seiyuu3

Official site here.

As I’ve written in my 2008 review post, Shimoda “Asapon” Asami was one of the two great seiyuu discoveries for me last year. So I’m really excited about this album (perhaps even more so than Nana’s upcoming “Ultimate Diamond”). With the recent success of several ameteur release of Hatsune Miku albums, it’s not too surprising that more people are trying to make real cash off Vocaloid music. Although one could argue that part of the charm of Vocaloid songs is the slightly mechanical tone of the voices, but it’s also undeniable that there’s a lot of demand for renedition of the songs by real people/singers. Out of all the 3 Vocaloid sound bank seiyuu contributors - Fujita Saki as Miku, Shimoda Asami as Rin/Len and Asakawa Yuu as Ruka, the sound produced by Rin/Len’s remains the closest to the vocal range that Shimoda Asami herself is able to actually sing in (unlike say, Fujita Saki as Miku). On top of that, Shimoda Asami has an excellent track record in singing a wide variety of songs as well as being a capable singer, combined with some spill-over from her army of fans on NicoDouga (no doubt also realising this, the PR machine plans to start a Shimoda Asami channel on NicoDouga to promote the album) due to her role as Futami Ami/Mami of Idolmaster, this album could potentially be a big hit and rip up the charts similiar to the other recent Hatsune Miku albums. Although this is going to be Shimoda Asami’s first solo album release, the formula here seems to contain enough of the stuff that attracts good publicity to give her a solid boost in her career. Finally, Shimoda Asami herself will pen lyrics to the title song “Prism”, which is a completely original song.

The album will go on sale on 10th June.

EDIT: Youtube links to a few songs that will be covered:

ココロ　(Kokoro)

リンリンシグナル (Rin Rin Signal)

Finally for good measure what Shimoda Asami sounds like live. スタ→トスタ→ (Start Star) from Idolmaster.

We’re back! Maybe the site will be a bit slower than before. Let me know if it’s unbearable. I might do something about it. There may be some more changes to come soon too. Feedback is welcome as always.

Hey everyone, long time no post. Just some pre-warning that there’s going to be some downtime for seiyuu3 while we relocate. We’re looking at a couple of weeks of downtime starting from sometime next week (25th March onwards). I’ll see if I can *ahem* squeeze some upgrades in at the same time.

See you on the other side! (hopefully)

The award ceremony is suppose to be this Saturday, but naturally all the magazines already knew who the winners are so they can do their interviews to make it in time for publications. So while surfing image boards a small picture of the upcoming Voice Newtype came up and shows us that their winner cover special has these people:

So that almost certainly means Kamiya Hiroshi and Kugimiya Rie won best actor/actress respectively. I would think that Kamiya Hiroshi got it for Zetsubou Sensei, but on the other hand I have no idea what the Kugyu would have gotten it for.

The smaller words below also shows names such as Sugita Tomokazu (looks like his picture in the second from left too), Tomatsu Haruka, Nakajima Megumi and Fukuyama Jun. Third picture from the left looks like Endo Aya to me (the kanji just above the picture seems to read as her name too). I think I can make out Sawashiro Miyuki above Sugita’s photo as well.

Speculations and flames on what roles they’ve won it for welcome. ;)

Animelo 2009 RE:Bridge

I missed the livecast, but thanks to everyone’s live-spamming of this site (lol), I got to know the initial line-up for Animelo 2009 without even having to check the official site! User-generated content FTW? Anyway, with them going to the lengths of setting up an English site, I guess keeping up with this year’s line-up will be much simplier. Now just a summary of what artist we have thus far:

22nd August: Ayane, Ishikawa Chiaki, ELISA, JAM Project, Chihara Minori
23rd August: Sakakibara Yui, Savage Genius, Hirano Aya, Mizuki Nana, Yonekura Chihiro

It seems to me that Saturday currently lacks the 萌え idol seiyuu singers while Sunday is lacking the 燃え GAR/male singers. So I’m predicting that they will probably do something about that to balance the two days up in the upcoming annoucements. With Nana-chan and Hirano Aya both on Sunday (FWIW, they have gone head-to-head on the same day before when Aya appeared as special guest in 2007, though I guess most people had sealed that memory away due to that horrendous punk version of Bouken Desho Desho) it’s going to be a sell out for all the rabid fanboys and it would probably be just short of a riot when it comes to them fighting over tickets. If it is up to me I would think that they would do a temporary reunion of Yamato Nadeshiko (Yukarin and Hoc-chan) on Saturday to get the fanboys to step and craw over each others’ smelly bodies for Saturday’s session too. For GAR singers, well, I’m not that knowledgible in those, but I wouldn’t mind if they bring back GRANRODEO or something along that line. Oh and if m.o.v.e makes another appearance, please sing something else besides Gamble Rumble. You have an entire catalog of good Initial D theme songs, use them!

First iDOLM@STER Concert Tour

On other concert news, the iM@S girls are going to have their first ever concert tour in 4 major cities in May. The cities they are visiting are in the order of Nagoya, Osaka, Fukuoka and final stop at Tokyo. Appearance of the seiyuu are all over the place though from the initial announcements - like Takahashi Chiaki “Chiaking” only appearing at the Tokyo session and Shimoda Asami “Asapon” at Fukuoka only, plus the usual absence of Ochiai Yurika “Yurishii” and Kugimiya Rie “Kugyuu~”. Unless they change the line up it just means that it would be impossible to see to all the performances in one session. Someone made a reference guide for the line-up and I’ve just PS the English bits myself. While Tokyo looks the most delicious (as expected, and competition for tickets will be fierce), the lack of Asapon is going to be a real let down for me.

Nana-chan New Album on 20th May

So we now have a date, apparently it will contain 15 tracks, and the first press comes with a DVD of the secret event for Trickster which had Nana roping in a bunch of her other seiyuu friends such as Sugita Tomokazu, Suzumura Kenichi, Sawashiro Miyuki, and Kuwatani Natsuko and TEH Wakamoto (even though only as narration) did a play. I wonder if the epicness of the DVD will boost the sales even more by getting a few more sales from the fans of the other seiyuu?

It’s only February but the promotion machine for Animelo 2009 is about to be fired up again with the livecasting of the press conference on Nicodouga this Thursday (26th) at 1pm Tokyo time (GMT +9). We should get a first glimps of the artist line up during the conference. I guess we will see the usual suspects (JAM Project, Nana-chan, Kuribayashi Minami), so the fun is going to be what surprises they have in store.

Following closely to her getting number one spot on the Oricon Daily Singles chart with Shinai, Nana-chan now has another record to add to her list of musical achievements - this time for her Blu-ray disk set of the Live Fighter concert　”Live Fighter Blue X Red Side” being the first ever music related Blu-ray disk to have sold more than 10,000 copies in Japan (source).

While this is good news for Nana-chan and her fans, I think this says a lot more about the adaptation rate of Blu-ray in the general population and the condition of the music industry rather than the success of Nana-chan. If no other artists had sold more than 10,000 copies of their concerts or music clip Blu-rays up till now, if I was to be working for someone like SME or Avex I won’t be sleeping well at night that’s for sure.

While most will already know about the upcoming new album (Nana-chan said it should be coming out around May), the “one last thing” for today’s final concert at Budoukan was a summer concert at the Seibu Dome on 5th July this year.

While this is not THE Tokyo Dome we are talking about, it is a baseball dome revenue capable of seating some 36,000 people (Tokyo Dome holds 48,000) and one of the only two dome structures in and around the Tokyo area. This would very likely make Nana-chan the first seiyuu artist as well as anime song singer to have a dome scale concert.

Tokyo Dome and Kouhaku might really be just around the corner.

Arguably one of the most camera-friendly seiyuu, RieRie is finally releasing her own photo album. Apparently she announced it on a radio show yesterday, which is double confirmed in her latest blog post.

No title as of yet (she’s considering asking listeners for ideas) and other information such as release date hasn’t surfaced, but I’ll keep an eye on this one.

I wonder what kind of photo album can we expect? Will it be full of photos of her in cosplay?

I uploaded my version without the letterbox - just because I can.

An acoustic version of this song will rock, maybe they’ll do one in the next concert tour. For the upcoming one, they need to get Agematsu Mika to come back and make epicness like last time.

I still haven’t seriously watched White Album, probably never will either.