Some
days ago, while I looked after some vaporwave songs, I came across an album
released by singer G.RINA in October
2015 called “Lotta Love”. The promotional song, “Ai no Maboroshi”, was far from a vaporwave song, but its slow and melancholic sound did more to me than any of the vaporwave songs I
was listening to at the time.
If there’s some type
of logical narrative in the video, I’m not smart enough to catch it. At the
beginning, it feels like the girl – portrayed by Ayako Sasaki, by the way – is a little bit lonely, as she’s doing
very daily things and constantly smoking (it seems like her only true hobby).
After a while, she gets together with another girl, who I don’t know if it’s a
friend, a sister or a lover. What I do know, however, is that our main girl
feels comfortable and happy around her. During
the final sequence, for example, when she’s smoking while the other girl is
sleeping next to her, it’s visible how warm their relationship is... and I can’t
help but feel warm inside as well.
About
the song, I may not like tofubeats’ mechanical
singing vocals very much, but his production (I just love the dreamy keyboards), alongside G.RINA’s fitting
vocals and the whole instrospective feeling, are what this song is all about. It’s the type of song that evokes a certain
feeling, and I think Ms. Ayako Sasaki’s performance in the video is
essential in order to the listener/viewer reach its climax.
In the end, song and
video are so complementary (at least
to me) that I was afraid of not liking the song very much without its
accompanying video. However, it seems I’ll be able to listen to it during my
constant travels. Like I said, it makes me feel warm inside.
Hi, Marcos.
ReplyDeleteYeah, the tofubeats' vocals sounded rather screechy through the Autotune but nothing wrong with G.Rina. She sounded like one of the singers who helped out with the R&B unit m-flo a decade or so ago.
Not sure if the director of the video was looking for a plot aside from pointing out that Ayako's life is literally a whole lot brighter when her significant other enters the picture. She just seems to mope around at home when she's not there but once she comes in, they go out to places like that onsen. Always nice to have a friend like that.
Now that you talked about... she would not be out of place in m-flo. G.RINA is not new in the industry, but I don't know if she worked with them in the past or not. As I recall, she likes to work with tofubeats since his indie days.
DeleteFriendship is a very touching topic, and this video is a nice way of portraying it. That's probably why I related so much with it.
As for Ayako, I searched for her in the net, but wasn't able to find any information. If only they listed her name using kanji, and not romaji...
Yeah, I had the same problem with tracking down Ayako Sasaki. When I looked her up on Yahoo in the Images section, I got a whole ton of different pictures...some which shouldn't be shown in public.:)
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