reset/fripSide -- escape ver. 2001

This song has been a fairly often played tune during my anime buddy's anison hour. And since "escape ver. 2001" by the duo reset reminded me a lot of the Tetsuya Komuro（小室哲哉）dance pop that was racing around Japanese pop culture like wildfire in the 1990s, I decided to do a bit of research.

In fact, I would say that "escape ver. 2001" strikes me as being rather reminiscent of early Namie Amuro（安室奈美恵）and trf. But indeed as the title says, the duo released the song as one of the tracks on their debut album, cheekily titled "THE VERY BEST OF RESET", which was released in January 2002. As for reset, the duo consisted of vocalist YUMI and songwriter/musician Tatsuo Kimura, and they released three albums between 2002 and 2004. Kimura wrote and composed "escape" with satsuki also working on the lyrics.

From the information that pops up on my buddy's computer screen whenever a song is playing, I knew that "escape ver. 2001" had been a theme song for some computer game. That game, "Shirotsume Souwa ~ Episode of the Clovers"（白詰草話）would come out in its initial limited version later in July 2002 with the general release in October. Little did I know that the game was some sort of eroge restricted to those aged 18 and over with some pretty big seiyuu names like Ayako Kawasumi（川澄綾子）, Aya Hisakawa（久川綾）and Hiroshi Kamiya（神谷浩史）.

fripSide is another pop duo that got its start soon after reset in 2002, and I think KKP contributor Joana Bernardo may have mentioned them in her own Twitter feed. When I was looking up the original "escape" by reset, I discovered that fripSide had done a slightly more techno cover of the song, so I'm including the video here.

"escape ver. 2008" was a track on fripSide's 5th album from September 2008, "split tears" which was also their first album under a major label. Their first four releases were self-produced. At that time, fripSide consisted of musician/songwriter Satoshi Yaginuma（八木沼悟志）and vocalist/lyricist nao. From 2009, though, nao left fripSide and singer/seiyuu Yoshino Nanjo（南條愛乃）took her place. Nanjo also happened to be one of the main cast of one of my favourite anime, "Joshiraku"（じょしらく）, the bespectacled rakugo storyteller Gankyō Kūrubiyūtei（空琉美遊亭丸京）.