the ramune marble 000, intro
“You’re listening to MIKU 39.8 FM in Tokyo, this is Basil, your host for today.” - me, a few months ago.
The university I attend has a radio station and apparently students, faculty, and volunteers can play music or have a talk show on air if they go through trainings.
I went through the training but didn’t end up having a music show despite being so excited to share music that I love. For a few months, I would help out and sub for people who couldn’t make it to their shows and learned that it just wasn’t for me. I think I just found it a little too isolating in the sound booth, even if I was possibly talking to many people on the airwaves. As much as I like the soundboard and microphones, there just wasn’t much of a community to me, so I’ve decided to drop the whole radio thing.
But I think I would still like to talk about music that I find interesting, so I’ll be writing about the songs here on my blog instead.
I had decided towards the end of the training that if I got a music show, I’d name it “the ramune marble” so this series will have the same name. I’ll be writing about mostly Japanese utaite and vocaloid music because that’s what I listen to most, but don’t be surprised if there’s a random post about something different.
I wish I could do this is an audio format so that I could insert segments of songs, but copyright means that I can’t really do that. So this is the closest I’ll get to that.
A couple notes before I start getting into a song:
- Because many of these songs have both an English and Japanese title (and sometimes only one of these), I will prefer whichever one I like and then have the alternate title in parentheses. This will only happen the first time I mention a song.
- In the case that I mention a song by romaji, both the English and Japanese will be in the parentheses.
- These also apply to artist names, though vocaloid producers sometimes have names that are neither in English or in Japanese, like 40mP and deco*27.
- I will try my best to be accurate, but since I don’t know very much Japanese (I can only read hirigana, katakana, and basic kanji), I will be relying on translations. This isn’t ideal, but I will try to make sure the translations I reference are by trusted translators in the community.
I’ll leave you with a set by Haraguchi Sasuke (原口沙輔). It contains covers, songs from his most recent album, and his two songs that basically went viral in the vocaloid scene, Hitomania (人マニア, Humaniac) and Igaku (イガク, Medicine). The set opens with clips from the Japanese side of the internet before the drums and keys come in, slowly blending into a cover of I’ll Wait for the Night (夜を待つよ) by Midnight Grand Orchestra before breaking into his own songs. My personal favorites are Sociability (愛想) and Tears (涙), as well as the tone change between them. While Sociability is a bit on the calmer side with the soft vocals, keys, and strings, Tears is noticably more emotional in vocals and more aggressive in sound design. I think he uses all the tools available in sound design and music production to get an emotion and mood across, and I find that quite admirable.
I could do a whole separate post about Haraguchi Sasuke and his music, but I’ll stop here for today. Thanks for reading, and please, have a listen.