I found unreleased Tenchi music (and it's weird)

Started by For Washuu, October 10, 2024, 09:16:37 PM

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October 10, 2024, 09:16:37 PM Last Edit: October 14, 2024, 12:36:59 AM by For Washuu Reason: title
Hi!  Partially clickbait title (hence this thread being in General instead of the Tenchi category.)

tl;dr: I found unreleased, unfinished songs featuring Tenchi's (and another who is maybe Sasami's) voice actor, from around halfway between the first OVA hitting shelves and Night Before the Carnival being released.

Long:
Masami Kikuchi, the Japanese voice actor for Tenchi Masaki, walked into a Tokyo recording studio in March of 1993, and he laid down vocal tracks for some music that would go on toooo... never see the light of day, as far as I know.

At some point the studio reel-to-reel tapes were shipped off to [checks notes]
Toronto.  Dunno why.

I bought it off of eBay recently, because my life is now a one-way street to my house for massive, fat, raw, unmixed studio multitrack tapes from bands like Bride, Melidian, The Men They Couldn't Hang, and [checks notes again]
REO Speedwagon???  How did that happen?


Anyway.  If you can spare a fellow Tenchi fan and music archival fanatic a small favor... could someone who's really, really familiar with the dub tell me if this does in fact sound like the same Masami Kikuchi who voiced our beloved guy? I can only remember him singing (briefly) in the Tenchi in Tokyo ending theme and... honestly I can hear it, but that's juuust not much to go on. It'd be nice to get a second opinion or two before mixing it, posting publicly it to YouTube, and saying ね!菊池正美の忘れ去られていた曲を見つけた!! as if I know what I'm doing.  :|

Thanks!


EDIT
Okay, went back to make a rough mix to share and realized there is more than one singer on this reel.  There's Masami Kikuchi and... Chisa Yokoyama??  Singing really aggressively?!?  Or maybe Etsuko Kozakura, VA for Ryo-Ohki? 

[how do i spoiler]
It's so very weirdly tracked.  The mid tracks have pre-recorded backing tracks, guitar overdubs, and vocals for some songs. (that's where the samples are coming from.)  Then the bottom few tracks are completely unrelated to those songs whatsoever, mostly instrumental, and one has like 3 seconds of vocal tracking dubbed before it cuts out mid-word... and the backing track just keeps going.  Some of them sound almost like OVA 1 OST background music.  One has actual, live drums recorded nevermind, it's samples just like the rest of the Tenchi OSTs from that era.
On a side-note, Chisa (or Etsuko) has WAY better control on the mic than Masami did.  Damn.)
The top few tracks are different songs yet again.  Whatever recording engineer was on the board that day was treating this reel-to-reel tape like a freaking hard drive and just putting stuff wherever it would fit - both in time AND vertically.  I have never, ever seen that before.
There's a clue buried in there, too: a spoken bit saying "もしもしひかるちゃん、また僕ですいつ電話しようか迷ったけど、もしかして君がいないかもしれないってそう思ったけど、結局電話しちゃった。" or "Hello Hikaru-chan, it's me again. I was wondering when to call, and I thought you might not be there, but I ended up calling."
Sounds more like "Hikari" than "Hikaru" to me, but that's what you get for using an AI to transcribe audio. Shrug.  As I mentioned in Discord, "did Masami Kikuchi ever play a character who was in love with a girl named Hikari?"

[/no really i forgot how]

That's all, folks.  Thanks if you're reading.  (._.)

Interesting find. Also I don't think there is a way to do spoilers anymore.

Quote from: Ryo-Okay on October 13, 2024, 08:26:28 PMInteresting find. Also I don't think there is a way to do spoilers anymore.

Ya a lot of addons broke...