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A while back I was investigating Secondlife for what it had on offer in the way of music. Crap was what I found with very little success in the way of live performances. Everytime I attended an arranged performance it was always dogged with technical problems and never a good musical experience.
After attending a couple of lame concerts and witnessing bedroom songwriting at it's worst I gave up for a while.
Now I've come accross Chouchou. This is pretty much exactly what I was hoping to come accross in the SL community. An act which exists only within SL and the entire product, promo etc exists only in this user generated world. Take a look at one of their videos, 'shot' in secondlife (wonder what camera they used? :-)
I find some of the piano work on there a bit reminscent of Stan Tracey's Under Milk Wood in it's very minimalist yet quite progressive nature. Generally a quite emmersive sound, epic in scale but not overpowering with the various layers of reverbarating piano and processed digital hisses. (What?!?!?! I'll settle down in a min, bear with me)
I guess rather than seeing this as involving records/albums/units/whatever you want to call them, I think Chouchou's approach is more focused on how people consume and interact with their music. For me I find their videos and music all part and parcel of the same thing, like an AV art installation. I will get back onto the whole SL thing just to get a look at what they are doing on line.
Be sure to take a look at their blog and have a listen to their stuff. Possibly lacking a place in today's commercial music market but definitely good to listen to at the right moment. I'll be sticking some of this on my MP3 for those quiet moments when I need some musical mescaline. - Indieboy-Columbia/RCA Digital A&R
At least for now, Chouchou is the only group we know of that performs exclusively in Second Life. Singer Juliet Heberle collaborates online from the States with composer Arabesque Choche in Tokyo, and together they make elegant music that combines electronica, ambient classical, and Japanese pop.
One of the benefits of playing virtual shows is having their own custom-designed stage, a pretty fantastic piece of CG architecture called Islamey.
The first track on their self-titled album, coma, is a captivating mix of soft vocals and reverb-filled production, the kind of thing fit for a spacious, ornate opera house. One way that Japanese music often finds its way to audiences in Europe and the US is through video games, so it makes sense that this brings to mind some of the classic Square games of the '90s. (Remember the opera in the beginning of Parasite Eve? Anyone?)
Thus Second Life, besides being convenient for the geographically-separated musicians, is very much an appropriate venue for Chouchou's music. Who knows, maybe Amie Street will build a virtual street near Islamey! With tables and tiny pieces of merch! Oh, the possibilities are endless. - Amie Street
Discography
[Chouchou songs]
-eterna
-rafflesia
-heterotopia
-coma
-sign 0
-neverland
-City
-harunire
-B612
-indigo
-sign
-utakata
[Chouchou pianos]
-repose
-air
-cocoon
-none
-ABOVE
Photos
Bio
arabesque is half-Japanese and half-European and was born in Tokyo, Japan. He was grown up in Japan and Austria with classical music background. He was educated as a classical pianist, however, His passion is not only for classical music but also for all kinds of music genres, especially for electronic and ambient musics. And that led him to start to compose his unique style of music with beautiful melodious notes. Then his music was finally completed when he met juliet as a singer. She is Japanese and was born and grown up in Tokyo, but she also spent 10 years of her life in New York. Her pure vocal like a lonely little girl perfectly harmonizes with his music. They began to use SecondLife as a platform to express their new possibilities of music and world as Chouchou from July, 2007, and now Chouchou is one of the best and most famous one of a kind music group in SecondLife.
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