2023 Year-End Roundup

With 2023 winding down, I want to do a short recap on the blog this year. A part of this is to help me evaluate my thoughts and writing with enough hindsight, but it’s also fun to see the weird places I wandered to throughout the year. I wasn’t planning on writing about electronic anime albums, a Gundam guide, and a journey through someone making crap up on Wikipedia, but it all led to some fun diversions, even if I still haven’t settled on a cohesive identity for this blog.

While this blog still wasn’t too active, I’m happy I had the discipline to write, edit, and release multiple posts on varying topics. This is all still a hobby of mine, but it’s good practice for my own writing. I don’t have huge aspirations for this page, but if I can make something entertaining and informative for at least a few other people while exploring my interests, that’s rewarding enough.

The only major change to the blog itself was making it look more presentable. A purple background with white text was a bad idea and I don’t know why I put it in at all, but hopefully the light pink with black text style ages better. Or maybe I’ll decide that look stinks too, we’ll see.

For some reason, neither this nor the Tumblr show up Google’s search, but they do appear on Yahoo and Bing. I’m doing the Google site analytics tools to crawl the URL and see what the issue is, but any advice is appreciated. I don’t want this to be stuck on social media alone, especially since I avoid using it too much.

With all that said, here's my brief recap of what happened here in 2023.

Diving Into the Digital Trip

“This series was conceived with the intention of taking impressions from animation, comics, and other visual works and developing them into a completely fresh musical world using synthesizers.”

-Obi Strip Digital Trip Series Description, 1983 (SDF Macross DT, translated by Windii)

 

Intro

When I first started listening through tokusatsu soundtracks, I was going through the two-disc set for Uchuu Keiji Sharivan’s BGM and noticed that the second disc began with a set of songs titled “DIGITAL TRIP Uchuu Keiji Sharivan SYNTHESIZER FANTASY.” Upon playing those curious tracks, I was greeted with a very electronic, synthesized, and striking series of compositions. They were still recognizable as variations of the OST and BGM I’d heard earlier, yet they sounded almost otherworldly.

Years of anisong searching and listening later, and now as an avid music enthusiast, I’ve plunged into the huge range of the Digital Trip – Synthesizer Fantasy albums. Though only lasting around five years, the series saw many releases from a variety of arrangers offering their own, synthesizer-heavy takes on anime and other Japanese media music.

Some of the albums recently received worldwide streaming releases for the first time, but I wanted to write about this series anyways because of how much I enjoyed listening through and discovering so many favorites. I love synthesizer music of all kinds, especially ones that aim for their own distinctive style. The Digital Trip series is unique among both electronic and anime music, and I think it’s worth highlighting as a creative and entertaining series of albums.

This retrospective is a mix of contextual overview, notes on the styles of the main arrangers, a look at some of the tech used, the end of the line itself, and ten personal album recommendations.

(VGMDB is the source for most of the credits and dates in this post.)

Macross Digital Trip - Liner Notes from Osamu Shoji

These are the translated liner notes from the SDF Macross Digital Trip - Synthesizer Fantasy album, written by the arranger Osamu Shoji. The obi strip is also translated.

Many of the Digital Trip albums have liner notes from the arrangers describing the process behind certain songs and explain some of the technical aspects more directly. This has lots of interesting details, especially with how Shoji used the Fairlight CMI sampler to make many distinct sounds for the album.

Apologies that I don't have proper scans. I hope to figure out a way to scan some of my LPs in the short and long term soon enough. If you're interested in the Digital Trip albums more generally, I wrote a longer overview post on the series.

As before, the English translation is by Windii (Twitter, Ko-fi). Thanks for her help with this, and consider commissioning her for JPN-ENG translations.

All the punctuation is in the original text.

A Journey Through an Internet Anime Rumor on Takeyuki Kanda

There is a rumor that’s spread about anime director Takeyuki Kanda’s sudden death in 1996 that has nothing to back it up. As best as I can tell, it remains unfounded and almost certainly false. The rumor is that he died in a car crash, but the only available information on Japanese sites doesn’t mention that at all. The oldest source I could find for that rumor was an uncited English Wikipedia article written by an account later banned for bad edits.

The only confirmed detail on Kanda’s death is that he suddenly passed away at the age of 52. That much, at a minimum, is confirmed by an official interview on the VOTOMS website with Ryosuke Takahashi that mentions Kanda’s passing, specifically in its third footnote.

I was (and still am) working on a separate, more fun article about a series of anime image albums, but I got sucked into this rabbit hole over the last few days. I figured I’d tell the story of how this unraveled, as well as share some thoughts on anime rumors in general.

Newtype August 2023: Ippei Gyoubu Interview on G-Witch’s Costume Designs

This is an interview of Ippei Gyoubu (Twitter) from Newtype's August 2023 issue, which was released close to the conclusion of the Witch from Mercury. The magazine did a feature of "composition" going into some of the main creative aspects of the show. 

While Gyoubu was most prominent as a mechanical designer for the show, mostly with the Jeturk House mobile suits, this interview goes into the costume and some other tech design he did. There's some interesting tidbits in how the team wanted to reflect the characters' personalities, as well as some choice comments regarding Guel.

Like last time, the English translation is by Windii (Twitter, Ko-fi). Thanks for her help with this, and consider commissioning her for JPN-ENG translations.

Toei Took Down My Youtube Channel

Not that it was ever a part of this blog anyways, but Toei issued three copyright strikes against my Youtube channel three days in a row, so now it's gone for good. I only used it for posting funny or cool short tokusatsu clips for a few years now, so I don't know why they decided to suddenly take it down when they were still running ads themselves on the clips. Regardless, it looks like it's unretrievable. 

If I ever start a different Youtube channel for something else I'll announce it, but for now I'm not gonna bother with setting up a new one.

The Importance of Big Cool Sci-Fi Stuff

I finished watching Turn A Gundam recently, and it’s already cemented itself as one of my favorite Gundam shows and anime in general. But one detail I appreciate is that, even with its Americana setting, it still works in some interesting, immense technological set pieces that give a great sense of scale to the show in the portions where it heads to outer space. To put it bluntly, I appreciate it when science fiction has what I like to call “Big Cool Sci-Fi Stuff,” both for the novelty but also realizing the unique potential the medium has to create a unique sense of wonder.