Nagisa Cosmetic -- Life Balance

 

I remember when Sanae Takaichi（高市早苗）first took the reins as Japan's first female prime minister and she exhorted she couldn't care less about work-life balance as it pertained to her. She said that she would be a machine and keep on working. For me, it's more about life balance since I'm basically semi-retired now. And for today, it's all about heat dissipation because for the first time this year, I'm baking again in my own juices since we've got a summery day out there.

Anyways, we've got cutesy-voiced Nagisa Cosmetic, aka former model-singer and current creative consultant Nagisa Ichikawa（市川渚）. When I was going through that eclectic compilation album "Contemode V.A. 2" and found acts such as spaghetti vabune! and Plus-Tech Squeeze Box, I also saw Nagisa Cosmetic in there, too, and I remember posting her first article almost a year ago.

Well, within "Contemode V.A. 2", she's contributed "Life Balance" which was also originally placed as a track on her lone 2004 album "NAGISA COSMETIC". Yasutaka Nakata（中田ヤスタカ）was once again behind words and music for the techno-Shibuya-kei-esque "Life Balance" and there's much about it that reminds me of Nakata's other project, capsule, when the duo was more into Shibuya-kei in their early days.

Nagisa Cosmetic -- Cosmetic Happy

 

As much as sound producer and songwriter Yasutaka Nakata（中田ヤスタカ）has been associated with Perfume and capsule, I only discovered just in the last few weeks that he also belonged to a very short-lived duo.

From what I've read on the Japanese Music Wiki, Nakata had seen model Nagisa Ichikawa（市川渚）in a fashion magazine and just decided then and there that he had to see whether they could collaborate on something musically. Ichikawa agreed and the result was the duo Nagisa Cosmetic with the one-and-done album "Nagisa Cosmetic" which was released in July 2004. 

The second track is "Cosmetic Happy", a light and bouncy techno-Shibuya-kei ditty with Ichikawa's frothy vocals making things even airier like the best soufflé. If it had anything to do with anime, then I could have heard it as an Akibshibu-kei tune. Once the album was released, Ichikawa decided to focus on her college studies and so Nagisa Cosmetic quietly ended its time in the recording booth.