seiyuu3

I’m sure most of you will know about the recent Akiba stabbing incident, in which it was widly reported that the offender had announced his plans to commit the crime on the infamous Japanese BBS 2ch several weeks before the incident. There has been a number of half-copycats after the incident - “half” because people are posting announcements but without actually carrying it through/or was arrested before they could carry it through (thank goodness!). And now one of the latest incident took an interesting seiyuu twist.

According to the report, a 21 year old man had posted the following message on 2ch with his mobile phone:

「お前ら安心しろ。水樹奈々と水樹信者はダガーナイフと２ｔ（トン）トラックを使って、俺が代々木で皆殺しにしてやるからよ」

Roughly translating to “You guys don’t worry about it. I’m going to use a dagger and a 2t truck and kill Mizuki Nana and all her rabid fans at Yoyogi”.

Why Yoyogi? Well that’s because Mizuki Nana is going to hold her Live Fighter Concert at Yoyogi this weekend, and it’s anticipated that there will be at least 15,000 Mizuki Nana fans there.

The man confessed his crime. His reason? He just wanted to see the reaction.

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)

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)

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.