“Singing my songs I hold dear; from my virtual world to yours” – Isekaijoucho
Hello there! And welcome to the J-Music Exchange/Rate! If you know exactly what that means and what we’re all about here, you should also be well aware what to do from here on out, so off you go! However, if this is actually your first time here and you’re not entirely sure what you just walked into, please give the following primer a quick read:
The Exchange/Rate is a tandem album review series conducted every month by yours truly alongside my good friend and fellow Japanese music fan Al (from Omunibasu). Each month we decide on a specific theme with which our reviews would revolve around. We then pick out albums from our respective libraries which we think best coincides with that theme. We will then give the album we chose to the other person and vice versa (exchange), after which we then listen to and subsequently review the album we were given (rate). This project has not only allowed us to explore music beyond our libraries, but it provides an opportunity for us to see our favorite albums from a different point of view. It is our hope that this series is able to do the same for you and that you either find a new artist to try out and/or we offer you a fresh take on one of *your* favorite albums
This month it was my turn again to dish out a theme. I think I came up with a pretty interesting one specifically within the context of the Exchange/Rate. and that is bands/artists we started listening to thanks to the Exchange/Rate! I think when Al and I first started doing this series, the most obvious way of looking at the “exchange” part of the Exchange/Rate was simply through the albums we gave each other. I send him something I think he’d find interesting, he does the same for me, and every month we both hopefully walk away having listened to something we otherwise might not have checked out on our own. But after years of doing this, I think it’s fair to say that the exchange goes quite a bit further than that. We’ve talked about a plethora of artists between the two of us at this point, whether through the albums we’ve directly exchanged, comparisons made during reviews, conversations outside of the series, or simply repeatedly exposing each other to certain names until eventually curiosity gets the better of us. Naturally, some of those artists have stuck around long after their respective Exchange/Rate appearances, becoming part of our regular listening habits in the process. So this month, we thought it’d be fun to look at a couple of those artists and see where that influence has taken us.
On my end I went ahead and handed Al Soul/R&B artist MALIYA’s album pluto for him to go over with you guys at the Omunibasu Substack (check it out here!). Al in turn had me revisit the one and only Isekaihoucho’s Shikisai for me to talk about and review.
So, without further ado, let us enter Isekaijoucho’s world!
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Isekaijoucho (ヰ世界情緒) is a Japanese virtual singer affiliated with the artist collective KAMITSUBAKI STUDIO, as well as a member of the virtual singer group Virtual Witch Phenomenon, better known as V.W.P. Described as a “virtual dark singer,” Isekaijoucho aims to express the world through her songs and creative works, often weaving themes of darkness and light together through her distinctively powerful yet ethereal singing voice. Beyond music, she’s also a multifaceted creator who expresses herself through a number of different mediums, including illustration, narration, and voice acting.
＜Ｓｈｉｋｉｓａｉ (色彩)＞
(＊Spotify link to the full album)
CDJapan Affiliate Link(s):
N/A
＜T ｒａｃｋｌｉｓｔ＞
０１・息吹/ibuki -instrumental-
０２・そして白に還る/soshite shiro ni kaeru
０３・ラピスのお人形/lapis no oningyou
０４・パンドラコール/pandora call
０５・ディメンション/dimension
０６・キミ消失セカイ/kimi shoushitsu sekai
０７・グレイスケイル/grayscale
０８・此処に棘と死を/koko ni toge to shi o
０９・ネリネの内緒事/nerine no naishogoto
１０・暮れなずむ約束/kurenazumu yakusoku
１１・ヴァーミリオン/vermillion
１２・描き続けた君へ/kaki wo tsudxuketa kimi e
１３・かたちなきもの/katachinakimono
１４・ANGELIC
１５・色彩-instrumental-
Ａｌ：I first knew about Isekaijoucho through Leap’s various recommendations, but most prevalently within the Exchange/Rate segment, when I reviewed V.W.P’s first full-length album. And similar to being introduced to a brand new idol group, it was neat to learn about all these different personalities and think about how much KAMITSUBAKI struck digital gold when assembling this vocal superteam.
And while I’ve come to really appreciate all of them and what they bring to the unit, Isekaijoucho was the one member that caught my eye the most. Given that visuals are important in the world of virtual talents, I’d imagine that a lot of people, myself included, gravitated towards the cute appeal of her design. But looks can be (somewhat) deceiving, as I quickly realized just how much of a fantastic and nuanced singer she really is. As many have pointed out, Joucho has excelled at performing more operatic songs, adding to the dramatic theatrics through her eeriely calm demeanor and ability to sing to the high heavens when needed. And I do think that her most recent full-length album, Colors, exemplifies that visual/auditory contrast of hers and much more.
Songs like “Lapis no Ohitogata” and “Pandora Call” have always stood out to me for its mysterious attractiveness and how it fits Joucho’s personality pretty nicely. But what I found most interesting about this record is her apparent desire to expand her range, as we later hear Joucho perform on tracks that stray a bit farther from her usual stuff. Obviously, you can tell that she holds her own on those heavier rock tracks; but listening to her take on various styles like a jazzy musical number, a touching piano ballad, or even something you’d normally hear Harusaruhi rap on… it’s all an impressive display of who Joucho is as an evolving singer and the heights that she’s very well capable of reaching.
I have always had a lot of admiration for faceless talents, as they’ve proven that revealing your real identity is not always a necessity in the world of public/online entertainment. And while I never was really caught up in the massive ‘virtual talent’ wave we’ve been seeing over the years, no doubt has it given people endless ways to express themselves through their pursuits of content creation, gaming, art, and especially music. And with how Joucho has presented herself in this album, it’s hard not to see her as a prime example of that type of creative talent.
＜Ｓｏｎｇｓ ｏｆ Ｉｎｔｅｒｅｓｔ＞
０１・息吹/Ibuki -instrumental-、０２・そして白に還る/soshite shiro ni kaeru
I do find it a little funny that this is now the second album in a row we’ve reviewed here on the Exchange/Rate that begins with a dedicated instrumental opener (lol). For what it’s worth though, and as I mentioned last month, I actually enjoy these quite a bit when they’re used to lead directly into the first proper song on an album, which is once again the case here with Ibuki and Soshite Shiro ni Kaeru.
Ibuki opens with this grand choir hymn that immediately gives the album an almost mystical, high-fantasy feel. That imagery only becomes stronger as the orchestral accompaniment gradually comes into view, complete with sweeping strings and blaring horns that make it feel as though we’re standing at the beginning of some grand hero’s adventure. It’s brief, but it does exactly what I would want an opening instrumental like this to do; set the scene before seamlessly handing things off to what comes next. Fittingly enough, the choir then gives way to Isekaijoucho’s own beautiful hymn at the beginning of Soshite Shiro ni Kaeru. And I think it’s at around this point that anyone who isn’t terribly familiar with Joucho, or perhaps only knows her through some of the covers she’s done over the years, might start to realize that she’s actually a bit of a singing virtuoso.
I don’t just mean that in the sense that she has a good voice either. I personally think she does, of course, though I can also understand her particular tonality perhaps being an acquired taste for some. What impresses me more is the sheer amount of control she has over it. There’s an almost uncanny precision to the way she moves between notes, adjusts the weight behind her voice, and knows exactly how much of it to use at any given moment. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised to learn that she’s had some form of classical training in the past, though I’d probably be even more impressed if she hasn’t. There’s just this innate sense of grandeur to the way she sings that makes performances like this feel remarkably natural for her. You get a pretty good sense of all of that listening to Soshite Shiro ni Kaeru, which, in my opinion, is Isekaijoucho very much in her element. Give Joucho a huge instrumental arrangement and enough room to make use of the technical range at her disposal, and she has an incredible ability to rise right alongside it rather than getting swallowed up by everything happening around her; a dynamic that I’ve always found particularly fascinating about her music.
０７・グレイスケイル/grayscale
Which is kinda funny when you then arrive at Grayscale around the midway point of the album, as it sounds almost nothing like Soshite Shiro ni Kaeru. This is, of course, very much by design, as I’m sure a lot of you have probably clued in on as well. I’ll talk a little more later about what I think Grayscale represents within the broader context of Shikisai, but to give you guys a bit of a hint, it does dovetail into both the visual and auditory narrative that the album appears to be building. At the very least, I don’t think its placement here is simply for the sake of giving listeners a breather before heading into the album’s latter half. Going back to the song itself though, if I’m being completely honest, I didn’t really know what to make of it during my first couple of spins through the album. Initially, I mostly chalked it up to some of KAMITSUBAKI’s broader musical tendencies bleeding into Isekaijoucho’s own work, given the group’s penchant for electronic music and rap, both of which I’m also a fan of.
After a while though, Grayscale started tickling a part of my brain that I haven’t really ventured into for the longest time. The more I listened to it, the more it began reminding me of an artist I listened to a ton when I was first getting into Japanese music; specifically, old-school DAOKO from her indie days under LOW HIGH WHO? There’s something about the quick, almost spoken-word style of rap that Joucho employs here that takes me back to that period of DAOKO’s music, where her delivery would almost casually tumble across the beat rather than approaching it like a more conventional rap performance. And I think that’s what ultimately got me to appreciate Grayscale quite a bit more than I initially did. Her youthful voice and demeanor aside, Isekaijoucho has always struck me as a consummate professional through and through. A track like this takes her considerably further away from the grand, technically demanding vocal performances that I personally associate with her, yet she never comes across as uncomfortable doing it. If anything, I thought she acquitted herself remarkably well, adapting her delivery to what the song asks of her without making it feel like she’s merely trying on a style for novelty’s sake. It’s certainly not the version of Isekaijoucho I expected to hear after the way Shikisai begins, but given what the album is seemingly trying to accomplish, I have a feeling that’s precisely the point.
０８・此処に棘と死を/koko ni toge to shi wo
This middle portion of Shikisai is actually my favorite stretch of the album to go through. Not only does it provide a nice stylistic shakeup around the halfway point, but I also think it makes for just about the best demonstration of Isekaijoucho’s versatility as a singer. You really only have to look at the jump from Grayscale to Koko ni Toge to Shi wo to see what I mean. Circling back to something I mentioned at the very beginning, Joucho, in my opinion, is truly right at home performing against these big, theatrical orchestral arrangements. There’s almost a Broadway-esque quality to her delivery here, particularly in the way she’s able to rise to meet the scale and drama of the instrumentation around her. And again, I think part of why this works so well comes from the contrast inherent to Isekaijoucho herself. If you were to hear her speaking voice or even just look at her character design, you probably wouldn’t immediately expect this kind of performance from her. Her voice naturally comes across as incredibly dainty and fragile, and I’ll even concede that there are singers out there with stronger natural vocal qualities than her.
But that’s where I think the distinction between having a great voice and being a great singer becomes incredibly important. Because whatever Joucho might lack in natural vocal power, she more than makes up for through sheer technique. That’s perhaps my favorite thing about her as a performer. As delicate as she might look and sound, at no point does Isekaijoucho ever truly feel outsized by the music around her. You can put these massive strings, pounding percussion, and all sorts of theatrical flourishes behind her, and somehow she always finds a way to make herself feel every bit as important to the arrangement. Of course, credit for that doesn’t belong solely to Joucho. Vocaloid producer SLAVE.V-V-R, making their sole contribution to Shikisai here, gives her one hell of a composition to work with. More broadly though, I also have to give KAMITSUBAKI STUDIO a lot of credit for seemingly understanding exactly what makes Isekaijoucho such an interesting vocalist and continually putting her in musical situations where those qualities can shine.
１２・描き続けた君へ/kaki tsudzuketa kimi e
In my initial draft for this review, I thought I was gonna have a hard time deciding on one final song to feature before giving my overall impressions on the album. But after giving Shikisai a fair number of spins, I eventually realized that I couldn’t bring myself not to cap everything off with Kaki Tsudzuketa Kimi e. For one, in as much as I really enjoy the theatrical presentation of something like Koko ni Toge to Shi wo, part of me believes that this kind of electro chamber pop arrangement is where Isekaijoucho could ultimately find a lot of mainstream success. There’s this grand, almost epic quality to the song that I could very easily imagine translating to a big game or anime tie-up, while still retaining enough of the characteristics that make Joucho’s music feel distinctly her own.
More importantly for this review though, I also think Kaki Tsudzuketa Kimi e serves as a perfectly positioned capstone performance for just about everything we’ve talked about thus far regarding Joucho’s prowess as a singer. While I’d probably still say Koko ni Toge to Shi wo is my favorite song off Shikisai as a whole, the stretch from around 3:23 through the end of Kaki Tsudzuketa Kimi e might just be my favorite sequence on the entire album. Everything about it is just gorgeous. I love how quickly the melody moves and evolves over such a short span of time, constantly giving Joucho something new to respond to as the arrangement builds toward its conclusion. And respond she does, because she absolutely steals the show here. After an entire album spent demonstrating just how much control she has over her voice, Joucho finally gets this extended vocal run where it feels like she’s letting everything loose at once. It’s become one of those moments that I actively look forward to whenever I put the song on.
＜Ｗｈａｔ Ｉ ｔｈｉｎｋ ｏｆ Ｓｈｉｋｉｓａｉ ＞
If you’re a longtime reader of the blog and follower of the Exchange/Rate series, then you should already be well familiar with the term “grab bag”. As a quick refresher, a “grab bag” is what Al and I have taken to calling albums that showcase a number of different musical styles, as opposed to something more uniform that’s built predominantly around a singular style or sound signature. Over the years since we first started using the term, we’ve revisited the concept across a number of different reviews, attempting to further define not only what makes an album a grab bag, but also why an artist might choose to make one and, perhaps more importantly, who exactly they’re meant for. It’s quite honestly become one of my favorite recurring concepts to revisit as part of the Exchange/Rate. Mostly because, as much as Al and I have talked about grab bags over the years, our understanding of them continues to evolve as we encounter albums that approach the idea in different ways. And wouldn’t you know it, we’re gonna be doing that again here with Isekaijoucho’s Shikisai.
Shikisai translates rather simply to “colors,” specifically referring to color as we perceive it through light and its different wavelengths. With that in mind, something I find immediately interesting about the album, and something you’ve probably already noticed just by looking at its artwork, is that despite what a title like Shikisai might lead you to expect, the album itself isn’t something I would necessarily describe as colorful. If anything, it’s overwhelmingly white. But that’s also where I think the conceptual brilliance of Shikisai starts to reveal itself, because white isn’t actually the absence of color. Rather, when we’re talking about light, white is what we perceive when all of its different colors come together. And suddenly, the way Shikisai sounds begins to make a whole lot more sense.
Because make no mistake, Shikisai is absolutely a grab bag. Across the album, you can hear Isekaijoucho moving between grand orchestral compositions, electronic music, rap, chamber pop, and plenty of other ideas in between. On the surface, these can seem like wildly different directions for the same album to take. Like, we only have to look back at Grayscale immediately followed by Koko ni Toge to Shi wo to see just how dramatic those differences can become. But I don’t think those differences are incidental. I think they’re the entire point. Each style effectively becomes another color for Isekaijoucho to inhabit. Taken individually, they’re all distinct from one another, sometimes drastically so. Bring all of them together, however, and they begin to form the white that defines Shikisai visually. The one constant holding all of those colors together, of course, is Joucho herself, who is appropriately clad in white.
＜Ｍｙ Ｒａｔｉｎｇ＞
４.５ ｏｕｔ ｏｆ ５
＆
９ ｏｕｔ ｏｆ １０
Which brings me back to why I’ve spent so much of this review talking about her ability as a singer. Whether you give her something theatrical and orchestral like Soshite Shiro ni Kaeru or Koko ni Toge to Shi wo, ask her to rap on something as comparatively unconventional as Grayscale, or give her the soaring electro chamber pop of Kaki Tsudzuketa Kimi e, Isekaijoucho continually finds a way to adapt herself to whatever the composition asks of her. And I think that’s ultimately the biggest takeaway we’re meant to have from Shikisai. Not necessarily that Isekaijoucho has the greatest voice you’ll ever hear, because as I’ve mentioned throughout this review, that’s not really the argument I’m trying to make. Rather, what makes Joucho such an exceptional vocalist is what she’s capable of doing with that voice. Technique, control, adaptability, and an almost uncanny ability to understand what a song needs from her; throw just about any color at Isekaijoucho and she’ll find some way to make it hers.
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What are your guys’ thoughts on Isekaijoucho’s Shikisai? Let us know in the comments!
Likewise, if there are any bands or artists you started listening to thanks to the Exchange/Rate over the years, please share those with us too! We’d love to know!
Lastly, before I let you guys go, don’t forget to check out Al’s review of pluto by MALIYA over at the Omunibasu Substack if you haven’t yet!
Happy Listening!