 |
VIZL-55 / VICL-60738 | October 3, 2001 Soundtrack 19 tracks [Click to Enlarge] |
Music: Yuki Kajiura (1-18), Akino Arai (19)
Arrangement: Yuki Kajiura (1-18)
Lyrics: Yuki Kajiura (1-18)
Vocal: chiaki (Chiaki Ishikawa) (19)
Vocal & chorus: Yuri Kasahara (2, 8, 16-17, 19), Yuriko Kaida (7, 13)
Musicians
Keyboards and Programming: Yuki Kajiura
Piano: Yuki Kajiura (14, 19)
Bass: Tomoharu “Jr” Takahashi (17, 19)
E. guitar: Takahiro Koike (1, 6, 16, 19)
A. guitar & mandolin: Masayoshi Furukawa (3, 5, 9, 17)
Percussion: Mataro Misawa (8)
Accordion & claviola: Yoshiaki Sato (3, 5, 9, 17)
Violin: Mori Kuwata (3, 15), Hitoshi Konno (13)
Viola: Hirohito Furukawara (13)
Cello: Masayo Furukawara (4, 13, 15)
Sax: Hiroyasu Yaguchi (6, 16)
Flute: Junko Wakamatsu (6)
Bagpipe: Atsuji Yamane (1, 6)
Snare: Miki Kajiura (2)
Tracklist
- le grand retour
- secret game
- fake garden
- les soldats II
- in memory of you
- colosseum
- salva nos II
- maze
- in peace
- despair
- power-hungry
- black is black
- canta per me II
- at dusk
- premonition
- killing
- a farewell song
- Kirei na Kanjou – piano ver.
- indio
Liner Notes
Wonderful, Kajiura Yuki.
Text by Kitayama Shigeru
This is the second Noir soundtrack.
It’s the second installment from the “Noir Original Soundtrack I”, which had recorded such songs as Canta Per Me and Salva Nos.
Naturally, when hopes are this high, the pressure is also high.
Even so.
First of all, dropping the pointer for a silent album…basically, I want to try listening to the CD.
Wonderful, Kajiura Yuki.
This being the second soundtrack, she was able to centrally organize the compositions she created new, for the sake of using them in the second part of the series. I’ll give very simple comments regarding a few songs.
The first song, Le Grand Retour, like its name, is a song that imagines the magnificent ideal of the Grand Retour Altena. “Noir” is rather strange, isn’t it? There are songs that overflow the floodgates of emotion, but in fact her goal here was to firmly develop the song toward an entirely different nuance. In the drama, the handling of twenty episodes is impressive.
The second song, Secret Game, is a painfully lovely song that uses the shock of the 25th episode’s A-part. Perhaps, it becomes a song that a Chloe fan (Kajiura-shi too?) can’t listen to without tears.
What plays during the scene that solitarily composes thoughts of Kirika’s confrontation with Mireille is the fifth song, In Memory Of You. It’s quite like Romance (from the first soundtrack), having the guitar of Furukawa Masayoshi (who, coincidentally, I’m a big fan of) and the accordion of Sato Yoshiaki; it’s an emotional and excellent performance that doesn’t sound much like BGM.
In the sixth song, Colosseum, the use of a bagpipe is a novelty. The eighth song, Maze, is one that somehow suggests the British tradition; coming closer to the Mansion where Altena waits, it turns into a sense of Medieval music.
The sixteenth song, Killing, is a song that targets the first soundtrack’s song Canta Per Me. Where the latter is Kirika’s theme for the girl who can make light of an extraordinary fate, I think Killing is Kirika’s theme for when she’s a pure murder machine. The 22nd episode, which paints Kirika’s definite transformation, effectively uses these two songs.
This time, some songs are vocal ones, but I think the one I noticed the most was the last song, Indio. This song, which also concerns Kajiura Yuki, was used at the point where you think “Never!” in the drama, beautifully expressing thoughts of the confrontation between Mireille and Kirika. Since it was on the air back then, it was a song that brought up the subject of “What’s this song? Is it included in the soundtrack?”
Otherwise, concerning fans, there’s also a different version of Salva Nos (seventh song) in this release, and a different version of Canta Per Me (thirteenth song), as well as piano versions of the eleventh song Power Hungry and Kirei na Kanjou (eighteenth song); it’s wonderful that compositions recorded in the first soundtrack are also recorded here. For you who say “But again, those songs, those songs aren’t there!”, there’s good news here. There’s a 12cm CD where each character sings Japanese versions of the very popular vocal pieces, and an 8cm CD is included with the BGM outtracks that weren’t recorded in soundtracks one and two.
(By the way, in the booklet’s anthology, the Japanese version lyrics recorded in this new album differ from the original words printed.)
Well, this last publicity is pretty terrible, but I think everyone who was pleased with soundtrack one will be definitely pleased with this work too.
Wonderful, Kajiura Yuki. (Producer)
Translation by ninetales