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Hey there buddy! Long time no talk. I hadn't logged into MAL in many years, but felt the nostalgia of coming back. How have you been?

Oi! Watch Natsume Yuujinchou and read Moomin!

I'm back! Dang what happened to this site? Couldn't access much of it.

Hey bud, long time no chat! What's up?

Oi! Watch Shirobako and read Hourou Musuko!

Yup.

Apologies for the terribly late reply! Sometimes I just terrible about writing back. I finally got Soundcloud to work though and listened to your piece, as well as the ED for Humanity has Declined, and I'd say you did a pretty damn good job. It has that overly light and fluffy bounce to it that the ED has that you claim is no more than a cynical mockery of its actual attitude. I love the slides that the girl singing does all over the place, it makes it a lot more interesting. It almost sounds like the OST for "Mary Poppins the Animation" if that were to ever exist.

You're right, I'm sure a lot of lyrics do get lost in translation. But then you get openings like Ping-Pongs or endings like Bakemonogataris where the lyrics just fit so perfectly and you can't help but wonder. Maybe people just put a lot more effort into translating those, who knows.

Speaking of Ping-Pong, I see you finished it recently. What'd you think? I watched it myself over vacation and absolutely fell in love with it. Pretty much embodies my ideals of what stories can be. It was such an honest yet hopeful piece, it was gorgeously animated, and it pulled itself together SO well. The entirety of the last two episodes I had chills running up and down my body.

Yeah hopefully as we go on we'll develop more of a unique personality... But hey, even if we're doing a bunch of different shit so long as we have a distinct cover style that could hold it all together.

Yeah I pretty much like changed what the song was about. I always LOVED the way it sounded, but the lyrics weren't at all what I expected something that sounded so pensive and melancholy to be, so I made them reflect more the way I felt about the song + the series.

I'm terribly sorry dude, I'm in Turkey right now (Instanbul actually, it's a seriously gorgeous place. It looks like it's straight out of a Ghibli movie) and while that's great and all there's a lot of stuff that's not available on the internet in Turkey and soundcloud seems to be one of them. I'll listen to it as soon as I get back. I listened to the original ED though (Youtube still works) and damn that was fascinating, I've never actually heard of the show before but that made me want to try it. Those collage-esque visuals were great and it was totally unlike most anime music which is usually a good sign.

Nice! We pretty much just sample a bit of everyone's taste. So we have one person that wants to play Skyfall, and another that wants to do traditional Russia nationalist hymns, and another that wants to do Legend of Zelda music. It ends up being a bit of a weird mix, but it's always something different so that's good.

I think we suffer from a bit of the same issues though; disparity in musical ability and trying to get everyone motivated. Hopefully this upcoming year everyone can practice a bit more and we can get something a bit more commendable rolling. I feel like with these things the less motivated people usually fall away and though you may not be left with the most talented group you're left with the people that have the drive to become talented and that's worth a lot more in the long run.

Here's my lyrics for Tabi no Tocchu, I've only got the opening version done to my liking. I want to get the full version up to snuff soon though. I like to imagine playing it with a few handheld instruments around a dying campfire, but that's a pretty romanticized ideal.

Damn I'm jealous, that sounds amazing. I play a little guitar but I'd have to improve that quite a bit before I'd be able to make anything serious out of it. My friend group has actually tried putting together a performance group in the past, but we got heavily sidetracked and failed to pull it together. I definitely want to try it again this upcoming year, I've talked to a few people over the summer and the motivation and interest is definitely there.

The language thing can be a bit of a problem, but I think part of the fun is getting to translate/rework the lyrics yourself. It's like how people get something different out of the shows they watch, except in this case you get to add your personal experience to the show itself by writing lyrics that reflect both what the song is saying and what you personally feel when you hear the song. A great example for me is "Tabi no Tochuu" from Spice & Wolf (probably my favorite OP of all time) which is something I'd LOVE to perform with a group, and I've rewritten the lyrics already to be something that actually flows well in English and reflects more on how I feel about the show (originally it was more of a traditional love ballad, but I like it more as a cry of finding that one doesn't feel lonely anymore and being overwhelmed by the fear of losing that.)

Not as big a fan as I should be. Trying to get into it more. Any other recommendations? I kinda like Brahms. Know mostly big names.

It's gotten pretty interesting early on. Can't wait to see where the show goes.

Satoshi Konnn oh man what a guy. I still have too much of his stuff I've gotta watch, including Perfect Blue. I loves Paprika (even though I saw it at a rather unusual age) and I've had my eye on Paranoia Agent for a while, as I've heard people who I consider to have extremely high standards describe it as "perfect."

Those first ten seconds... Ahh. HAne HAne HAne HEE! Those sound so cool. I'm in an a capella group (because I'm just THAT cool) and every once in a while I try to suggest some piece of anime music, so far to absolutely no avail but I have this INSANE desire to arrange that one, even though I know no one will go for it. "yeah guys, so I found this cool song... in another language... from an anime... about little girls killing each other..." Unfortunately never gonna happen.

That's a really cool idea, reading manga with a show's soundtrack playing. Manga was actually what got me started on the genre originally, back in high school, but then it was onepiece/bleach/shamanking/fairytai etc. so that kind of became my impression of it. Eventually I got a bit older and none of the series I was into showed any sign of ending so I dropped all of them and forgot about manga/anime for a few years until my dorm caught Attack on Titan fever, and I guess watching that made me realize that adaptations COULD be good and I've been pretty unilaterally doing anime since then. I'll definitely pick up manga again soon though; my roommate owns all of the flowers of evil manga and he loves it so I've been meaning to check that out, and my sister is the opposite of me where she dropped anime for manga as most of her favorite stories haven't gotten adaptations yet (probably because from what I've seen of them their marketability is nil) but I want to at least try some of hers. If I become a big enough fan of Aria I'll try the manga for that as well.

As for Higurashi, I agree: if I had watched the show first I wouldn't have given it more than 10 episodes. I actually dropped it around there anyways... The maniacal laughter, the overblown moe, the show's consistent need to be ominous and creepy, all the details it leaves out and it's AWFUL pacing kindof ruin it. It's sad, since I went into it wanting to love it considering how much I was enjoying the visual novel and ended up just being surprised that so many people were a fan of it without having tried to the source material. When I found that the conversion rate was 12 hours of visual novel --> 4 EPISODES of screentime it broke my heart. No DEEN, that's not what Rena's character is like... at all...
Oh well. You said it yourself, there's no such thing as anime horror. You're usually better off just not even trying. And on the bright side, the opening and ending songs (at least for the first season) are amazing, so I can listen to those to get hyped for the actual story.

Never heard of Bartok before. Thanks for posting, really enjoying it

Thanks man! Yeah the protagonists are pretty sugary good. Except for Scar. Scar was great.

I'm on episode 4 of Aria and I've already quickly gone from "cute" to "ahhhhhh" (not like that means anything: pretty much its insanely soothing and thoughtful, as you said.) Super excited, considering the second and third seasons are supposed to be even better. I've been dropping a lot of stuff lately but this is one I'm definitely gonna stick with.

I definitely wanna give Monster a shot at some point, but right now I'm making my way through Higurashi (the visual novel, not DEEN's sad excuse for an adaptation) so my murder mystery quota is filled for the moment. I wasn't really even into the genre until I started reading through Higurashi, but my roommate and I are pretty obsessed with it now so we'll definitely be looking for something to quench our thirst when we're done. Good thing there's a lengthy, renowned classic that fits the bill!