Hit Japanese Pop Composer Promotes New Solo Project With SL Video

This totally charming SL music video incorporates Japanese-themed locations with Japanese pop music, and there's a very good reason for that: Both the video and the music are by Yasushi Watanabe, and if you follow J-Pop, you're probably already familiar with his music.

"He composes music for many Japanese major singers including AKB48 and Nogizaka46 (do you know these big groups of Japanese girls?) He composed some music for anime and games too." (He also composed this banger by Guilty Kiss.)

That's all according to Sanny Yoshikawa, my occasional, indispensable Japanese translator (and an adorable squirrel in SL).

To promote his spin-off project, called BYNORAL, Sanny tells me Watanabe returned to Second Life recently, since he had first explored the platform almost a decade ago:

"Although he knew he could make realistic and unique avatars in SL [back then], he was surprised how the world evolved these 10 years."

So he set out to catching up:

"Yasushi...  went through the trouble of understanding the [new] technology such as mesh and Bento," Sanny explains to me, after messaging Yasushi in SL.  Then he explored SL Flickr and blogs, to help put together the video. That would probably help explain the appearance of SL's many great and highly detailed Japanese-themed locations, such as Mitsumi-Town and also Rieri, inspired by Tokyo's Arakawa Lock Gate Region.

Hat tip: Japanese SL Fennel2.

Comments

[Hitomi Tiponi]

Yasushi Watanabe has written a handful of minor album tracks for Japanese girl groups, but that is more than I have!
It's great to see Second Life being used on a track with an almost anime-like feel to the imagery, something it seems well-suited for.

[mapquest directions]

Very elaborate and insightful article. It gives me a fair amount of knowledge. It helps a lot for my work.