Well, I'm back from Nagoya and Animericana. First of all, thanks for all the encouraging comments. The event was a big success and my sets went quite well! Despite being a predominantly anime-related event with people who weren't nearly as familiar with game music as perhaps we fans are, everyone really got into the music. People were dancing and raving and I even got a big cheer at the end. Probably didn't hurt that I was going crazy up on stage myself the whole time while DJing.
Here is a snippet of a description of the event I wrote that I sent out to some people in Japan, just to give some background about the event:
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On Saturday, March 28th, myself and 5 other people will be hosting an international fandom event at a club in Nagoya called, "Animericana." This event, conceived by my friend ogin, who is deeply involved in the anime club scene in Nagoya, will be a first time for Nagoya, and perhaps Japan. With sort of an "East meets West" theme, we've assembled three DJs from both sides of the globe: Ogin, myself, and our friend Mil from the States, and three DJs highly active in the nerdcore scene in Japan. Both sides and each DJ will be bringing their own special flavor to the table to give the crowd an experience they've hopefully never heard before.
As such, unlike your average anime club party in Japan, at Animericana you're likely to hear popular American cartoon and show themes (G.I. Joe, Duck Tales, Thundercats, anyone?) and English versions and remixes of Japanese anime songs. This will be Ogin's specialty for the night. Mil will be playing some hip hop and techno mixes inspired from anime and game music. The Japanese DJs will of course, be doing their hyper anime/idol/j-pop thing.
My area of expertise, as some of you may know, is game music. As such, I will be bringing an extended, 100% game music set to the table. When game music appears at these kinds of events, it's usually just a song or two thrown in here and there, taken mainly from vocal themes or popular RPGs. Then there is of course the hardcore chiptune scene, which focuses on remixing and composing chiptunes, however no one seems to have tapped into the pure game music scene yet. As such, it is my goal to let people hear and experience game music in a way they've never heard or thought of before - one that you can actually get down and move your body to. I'll be including raw and arranged game music, both new and old, as well as some chip themes that I've slightly remixed and upgraded myself. You can expect to hear anything from Mega Man, Contra, and Street Fighter, to Jet Set Radio and Sonic Rush. Since it's a cartooned themed event, I'm also going to throw in some X-Men, The Simpsons, and TMNT arcade music. [edit: I ended up cutting this unfortunately. ]
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I did two sets: one 45-minute set at midnight, and another 30-minute set at 4:00AM. Man, it was a completely intense experience. Just being able to hear VGM that loud in a club was awesome, not to mention having a bunch of people getting into it as well and feeding off your energy. My opening Rockman set got a good reaction, since the music is pretty familiar to everyone, and the chip medley I remixed hit some nostalgic cords with the people I think. Cheers errupted when several songs came on, and one guy actually came up to me after my set and said, "Dude! You're my hero for putting a Phantasy Star IV song in there!" And one Japanese guy straight up started breakdancing during the TMNT OCR remix that I played toward the end. It was pretty funny, and awesome. With my last set being at 4:00AM, the number of people and energy was at a bit of a low, but the diehards still got into it. I don't think many people recognized the music from my second set. It was probably the least "game-like" sounding music out of everything, even though ironically, it was entirely raw VGM, unlike the 45-minute set that contained a lot of remixes and arrangements.
To answer your question Adam, all my mixing was done 100% with a program called Virtual DJ, which I ran from my laptop in congruence with the club's mixer controller. I'm familiar with how CDJs work, but I have yet to practice extensively with them and think I may prefer the visual precision and cue points that software offers. Of course, I'm just getting into this, so it's not like I was going to shell out any major dough on any hardware. But if things keep up, I may have to upgrade my gear. As you may notice from listening, I edited a lot of the original tracks to my liking and cut out some parts to make for a better flow overall. Some I even changed quite drastically. I tried to focus on energy, familiarity, and connective flow when putting together these sets. Balancing everything together turned out to be quite the task.
That said, I've made a recording of my sets from Animericana for anyone who wants to hear: http://www.sendspace.com/file/fc5x02
I know they're long, but it's better to listen to them straight through rather than skip around. Naturally, I'm a little curious to hear what people think. Yoroshiku!
- Justin Pfeiffer