Anime Music! OP/ED and Soundtrack Reviews.
| Album Title: | ARIA the Box |
|---|---|
| Anime Title: | ARIA the Animation; ARIA the Natural ARIA the Origination; ARIA the OVA ~Arietta~ |
| Artist: | Choro Club; Takeshi Senoo; Yui Makino; Round Table feat. Nino; SONOROUS, Chiwa Saito, Eri Kawai, Ryo Hirohashi, Erino Hazuki |
| Catalog Number: | VTCL-60114-6 |
| Release Type: | Soundtrack |
| Release Date: | September 23, 2009 |
| Purchase at: | CDJapan, Play-Asia (Out of Print) |
Good doujin music is hard to find. That’s the message I’ve gotten when I was unfortunate enough to have to listen to either of the Anime House albums or TAMUSIC’s godawful Haruhi arrange album. Hell, if it weren’t for kevo’s post celebrating the better Japanese doujin electronica works, I’d probably be giving up on the endeavor altogether.
My chief complaint with doujin music lies in its lack of creativity; most groups seem content with taking a well-known melody, be it an OP, ED, insert song, or, even more rarely, BGM, and slapping some UNTZ UNTZ UNTZ on top of it. Such a method feels so half-assed that I just become disenchanted by what passes for effort, and head off to better anime music pastures. I realize that such pastures are thin indeed, but the one that has stood out has been the works at AnimeRemix.org.
Back when videogame music dominated my listening charts, OCRemix.org was a site that I’d check out a lot. Not only did it (and still does) offer a whole lot of video game remixes, the ones that were posted there were generally pretty good. You didn’t have lazy techno beats draped on top of an anime melody, straight up transcriptions of game scores, or anything that simple. The people whose submissions were put on the site demonstrated a good amount of effort and creativity in their works, which made listening to their compositions a very fulfilling experience.
AnimeRemix is pretty much an offshoot of OCRemix and their goals are the same, except their focus is on music from animated works (be it Western or Japanese). The scale to which they’re operating isn’t quite as large as OCR because anime music is still an underdeveloped area within the anime fandom, but that it even has more than 100 remixes housed on the site is something to celebrate.
After going through their cache of remixes, I figured I’d showcase some of my favorites in no particular order. If you want to download the track in question, I’ve linked to the track’s downloads page for your convenience. [Read more...]
