VOCALOG 01
Preramble
against a backdrop of economic uncertainties and imploding labor markets, the web has remained surprisingly resilient for small creators. large platforms clearly understand the lifecycle of this dynamic, yet increasingly are engaging in an obvious doublespeak to peddle the new snake oil. at this long tail, where creators are less established and enjoy less security from coasting on name recognition or career contacts, is where you will find the voices sounding alarms the loudest about the cracks starting to show in the web, accelerated by LLMs now laundering creative output and creators being pushed even further to the margins. there’s usually no need to read the comments to conclude what you’ve already figured out on your own: the web is dying. the global copyright regime that was engaged to fight against it in its P2P heyday is now repurposing fair use to flip the script, and it is probably fair to say it is unlikely to be reactive to concerns about ownership and remix being raised anew again when it starts crashing into the wall of large-scale AI, let alone inform its context in cooking us all alive. there’s negative profit to be had, endless growth to never be realized, and dividend orgies to be deferred indefinitely.
vocal synth music will certainly be no exception in this shifting dynamic. now that audio transformers like suno have started to appear, they’ve begun contributing their own noise into the screaming chorus. yet, somehow, more authentic vocal synth music will be published over this year than the last, largely by new, independent producers using it as a creative springboard for the first time. vocal synth music is experiencing its largest boom yet, and the resiliancy of the doujin spirit that has guided it, if somewhat bruised from a global pandemic, has protected that growth.
it’s my strong belief that manual curation is needed more than ever to sift through this noise, especially as fabricated content online goes exponential. recommendation algorithms, engineered primarily to extract attention, do not discriminate on content or control its failings, and many of the largest players are already racing to a future where creation is content maximized for infinite churn. there may eventually come a future of the web, or another protocol, that figures out a way to validate creators and separate out the bot chaff in a meaningful way, but the incentives are diminishing rapidly for platforms to ever develop or find such solutions. regular, periodic, grassroots curation will be our best tool to defend this value in the medium term, and it is the primary motivation for why I’m starting VOCALOG to explore new releases and the producers behind them in vocal synth music at a monthly cadence (though realistically, more irregularly). while it is unreasonable to think I may be able to chart even a small slice of a still expanding subculture, it’s subject matter that I have a sticky enthusiasm for and want to celebrate. the antipode is the enthusiasm and money slushing around for AI today that shrugs at culture converning on a marketable, average sludge, and there is more opportunity and responsibility than ever for you and me to show up with critical perspectives that might help us wade through it together.
unlike the data rummaging I’ve done and plan to continue with when the right inspiration strikes, these explorations are purposefully turning away from that approach. for one, the weekly vocaran is still active at this point and is being collected purely on numbers, which makes it one of the best windows into what trends locally within the vocal synth music scene undisturbed by more global fads or memes. one can argue about whether its relevance has already slipped, and also whether newer outfits like the billboard japan chart and vocaloid rankings are more usefully recording larger casual audiences being exposed to vocal synth music, but the point remains that there are ample models of the data-focused approach available, performed at different scales for a variety of purposes, that understand the quirks and caveats of streaming platforms and public metrics. weekly vocaran especially provides a wealth of historical data that has already been forced to respond to the way metrics have been recalculated and reformulated on nico over the years, and any other attempt to catch up to that benchmark would be redundant. the focus with VOCALOG is to dig deep, down into the CD jumble of a plastic bin at the hard off, to see what curiosities may turn up.
secondly, and perhaps more crucially, I want to avoid enforcing arbitrary limits and thresholds on what might be covered in this space. the initial vision for these explorations is to bring focus to lesser-known creators, and while I anticipate that will always inform what is showcased to some extent, view counts are a distraction to that goal. an upper views threshold on eligibility for mention would not only be arbitrarily snotty, but also uncompromising to the realities of how this scene has expanded. “VOCALOG” is meant to communicate this discretion: while a ship’s deck log may record as granularly as changes in the weather, there is also an expectation that it will be incomprehensive and likely omit events. maybe the presiding officer never noticed something. maybe the presiding officer was too lazy or inattentive to bother in the first place. the discussions here should not be taken as a total of vocal synth music, but as a supplement to other explorations, often done by other individuals who want to highlight their own personal discoveries. these have always been limited in english, which is some of the motivation for this effort to begin with ー I’d probably be in better company on this crossposting to a note blog ー so I’d encourage anyone that follows along to also check on resources like vocaDB to understand how far the horizon stretches and where I’m probably either overlooking or hazily scribbling the territory.
since my motivation flies more than a little high here, let me put things a little more plainly: what should you expect to read about on VOCALOG? vocal synth PV and album pickups, mostly. we’ll likely also detour pretty frequently into editorial and snip interviews or other commentary that I think make for good highlights. click through the hotlinks and fall down your own rabbit hole. expect the format to evolve as I find my tongue past this initial long-winded preamble, unless my yap fever never does end up breaking, in which case we’re in serious trouble. the weather here has been unreasonably warm for what should be the fall, and I need adachi rei to blow her cool air over me to save me from the delirium. save me, adachi rei! before I launch a real newsletter!
Spotlight
when I wrote about teto on her birthday last year, there was far more uncertainty in my tone then about how people would react to her receiving a commercial voicebank. teto does continue to reside over an underdog charm that I gushed about then, a forever distant second to miss 01, but reappraising now a year wiser, it’s stunning to admire how much glam and glitter she has put on since. the likes of haraguchi sasuke and masarada, producers who were in that moment mostly one-hit wonders with an unknown horizon in front of them, have completely upended that characterization by making major or exclusive use of her voicebanks, respectively, in a new boom era.
rarely would I credit one or even two personalities with defining an ad-hoc movement like this, outside of a crafted ideology, which makes it doubly astounding that these successes establish an almost perfect snapshot of the maturities that are supervising teto’s rise. masarada, a producer that splashed onto the scene from nothing, has cracked charts and sent teenagers rushing to karaoke booths. sasuke, initially signed to warner japan as a 15 year old boy-wonder toying with demoscene-style witchery, has mostly hung up that hat to celebrate the online youth he spent enjoying MADs by polishing his sharp sound with a reliance on UTAU. the superstar rookie, spurned by teto’s synthV release, has weaved an entirely new story for her. the seasoned production veteran, an amalgam of old haunt and fresh face, choosing to reach for her synthV voice primarily for commercial releases, prefers to exalt her old canon as a raucous VIPPER unconcerned with polite aesthetics. together, they encompass teto’s elevation from joke to standout, and larger diffusion among audiences as a character thrust into sudden success.
although the character PV has never lost full influence in vocal synth music, and someone like yukopi is affirmation that it has remained strong, the era where black rock shooter or kagepro could be propeled into media mix powerhouses has felt more like a distant memory. teto’s resurgence, the doctor wannabe forced into a lab coat, has likely brought us closer than ever to someone threading the right twist of her character into a commercial manga or light novel. a flood of amateur creatives and teto’s rise out of a lie have equipped her with especially useful subject matter, and teto, more than other voicebanks that engage character profiles as mere suggestions, has become an ambassador of youthful uncertainty. she’s been thrust into adulthood and is adrift. she’s socially anxious. her friendships are growing distant, her career is a mess, and she has a swelling panic that the best days are behind her as she begins to twilight at 20. to the teenagers crossing over some abstract threshold into adulthood, she is literally them. while it is not to say teto is uniquely tapping into emotions that vocal synth music hasn’t already trafficked in, she has emerged as a uniquely apt personification of that unease for audiences to latch on to. masarada and sasuke, having soared the highest here, provide some of the brightest beacons for producers to orient themselves towards, and it is with fully-realized narrative PVs from fresh faces like hitoka hitomoku and square37 that we see that influence with the most clarity. the nebulous elements of tondemo pop and the lyrical density of poemloids are unlikely to travel as far, or resonate as deeply, as the 31 year old chimera lamenting her dead-end desk job.
Pickups
no particular cut-off for inclusion this time, so I’ve picked out a few releases from the last two months or so. if I’m going to keep myself to a monthly cadence, then I’ll need to be stricter about this. equally to the point, I’m hoping to be more wide-ranging on what’s included in the future, now that I’ve shaken off the introduction, and events like comiket or vocacolle could make that an overwhelming ask. I think you might already be seeing me rationalize the need to make these posts less regular.
if kasane teto represents a merge of personalities, then adachi rei is the double agent living two lives. unlike teto, who has had her memetic status reconciled with her core music identity, rei has more closely followed miku’s path in seeing her character drift from any semblance of fixed traits. on twitter, where she exists as a markov chain bot mashing together tweets from followers, she is at moments wistful, in need of correction, garlic toasted1, blistering with rage, celebratingly horny, or conseratively horny (jordan peterson). that chaos is now most communally lauded, but producers do respect her more emotionally flat android side, still her dominant trait as informed by creators like avogado6. tracks like this one from mizenkei, a reflective quiet, are a nice retreat to that.
hatenagi nagisa has the sort of creative drive I want. not only is that reflected in his PV output – five new PVs in the last month, each of uncompromising standard – but also his seemingly smothering need to include footnotes for each of his songs explaining his process and motivations. most producers are usually content to let a work speak for itself, but the parade of releases and these addendums for what are already typically frantic anthems suggests more of a breathless urge to shout than a simple desire. if anything else, that’s the sort of enthusiasm we need to tap for the wacca and maimai crossover revival. anyone flirting with time signatures like this deserves the recognition.
yomitan akane has twisted familiar iconography in unusual ways before, or deliberately expunged it, so it’s really exceptional to see him attack it with such full throat in this exploration of the subconscious. what starts with a benign dream-like logic – teto flying with a golf club, holding a miniature organ, and buried in trash bags – quickly teeters into the nightmarish as things take a hard turn to the disassociative. there is as much to parse as there is to puzzle over: the lyrics in the description, distributed materials, and video itself don’t match each other, and fixed comments throughout the video provide terse explainers like they were jotted down in a dream journal. satoshi kon’s famously dense storyboards cross my mind here, and I can’t help thinking this a particularly great abbreviation of the same sort of subconscious odyssey. kon made whole films this way.
are you the kind of person that pays attention to aspect ratios? some of this is probably owed to the normalization of vertical video, and also retro tech nostalgia still booming with younger generations, but it is surprising to note how many vocal synth PVs are returning back to the promised land and away from widescreen. shannon here is more obviously leaning into the latter, as are most other examples I can cite, to blend the sepia tones of the showa era with the cool, trendy blues of mizuiro. personally, I think if anyone deserves to use this motif as a crutch, it’s probably the person that can convicingly establish a new-age retro worldview using a bed of chiptune arpeggios and a minutiae of shinkansen trivia (seriously, unless you’re a diehard railfan, you need to trust me that there’s a lot to gain reading the comments). wrap me in a blanket of television snow and let me nurse the too-hard shinkansen ice cream.
getting around to completing this round-up, which I announced would surely be coming almost a month ago, was especially taunted by this release from wata narashi. apparently, this is how he recalls the pressures from writing his graduation thesis, and while I’m not nearly as cute as an aoi puppet, looming quarter deadlines and the dread of reporting no progress in another standup has also led me to feel like I’m part of the same circus. even worse, I don’t have an adachi rei on a tripod scurrying past me in telepresence mode as she provides color commentary. along with the aspect ratio potpourri, we’ve also started to see more producers using live action footage like this as texture, or even similar thematic use to narashi, that I’m ready to shout that puppet comedy is back in. from vtubers to school idols, I think everyone would be more likely to swoon over my tehepero whimsy if we all had to talk past each other with flapping muppet mouths.
Noteworthy
Clippings
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blessed by what is no doubt a full book of corporate contacts, haraguchi sasuke’s rampage has seen him now worm his way into popular music. new sasuke releases find you, rather than being hunted for, which tripped me into ame-chan, kotone, and now his new idol single that I like to imagine came with a clause contingent on letting teto sing it too. for someone this high profile, it’s an amazingly steady output, and seeing how sasuke goes from an empty track timeline to twelve layers dancing around each other in thirty minutes is a great look into that process. when we talk about flowing like water in a creative context, this has to be what that looks like on a DAW.
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kitkat. mcdonalds. sure, everyone is ending up on the nissin CM promotional circuit at some point these days (daijoubu da, mondainai), but namigroove is grabbing the bag with both hands and running far with it. it’s something of both a generational and cultural gap, but in the before times of forums, indie assholes would blow a gasket upon learning of montreal signed on to be outback’s new jingle. watching fans congratulate namigroove under a commercial for new frappé flavors (not zundamochi flavor, mind you) has caused me to disassociate, and for a brief moment, I’ve peered through the cosmic keyhole to a world where these superfans are instead flaming each other over a commercial on vbulletin boards. let’s go maccas tonight.3
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kikuo’s north america tour wrapped up last month, and I scrambled to see him in chicago after being blocked out on the other showings. rarely do I feel all that old, since I already channel my ojisan chi daily, but it’s likely no exaggeration that I was one of the oldest and least trendy attendees outside of parents chaperoning their sons and daughters. while miku expo over a decade has already plainly demonstrated the audience growing, it was probably the clearest I’ve seen how tiktok has rocketed kikuo into stardom. all said, seeing hoshi-kun play hype man was worth the price of admission, but the sound mix left a lot to be desired. when you have teens screaming along to aishite in your ear, any extra attention to it probably wouldn’t have impressed anyway. just remind me to wear platform boots and to not forget my striped arm warmers next time.
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kenshi yonezu wants to sell you godiva chocolate, which explains why donut hole finally received a fully animated PV over a decade after it propelled him into normie. the credits backing it are impressive, and it looks just as much, with legends like masashi andou and takahiro chiba as standouts. as yonezu tells it, though, it doesn’t sound like he even needed the godiva money to get hooked up with production IG on it. after drinking georgia coffee for a few years, it’s nice to know you can always return to a sweet comfort; even sweeter, I’m sure, when you’re welcomed back with a millions of views over a couple days. no big thing to you, I know, yonezu-san.
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preserved for your convenience, as this tweet no longer translates the objectively correct way ↩
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if you've been bit by the same umicha bug as me, my gushing over this one already ended up on bluesky ↩
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it should be interesting to see at what point, if any, teto starts to show up in collaborations like this. to my knowledge, supercell ran the first CM of any kind to feature miku, and it wasn't really until project diva was in full swing after a year or two that collaborations began to spin up rapidly. throw me a curveball and let's see her work at a ministop instead of famima. ↩