Music Downloads

First off, if anyone was wondering where I was this past weekend, I took a little vacation and visited some friends down in San Diego, kicking off the trip with a visit to see The Hush Sound with Murder By Death and a couple other bands that really don't compare. Anyway, suffice to say that The Hush Sound and Murder By Death were both amazing and my friends and I have several complete sets of signatures. I mean, come on, how often do you get to see someone plucking an electric cello in the middle of a Western-esque rock song? Plus there are lots of really good singers overall. Thanks, OverCoat, for taking care of the blog in my absence. It looks like we've made it to one week old without any major problems!

As for more unrelated news, this weekend also saw the release of both the PlayStation 3 and the Nintendo Wii. My friend and I went to camp out for the Wii, but apparently we weren't hardcore enough because by the time we got there, all the lines were too huge already, and we didn't end up getting one. It sounds like overall, both launches went about as well as can be expected, which is to say that Nintendo's was a little less messy than Sony's - with supplies like that, it was bound to be trouble for PlayStation diehards. Personally, I think I'd rather have had my Wii signed, like the guy on the right. Update: Apparently the guy is a very dedicated gamer and pretty well-known on the east coast, named Isaiah Triforce Johnson. Yes, he got his middle name legally changed.

So today I have the honor of presenting you, our faithful readers, with an older anime arrangement but a good one you might not have heard. A little more than a year ago Trenthian sent in a late entry to Anime Remix's annual Halloween contest. It never did get posted to that site, so I'm posting it here instead, because as Trenthian himself says, "I forgot how pimp this mix was."

Beginning with a pretty neat piano but soon bursting into a a pulsing electronic melody, the song is incredible: it's unmistakably Rei's theme from Neon Genesis Evangelion, but the groove is completely different and a lot of fun. Several layers of synths, filtered piano, and a persistently rockin' beat make this one remix you don't wanna miss:
Trenthian - Neon Genesis Evangelion - Rei i

So, one of the things that we're glad about here on Nekomimi Music is that, being a blog and not a "ReMixing" site, we aren't limited by the constraints of those websites. And one of those things we have the freedom to post, while other great sites don't, is mashups. For those of you who aren't really familiar with the mashup phenomenon, Wikipedia describes it pretty well, but I'll give you a basic run-down: you take the music of one song, and the vocals of another song, and put them together. Well, TheMacAttack (remove "SPAMSUCKS" for email) of Melbourne, Australia has brought us our first mashup, with the music of Scryed's opening theme "Reckless Fire" combined with the a capella of Gackt's Vanilla (thanks for the correction). The result works almost startlingly well, and you'll probably wonder if the lyrics were made for the song. There's also a little bit more than Gackt thrown in: a recording of the War of the Worlds drama, and a little rapping by 2 Brothers on the Floor, which also fits uncannily. For those of you who haven't heard Reckless Fire, it's a pretty awesome song to start, with Spanish as well as electric guitar, orchestral hits, a cheesey horn section, and a solid techno drum beat powering the whole thing. According to TheMacAttack, he was just brushing up his multimedia editing skills and doing some mashups for fun when his friends requested this - and the result was a surprise even to him.

I guarantee you'll be rocking along with it, so download it now!

And if you're as much a fan of it as I am, you might also be interested to know that TheMacAttack has several more a capellas of anime songs (including stuff from BECK and Chobits, among others), and he's totally willing to pass them along to would-be remixers and mashup creators for their use in making new stuff. And, of course, we here at Nekomimi Music would only be too happy to post it.

Rock on, and may the cat ears be with you.

P.S. I had some problems posting entries, dunno why. It seems to be fine now. And yes, there was some downtime earlier. Hopefully I will be able to afford a real host sometime.

Welcome to our new blog, Nekomimi Music. For those of you who haven't heard our mumblings and ramblings in the past few weeks, you're probably wondering what this site is about. Well, it's time to end the questions and the vagueness and explain what this is and why it exists.

Why do we exist?

Well, I can't tell you the answers to any questions of existentialism and unversal truth, but I can tell you why this blog exists. We care about anime music - and anime remixes. And since certain other websites do not update as regularly as we'd like, we thought we could do better, and while we're at it, we could talk about things that aren't related to some of those other websites - we can review the latest OSTs, show off chiptunes of anime songs as well as professional rearrangements, post remixes of all sorts (including the kind that doesn't have a capitalized M) and whatever else we feel like adding. In short, this site is meant to be a one-stop visit for anime music news.

Why do you keep saying 'we'?

Simple. There are three of us: me (mDuo13), soc (OverCoat), and red (Redcavalier). We were basically the last active members of Anime Remix, so we decided that we may as well stick together when we made a new site.

What kind of weirdo name is 'Nekomimi Music'?

It's actually kind of a reference to the quirky opening theme from an obscure anime, but it's also a fun theme: "nekomimi" means cat ears, so we can use the cat-ear motif to mark our stuff. I mean, who doesn't like cat ears on anything and everything?

So if this is an anime music site, where's the anime music?

To be honest, we don't want to give it all away at once, so you'll have to keep checking back to get more and more of it. But we can start you off with a little something you may have heard before: the Anime Chipdisk volume 1. This is a little project by OverCoat, Tenemis, Coda, and Noboyuki to take a bunch of your favorite anime themes and re-create them in space-efficient Impulse Tracker chiptune format! The end result is pretty close to what it would sound like if you were watching anime on your Amiga or your NES! We hope you enjoy them!

What's the best way to tip you off about news?

If you've got something you want us to blog about, or if you have a song you want us to host, or whatever, just send it to the gmail box of either "mduo13" or "overcoat". (Hint: they're at gmail.com) A warning, if you're sending us a song, Gmail limits attachments to 2 megs, so you'll have to temporarily host it on YouSendIt or something like that.

That's all for now, folks!

And that concludes the Nekomimi Music Manifesto. Wow, I'm getting sick of typing those M's. Anyway, be sure to check back, because we're going to be posting lots more within the next few weeks, including plenty of songs, some of which you'll have never heard before!

In other news, it's my birthday! I'm 20 now. It's kind of depressing to realize I'm already this old and yet I've accomplished so little with my life. Hopefully that won't be true for long!