should be a no-brainer purchase for me.

2007 Christmas week sees two big seiyuu DVD releases - Yukarin’s concert DVD “Pinkle Twinkle Milky Way” and Minorin’s first music clip DVD “Message 01″. So how do they stack up and are they worth the price of admission? Read on.

First, Yukarin’s concert DVD set containing footage from the 2006 Christmas concert “Pinkle Twinkle Party” as well as this year’s summer tour “Sweet Milky Way”. After a few fumbles in the beginning, the past couple of years King Record’s concert DVD products has improved dramatically and has remained pretty solid - both in terms of the quality of the actual content on the disk as well as the presentation of the package. “Pinkle Twinkle Milky Way” keeps up with the trend, so what you get for 6,800yen is a massive 3 disk set in a 4 fold digi pack, a nice thick booklet containing pictures and interviews, and a hard cardboard box to house it all. Click on the second and third picture for large size photo.

Just looking at the pictures, you can tell that King Record really knows the people they are selling to. It’s all good and well that the package is pretty, so how about the actual content? Again keeping up with their recent effort, what you get is the concert recorded in anamorphic widescreen with linear PCM stereo sound - this is about as good as they can get without moving to HD disks such as Blu-ray or HD-DVD (FWIW, Suara’s concert on Blu-ray was beautiful, so I’m eagerly waiting for a Nana-chan or Yukarin concert on a HD disk). The video compression is also good, so visually it is nice as well, check out a few screen grabs below (click for full size):

Some of you might have read my ranting against the Haruhi Gekisou DVD at other places, for reference’s sake, here’s a grab from the Gekisou DVD, again click for full size.

Compare the crispness of the screen grabs, added with the fact that the Gekisou DVD was 4:3 letterboxed (with insane overscan compensation) and I think it should be clear that the Gekisou DVD was a damn mess. Not to mention the difference in price was only a mere 800yen and I think you can understand my beef with the Gekisou disk.

As for the content’s side, we’ve talked about Yukarin’s live performance enough here but it’s worth repeating - she sings well and her MCs are fun, so you do get your money’s worth.

Moving on to Minorin’s “Message 01″

The packaging is not fancy - only coming in a standard CD size jewel case, no big deal, but my first big disappointment was the 4:3 letterbox video despite the fact that the entire disk’s video was in widescreen! On the plus side though there were no major problems with the video compression, so not all were lost.

This is the second Lantis produce DVD that I’ve bought - Animelo 2007 being the first which had bad video compression - and judging from this disk it looks like Lantis could learn a thing or two from King Record. Other than that though, the content itself was quite substantial with 96 minutes of running time, off setting the original fear of a 3,000yen price tag for 3 PV clips. The documentary section makes up the bulk of it and it will take me some time to get through the entire disk, though quickly skimming through the footage I found some nice gems in there including videos of Minorin’s street live days in Akihabara, definitely worth watching to see just how far she had came. Included with the DVD was a bonus audio CD containing one track titled “Contact 13th”. My first reaction was to ripped it and add it as the 13th track to the Contact album playlist, then I replace the mangled album version of “Shinji no Tabi” with the full version from the DVD and gave it a few play through and all of a sudden it made the album seem more complete. Surprising how one or two tracks can make or break an entire album. As a side note, Lantis collaborated with the usual anime goods stores for extra goodies and Animate was giving out special posters:

When I saw the sample on Lantis’ special page I knew I had to get the disk at Animate just for this poster, and I have to say it is one of the better free posters I’ve got from Animate for a long long time. Now I’ll just have to decide whether I want to use this poster in place of the Junpaku Sanctuary poster currently on the wall.

In conclusion, Yukarin’s DVD is another quality product that is highly recommended to anyone having a passing interest in her music career. On the other hand, Minorin’s DVD would not disappoint hardcore fans, however I don’t think it will be as worthy of a purchase to non-followers compared to the Yukarin DVD.

Believe it or not, I’m actually not the type that follows seiyuu radio shows. However this season had me following the Minami-ke radio “Minami-ke no Minakike”. I’m not sure why I’m attracted to this particular radio show - it’s probably the random-ness of it, as each episode has no particular theme to it and it goes in all sorts of direction, and the adlib nature of the radio show resembles the anime itself. Of course it has the added attraction of having two seiyuu that I’m interested in - Inoue Marina and Chihara Minori, and I’m starting to warm up to Sato Rina as well.

One example of the random-ness of the show was when they talked about the show-within-show, the love drama “Sensei and Ninomiya-kun”, that the Minami sisters watches. Since in the anime there really is no story to this show, one of the seiyuu, Inoue Marina if I recall correctly, suggested that they could draw a shoujo manga of the show, and they can each take turn drawing a chapter each week. To keep it short, the idea got the go ahead and they are now serialising the manga, so to speak.

Originally they were doing it for fun and they weren’t going to show it to anyone, but since Inoue Marina is such an excellent drawer, Chihara Minori’s childhood dream was to be a mangaka and apparently Sato Rina is said to be a good drawer too according to her wiki entry, it turned into something they didn’t quite expected, so they’re now giving the listeners a glimps of it by posting a couple of sample pages from their manga.

First you have Sato Rina’s:

And here you have Inoue Marina’s:

The three of them joked about publishing it in one of the episodes, maybe at Comiket or package it as a special in the DVD or something, and who knows, maybe just like this little idea it may come true.

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.