General Music Thread

fourteenwings

Stray Observations:

1. Motsu is tweeting about ALTIMA WHAT DOES THIS MEAN
2. UNIVERSAL MUSIC JAPAN seems to have really had a lot of success with Da-iCE, which is probably why all my actual favorite boy groups got a shot (WEBER already existed before their debut). When MAG!C☆PRINCE were successful, the agency behind them went on and came up with Nine Stars, who are also pretty good. I wonder what's next on that front.
3. Sasaki Sayaka, Ayano Mashiro, Tamaki Nami (!!!!!!) and ChouCho, all in one room. Oh how I do love a good ChouCho twitter selfie .
4. Tamaki Nami was at this year's Super★Premium performing old Gundam OPs with the modern ladies of anison. Might not mean anything, might mean everything (EVERYTHING).
5. Irino Miyu seems to have spent too much time in America. I mean, I'm all for artistic integrity and stuff but he's a seiyuu singer under the danged Kiramune label.
6. la la larks are not writing the new Fate/Grand Order OP as to be performed by Sakamoto Maaya, but they are writing the Arcade game OP, so I can't wait for them to do a self-cover of that eventually (if they still exist outside of writing for others, I mean).

Naas_Human

A Japanese version of a German song about a Russian city.

That this exists is great in itself.

glennmagusharvey

As someone who doesn't speak Spanish, I get to enjoy this without noticing whether it has things like grammar/smoothness/stress awkwardness.

fourteenwings

Yesterday I discovered that the song Summer Sunshine from Barbie in a Mermaid Tale is actually a cover of a Korean song called Dallyora Kudongo (which translates, literally, to Summer Sunshine). No wonder I like it so much.

Also:

So much to see
There's one more guy
Two more guys
Three more guys
Wow!

This song gets me.

glennmagusharvey

By my understanding based on the comments, this appears to be a combo remix, i.e. one that incorporates multiple source tracks. Like five of them.

fourteenwings

I was reading this article about how Australian Music Festivals are terrible at getting female artists and I was really surprised because I thought pop music in general is a very female-led business.

It actually turns out that most popular music doesn't actually have female lead artists (especially now since Swedish DJs rule the airwaves and there are somehow no female ones?)

glennmagusharvey

from the department of "things no one but GMH would pay attention to"

If you ever happen to come across a piano piece (most likely an obscure one, for you to have found such a recording) on YouTube played by someone named "Claudio Colombo", you may wonder why the piece sounds very, very mechanically played, with basically nothing in the way of emotional nuance.

Well, I certainly did, and I wasn't the only one.

This person claims that he plays them and then digitally edits the result to be satisfactory. Well, I'm betting that it's just him putting them into a MIDI file. Like, every instance of a given ornament is performed exactly the same; every repeated section sounds exactly the same, and even in stuff like the brilliantly showy sonatas of Scarlatti, the recorded performance is entirely mechanical and perfectly in time, making no attempt at modifying tempo or dynamics for expressiveness.

And other people noted how he basically "played" an insanely large amount of repertoire, including some of the most difficult pieces ever written, without making any mistakes at all.

Well, if you just play a little bit then digitally edit everything together, it's not like it's all that different anyway. Heck, turning recordings of a real person into a soundbank? That's exactly how Miku Hatsune works.

TL;DR: If you see music played by "Claudio Colombo" you can assume that it's basically just a MIDI rendition using a high-quality piano soundfont. (It doesn't really matter how he makes it; what results is what it is.)

And don't bother buying recordings of it, unless you enjoy this sort of interpretation.

fourteenwings

I put on Utada Hikaru's new album HATSUKOI, listened to four songs...

...and then put on Resonant Heart by Uchida Maaya because oh goodness HATSUKOI is cloying. It's all really great songs that I don't actually like too much.

Also recently I've been listening to Endless Sky from Aikatsu Stars! and I've taken a real liking to Hadashi no Renaissance.

Blueeyedrat

So I've been listening to The Adventure Zone for the past couple months (just finished the penultimate arc), and fffuck this series has some good music. Some highlights (possible spoilers):

• "Discovery and Recovery"
• "Crystal Minuet"
• "The Cosmoscope"
• "The Diary of Sheriff Isaak"
• "The Chalice"
• "The Purple Worm" (probably my favorite song so far)
• "20 Years Gone"
• "Wonderland" (all three variations are good, but the last one tops them)
• "Arms Outstretched"
• And just because it caught me utterly off guard, this.

fourteenwings

Animation Soundtrack (Music by Rasmus Faber)/"Harukana Receive (Anime)" Original Soundtrack

@GMH: I don't know how you feel about volleyball anime but like, yeah.

The KOTOKO version of a-gain (the Ray song) is brilliaaaaaaaaaaaaaaant. The backing vocals really sell the whole thing.

glennmagusharvey

@fourteenwings is the third track in ANICHRO a cover?
edit: is the entire album a series of covers?

fourteenwings

Yeah all of ANICHRO is covers. I think the track you're referring to is Himitsu Kichi by Takada Kozue, which is a song you should really know.

glennmagusharvey

fourteenwings wrote: »

Himitsu Kichi by Takada Kozue, which is a song you should really know.

*doesn't recognize name*
*googles*
*E7 ED1*

oh
no wonder i recognized it

fourteenwings

That song was my childhood tweenhood, GMH.

glennmagusharvey

Just picked this up from the library.

http://thelistenersclub.com/2015/09/23/gabriela-monteros-new-recording-rachmaninov-and-ex-patria/

paging @Stormtroper; might be of interest to you.

glennmagusharvey

S Club 7's "Never Had A Dream Come True" is quite pretty.

fourteenwings

In terms of "mixed-gender western group music that I was inexplicably introduced to by my dad"*, I prefer beFour's Balla Balla. In fact, beFour were kind of the best.

...which I can't find online so I'll have to find that CD and rip it since now I want to really want to listen to it suddenly.

I did find Live Your Dream though.

*The three most prominent bands I can still remember are S Club 7, beFour and Steps. Apparently Steps still exist even.

fourteenwings

I find ZEDD's music insanely catchy, but I detest most of it. Right now I have his and Ryan Tedder's "Lost at Sea" stuck in my head. It ends on such an inconvenient note and my brain keeps expecting more to happen after it ends so it just keeps looping over and over.

I wonder why malls like ZEDD music so much. Him and Zara Larsson. You literally can't escape it.

glennmagusharvey

making a note here for myself: Megumi Hayashibara - Mint

making another note here for myself: her song "Regret" is something I've also heard by Ritsuko Okazaki

lrdgck

@glennmagusharvey: I remember you having some interest in Polish song, so I have a piece of sung poetry for you.

Stormtroper

paging @Stormtroper; might be of interest to you.

Apparently I missed that query, I happened to read this just now after randomly scrolling up, though I was already aware of her and her work (as one can imagine, she's well known when it comes to Venezuelan politics),

@ZEDD: it's one of the many things I know only because of Touhou:

Naas_Human

The BanG Dream version of Eternal Blaze is surprisingly not awful.

I mean, I still suspect the song was specifically written to work with Nana's voice and thus nobody else can get it right but Roselia's vocalist doesn't sound quite so wrong despite that.

lrdgck

By now you guys probably know I listen to black metal, but most of the time less literal. According to the description it's a heavy metal band from Mozambique, singing in a local language. (It doesn't really tick my "it's African" box, but then I know pretty much nothing on sub-Saharan languages. Can anyone confirm?) These guys do some nice rockin', and it's not often when you see corpse paint on a black guy.

fourteenwings

EDIT: I have never seen this much only my railgun (That's like... fripSide, ALTIMA, KOTOKO, GERO, Kawada Mami, etc.)

thus nobody else can get it right

I feel like Minase can do a good interpretation of Nana songs but like, that's not the direction her career went obviously.

Can anyone confirm?

Yeah there's some stuff I recognize (not sure how many languages ended up borrowing the word but I'm pretty sure "Mfana" always means boy/young adult male). Yeah I mean I have no idea what language this is but it certainly sounds like everything else enough.

I did not expect the plot of a metal music video to be the standard "guy and girl and romance" stuff.

glennmagusharvey

fourteenwings wrote: »

EDIT: I have never seen this much only my railgun (That's like... fripSide, ALTIMA, KOTOKO, GERO, Kawada Mami, etc.)

Ironically, it's noticeably out of tune...and I thought groups would generally sound more in-tune...

Anyway I noticed I didn't recognize anything in the video except for only my railgun, not sure how i should feel about this

fourteenwings

Well this is an amalgamation of like, recent NBCU people (who I know pretty well) and the fan favorite songs that won't always translate from the Japanese fandom to the English one and like, even then some of the stuff is pretty niche.

I thought groups would generally sound more in-tune

Solo singers/smallish groups always keep better time than groups, which is why idol songs will generally have a slower vocal arrangement than groups.

Compare the average vocal speed of a ClariS song to an AKB48 song. Aside from AKB48 songs being written with 100+ girls in mind (not just the recording version, but the many lineups the group will go through as they sing it live) they do consider how the original group will be able to keep up with each other.

With ClariS, the girls know each other so well that basically they can well and truly match each other. That gets harder as you add more people to a group because you have to understand the unique points and idiosyncrasies of every voice but also the nuances and habits that singer has.

Anyways, I like that Koda Kumi's 1000 no Kotoba sounds so 90s ballad-ey but there are some things that mark it as being a bit too post-modern for that.

fourteenwings

fourteenwings I wonder if there's an IRL seiyuu who has kind of just really gone for a whole different style from the usual thing aside from Nana (and I'm pretty sure that's because Elements Garden+she's famous now so she can do whatever she danged wants)
fourteenwings Like Ishihara Kaori went for this weird techno disco thing for her single Ray Rule but I don't think that's going to be a permanent thing. Also she can dance. Like really dance. Like Tamaki Nami levels of co-ordination.
fourteenwings But I don't think this'll last before she goes back to the style she did with her first single (Innocent Flower or something)
fourteenwings And like obviously a distinction does exist between Minase types (Uchida Maaya, Touyama Nao, etc) and like... Minori types I guess (Fuchigami Mai, Takagaki Ayahi, etc)
fourteenwings I mean Numakura puts a lot of effort in working with producers who push her like WEST GROUND but when she's not putting in effort she defaults to styles like the ones in Good Day or Colour
fourteenwings Like maybe the real difference is what genre of music you do when you rest your laurels on/ie album filler (like when you hear overt weird techno noises in a nano song it's code for "you can relax and not pay attention to this one if you want")

fourteenwings

Classic music DJs are now a thing.

glennmagusharvey

fourteenwings wrote: »

Classic music DJs are now a thing.

What exactly is he doing??

fourteenwings

What all DJs do; that thing they do that makes no sense to anybody who is not a DJ.