Thank You Nagi Noda

TOKYOMANGO had a post about 野田凪 (Noda Nagi)'s last music video before her tragic death. I had been putting off watching it, but I finally got around to it today and I'm floored. It's so well done.

The song is precious, sung by MEG, music by 中田ヤスタカ (Nakata Yasutaka), the DJ behind capsule and perfume. The video is directed by the late 野田さん.

Her works feel like Michel Gondry, utilizing amazing tricks that are totally mundane in nature. Another video to check out is Yuki's Sentimental Journey for more of 野田さん's work.

In the MEG video, we have the people in black doing the magic. It blows my mind, because the first time I saw this effect was in 文楽 (bunraku), which is a Japanese puppet theatre where one pupper is operated by 3 people. When I first saw it, I thought it was a real person... and then the camera zoomed in on the puppet.



So this video has it all. Music by 中田ヤスタカ, PV directed by 野田凪, and MEG, of course. Bravo, simple amazing.

perfume

The fabulous trio known as Perfume are starting to leak across the sea...

There is this odd phenomenon where when you don't live in Japan, but are interested in it, it takes a while before something reaches critical mass and starts to leak out to other country's Japanese-speaking populations. perfume archived this a few weeks ago.

perfume (generally not capitalized) is a three girl group from Hiroshima. The members are あ～ちゃん (A~chan), かしゆか (Kashiyuka, sometimes ksyk in ローマ字), and のっち (Nocchi). They struggled for many years, apparently since elementary school, to make hit songs, but until Yasutaka Nakata, a fairly popular DJ, picked them up, they didn't really succeed.

My personal history with perfume started when I saw the IKZOLOGIC video a while back. From that video, I started to get into capsule. Yasutaka Nakata is the DJ for capsule, so when I went looking for more music by him, I ended up hearing a lot of perfume.

But I didn't think much of them. And then they took off and started showing up on TV and now I am on-board... they are a girl group... they don't make their own music, but Yasutaka-san is awesome, so at least it is good music. They are just there to look pretty and dance. All their live performances are lip-synced to allow them to dance in their very unique way.

Funny thing is most people have a favorite. They are made to all look different, mainly with wardrobe and hair styles differing. I must admit that のっち is my favorite. She's the short haired one... (-.-;)

Their blog is here. Sorry, it's in Japanese... for now...

I leave you with their music video/commercial for Pino brand bonbons. Enjoy!