Like any moderately prolific recording artist, Yoko Kanno tracks exist on a lot of CDs. My goal for this exercise is to build a list of her major primary published works. A lot of this is an intellectual exercise to get an idea of the scope of her work over time, but also a quick eyeball to see what a somewhat complete collection would look like. With a nod to fokm, most of us aren't going to be able to track down 'The Creation', but some people can get a good cross-section of her core works over time.
This is actually my second pass; My first pass was to try to break her works into "Major Works" and "Further Works", but the scope and scale of her catalog strongly suggest four tiers. We could break off her game work and live work and commercial work into further tiers, or break her career up into eras, but this is a broad first take at what counts as her primary works (as of late 2021)
Criteria modified slightly on 2022-01-01: Moved totally duplicate works into the secondary minor catgory, explicitly added an exception carveout to the 'Kids on the Slope OST'. Secondary major works were dedicated to partial and total reprints of major works only, and generally pushing the rest into Minor Works.
- Primary Major Works (today's exercise)
- Secondary works: which are reprints that may or may not contain new material. Examples: Cowboy Bebop CD Box, Escaflowne Lovers Only, Macross Plus For Fans Only, Daikoukai Jidai II Special Edition, Koei Best Yoko Kanno Collection, Space Bio Charge. Also included are J-pop albums largely covered by other CDs.
- Minor works, which fall into four categories: First is albums where the content composed by Kanno makes up a smaller fraction of the total, such as Please Save My Earth Image Soundtracks, Memories soundtrack, and everything in the TETSU100% catalog. Second is certain shorter discs such as Cowgirl Ed and Sharon Apple Cream Puf. Third are Obscurities like Petal Dance Original Piano Score, Sakamichi no Apollon BONUS TRACK, Elegant World AKA The Show Must Go On OST, and the sort-of-but-not-really-fully-released Ragnarok Online 2 out of uncertainty. Fourth is the Koei BGM and related old original game sounds albums here, as they generally contain a mix of composers and, frankly, they're fascinating but not very good.(I'll talk about those more in future posts). )
- Other Works, which includes various singles that appear on soundtracks and compilations that are primarily not her work (and are not or just not yet pr
The title of the choral piece that plays when Spike is falling out the shattered stained glass window in 'Battle of Fallen Angels' is Green Bird. I wonder if this is a reference to they lyric in the Beatles Song 'And your Bird Can Sing' from their album Revolver:
"You say you've seen seven wonders, and your bird is green, but you can't see me"
There's probably no way of knowing, but it's just a thought.
It comes in two formats:
Digital release (out this Friday on Apple Music and Spotify) and CD release (out on December 8th).
The digital release will feature an exclusive track (absent from the CD) and similarly, the CD will feature two exclusive tracks.
More information here: https://www.famitsu.com/news/202111/16240994.html
Apologies if this has already been mentioned here.
Did I see Yoko Kanno in the background of a coupla scenes of the new series?
https://youtu.be/Sujd6pRY-NI?t=13
The sound I'm trying to recreate is a very round, soft, bell-like sound. From what I can tell it sounds like a sine wave but for some reason has harmonics. Putting it into my EQ it also seems to have lower harmonics, which to me indicates more than one oscillator.
She uses what sounds like the exact same instrument in Inner Universe but with an LFO on the amp to create the wobble effect. I took a clean sample of this section of the song and put it into an oscilloscope, it looks like it is just a pure sine wave, which paradoxically has harmonics. There could be an error in my methodology however.
https://youtu.be/EIVgSuuUTwQ?t=114
Update: With some of the feedback I've gotten I'm almost starting to wonder if I'm using the wrong tool for the wrong job. I've mostly been working out of Massive to try and build this sound but I'm not entirely sure it's possible. From my reasearch Kanno has never really talked about what hardware she uses exactly, so it makes it a lot more of a synth guessing game.
I'm switching over to Reaktor to try and build something from scratch and see where that gets me. I've seen people asking for this kind of synth in the past so I want to update this post with any progress so that others can find it as well.
I may be incorrect about this but I think I just found the perfect allegory to describe the Live-Action adaptation of Cowboy Bebop.
So...
For those who don't already know, the soundtrack to the Live Action Cowboy Bebop contains a revised version of Rush known as 'Net Rush'. Rush is arguably one of my favorite songs from the original soundtrack mainly cause it captures an energy that is unlike anything I've heard before while also being somehow smooth and free-flowing.
Comparing the two, 'Net Rush' is shorter than the original and tries to capture that same energy it once had before by playing the first minutes beat for beat, albeit with certain orchestral additional flair that only sometimes works before almost diverging towards the end of the song which is certainly unique but is not as good in comparison to the original song. Given that tho, I still enjoyed it.
Tell me that comparison doesn't sound like the situation Netflix Bebop is currently in right now. A classic reimagined beat for beat that tries to capture the same spirit while trying to diverge into its own material in certain places but not really capturing the same essence it used to.
Idk what do you think?
Link for 'Net Rush':
