Entries by mDuo13

So anyone who's anyone these days is following Death Note, the hit-manga-turned-hit-anime about a college student who finds a notebook that kills anyone whose names are written in it. Though some people will tell you they're only reading the manga, I'm here to tell you that watching the anime is totally a better experience because it has the power of incredibly dramatic music! They finally put out the soundtrack to the anime, not just the live-action movie, and it really is great, but it gets so intense, it's almost (almost) silly. I am serious here - this is the sort of OST that makes eating potato chips a matter of life and death. If you're looking for the most dramatic songs yet used in the anime, Kyrie is the sad, tense choral melody used when Light is being particularly evil; and Low of Solipsism is the dramatic song used in the potato chip incident. Both of them are heavy-handed orchestral themes with plenty of choir action in there. And then there are so songs that are so extreme, they haven't even been used yet (so far as I know) in the anime - such as Death Note Theme and the Sephiroth-killer Domine Kira, or as I like to call it, "One-Winged Light". There are plenty of other gems in the soundtrack that I'm sure I'll discover in their full right after a few days of listening, such as L's Theme and Shudder (Senritsu), both of which utilize a nice grainy electric guitar and a piano, and have pretty awesome melodies.

Overall, I'm quite impressed with the audio quality that Yoshihisa Hirano and Hideki Taniuchi have come up with here. It's not only an incredibly atmospheric soundtrack, setting the mood perfectly for the show - it's also quite listenable and with some songs that can really literally make anything intense. So next time you eat potato chips, you know where to turn.

Update: I have gone back and uploaded all the old fileden stuff to Dreamhost, so if you had any problems about downloading files from us before, there should be no such problems now - things should be consistent and blazing fast, too. If the RSS feed seems out of order, that's an unfortunate side-effect of all this. To celebrate our ability to host more stuff now, I've also uploaded a 30-second demo from the Death Note anime soundtrack:

Light's Theme [484k, .mp3]

So it's been known for a little while that the Haruhi DVDs in Japan were going to come with a special version of the ending theme with the entire dance - you know, that one that's been performed by Gundams, miscellaneous cosplayers, troupes of Japanese street dancers, and so forth. Well, it's finally here! I was linked to it on a DivX-based site, which requires you to install the "DivX Web Player." (Yeah, I know, sounds like a pain in the rear end but it was actually quite painless and worked pretty well. I'll keep you updated if something goes wrong on its account.)

Anyway, it looks pretty nice and I'm wondering how long it'll be - minutes? Days? Is it already too late? - before someone puts a video with them (or their stop-motion model figures) performing the full version of the dance!

OverCoat edit: Need less suspicious .exe installers? Try youtube!
mDuo13 Edit: Youtube link updated.

So here we are: looking forward to the Spring 2007 anime season. Do you want to know how I look forward to new seasons? I check for new entries on Yuki Kajiura's profile page - if there's an anime on there I haven't heard of, it must be new. (Yes, I'm probably obsessed.) And so what did I find recently, but a new anime El Cazador (Full name: El Cazador de la Bruja, translation: Witch Hunter) with animation by Bee Train and music by Yuki Kajiura. The director, Koichi Mashimo, has already called it the third installment in his "girls with guns trilogy" which is funny because my first reaction when I heard the plot was "Oh, so it's Noir meets Trigun". Indeed, it takes after Noir and Madlax in pretty clear ways, as the plot summary makes clear:

The story predictably centers on two female characters: Ellis and Nadi. In the premise, Ellis is a murder suspect and finds herself on the run from an underground society called "Hunters" (possibly, the reason for the series' title). At some point, she meets a bounty hunter Nadi who is initially after the bounty on her head but eventually decides to help her pursue the truth about her past. Although by doing so, Nadi calls the Hunters' wrath upon herself, as well, she accompanies Ellis to her hometown. In a recent interview, Mashimo has revealed that Ellis is in fact a "witch" and her DNA has been modified by an entity (organization?) called "Leviathan", confirming his previous cryptic comments on the series.Source: Bee Train Fan Wiki

So the outlook is: if you liked Madlax and/or Noir, El Cazador sounds great. It seems that Mashimo is being sure to hit a variety of locales: Noir took place mostly in France, Madlax mostly in southeast Asia, and this one will be somewhere in the Wild West or South America. If you couldn't deal with the convoluted, style-over-substance plots of the first two series, you'll probably hate this show, too... but I'm telling you right now, the soundtrack is probably going to seriously rock.

There's another Bee Train + Yuki Kajiura anime for this spring, the third season of Tsubsa Chronicle, a show whose plot I've learned to despise, but whose soundtrack continues to expand with amazing music. (More on that later.) In any case, the series will pick up where it left off and with any luck it won't get renewed for another agonizingly progress-less season, but one has to worry about these things. It seems impossible that they'd change composers, though, so if you're a Kajiura fan, keep an eye out: this should be good.

There are some other upcoming anime worth noting, though not for their music. There's "Kishin Taisen Gigantic Formula", a mecha anime with designs by people from pretty much every mech anime ever. Take a gander at the list: Ikuto Yamashita (Evangelion, Blue Sub #6), Yutaka Izubuchi (Patlabor, RahXephon), Yasuhiro Moriki (Nadesico, Crest of the Stars), Takeshi Takakura (Appleseed), Shoji Kawamori (Macross, Escaflowne), Shinji Aramaki (Bubblegum Crisis), Shingo Takeba (Pilot Candidate), Kunio Okawara (Gundam series), Kimitoshi Yamane (Gundam Seed, Cowboy Bebop), Kazutaka Miyatake (Macross Plus, My-HIME), Kazumi Fujita (Zeta Gundam), Kanetake Ebikawa (Fullmetal Panic, Eureka 7), and newcomer Katsushi Murakami. Apparently each of them is designing one mech to represent one country in a massive battle for dominance in a post-apocalyptic world. Or something like that.

There's also "The Skull Man", an adaptation of the 1970s manga of the same name, done by (how appropriate is this?) Studio BONES. Music is by Shiro Sagisu, who did BGM for Evangelion and Bleach. Wikipedia summarizes the plot thusly:

There are mass murders and catastrophes all over Japan, committed by a masked/caped psychic madman called the Skull Man, and his shape-shifting aide Garo, who can turn into various powerful mutant monsters. The calamities caused by the Skull Man are investigated by the Tachiki Detective Agency, with the help of a young man named Tatsuo Kagura, the son of a yakuza in the Kagura Clan.

Anyway, that's enough babbling about what's to come. I suppose I should mention something that already happened. Namely, Redcavalier and I got real hosting and we moved. You can now access the blog from either http://nekomimimusic.redcavalier.com/ or http://nekomimimusic.mduo13.com/. I may add more later. Anyway, we got an amazing deal from DreamHost so we figured we may as well try it out. Over the next few days I'll be going over all the songs we've hosted and uploading them to this web space since we have so much bandwidth and it's so much faster and more reliable than what we've been dealing with before now! This also means we have plenty of opportunity to host new songs, so more than ever - if you have anime remixes, mashups, arrangements, live performances - let us know! (It's best to contact either mduo13 or overcoat on our gmail addresses... "overcoat" and "mduo13" at, well, you know where.)

P.S. if you're a fan of Taku Iwasaki, apparently he did the soundtrack for a movie that just premiered in Japan, entitled "Origin ~Spirits of the Past~". Unfortunately, I don't know anything about it. I'll keep you posted.

On behalf of Nekomimi Music, I'd like to wish everyone a happy and exciting Christmas. Last year, Anime Remix got the benefit of an amazing remix of "The Snowman" by remixer sephfire. This year, we aren't quite so lucky, but Avaris of the anime remix forums has provided us with a little ambient remix of D.N.Angel, entitled "Ice and Dark". It's not exactly in keeping with the spirit of giving, but in a week or two when the holiday season is over and you're still freezing your toes off, you'll probably appreciate the concept a little more. ;) So go ahead and download now! [mp3, 5.5kb]

P.S. if you don't celebrate Christmas, I wish you a happy season anyway! You can drown your sorrows at being left out by listening to avaris's song.

If you follow anime and you've somehow not been hooked into the Haruhi craze, I'll just say that it's an addictive, well-crafted show with all the elements of an anime cult classic. And for those who have, you're probably well familiar with the series' catchy music: from bouncy, silly J-pop like the opening and ending themes, to the amazing rock song "God Knows...". Well, just yesterday (December 6th), two new character-themed albums were released, for supporting characters Asakura Ryouko and Tsuruya-san, two of my personal favorite characters from the series. Each album contains a version with that character singing the very popular Haruhi ending theme "Hare Hare Yukai", as well as two original songs and the karaoke versions of those two. Unfortunately, they're not yet available outside of Japan, but you can try importing them from Amazon.co.jp but they're pretty pricey, especially with shipping!

In related news, Aya Hirano, the voice actor of Suzumiya Haruhi and singer of "God Knows..." along with several other Haruhi songs, has a very serious health condition. After collapsing during a recording session a few weeks ago, she's made a confession on her blog that the condition, whatever it is, "concerns [her] entire life" and so forth. There have been a lot of rumors that the cause is partly being overworked by her agency, which has her doing 7 TV roles, 3 radio show parts, various jobs singing, and her regular university studies at the same time. In any case, I hope that she'll be better soon, because I really love her singing and voice acting, and she's really cute in interviews because she has this super-high-pitched kid voice normally but then she can be super-deep-voiced and sultry. So wish her luck getting better, too! Be back with more news later.

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!