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destination-of-fate · 7 years ago

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(English) Mafumafu’s interview with Natalie Music (October 18th, 2017)

Original article here.

Mafumafu gave a very interesting interview to the music website Natalie to celebrate the release of his new CD! He spoke about the meaning behind his new songs, his future plans as both a solo artist and a member of After the Rain, and gave a bit more explanation about a new organization he is trying to form for online musicians and singers. Please let me know if you spot any typos or errors, and enjoy the interview~! :D

Mafumafu has released his solo album titled “Ashitairo World End.”

Mafumafu began his career as a video uploader who posted under the “I tried singing ___” category on video sites such as Niconico Douga. He now works as a member of After the Rain in addition to writing theme songs for anime series, gaining popularity as both a vocalist and a creator. To celebrate the release of “Ashitairo World End,” Natalie conducted a solo interview with Mafumafu. As he reflected on his increasingly high profile from many events over the last year, we inquired about the life of this unique creator and self-styled “jack of all trades.”

This year, I get the impression that many new people have taken notice of you, due to all the news about your various promotional songs and contributions to albums.

My work schedule has practically exploded with busyness compared to how it was last year, but I’m thankful for that.

At the start of the year you carried out your first solo concerts via tour. You’ve participated in many events and held large-scale concerts as After the Rain too. I was surprised that these were your first solo concerts.

The truth is that until now, I’d always avoided doing solo concerts. I’m first and foremost a video uploader, so I believed that my music was complete when I used videos to put a song and an image together for an audience. That’s why I didn’t have much interest in performing on stage. But that just sounded like an excuse so that I didn’t have to do concerts, and that’s when I had a sudden realization. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve believed that “growth” is when a person learns something they never knew before, or when they become able to do something they were unable to do before. I still feel that my music is complete when it’s in video form, but when I thought that having solo concerts might allow me to grow, I decided to give it a try.

Having completed your solo concerts, do you feel like you’ve experienced any personal change or growth?

Yes, I do. I always felt that “completed music” was something that could only be achieved in recorded form. But then I realized that “completed music” could take a different form in a place like a concert hall. Since you can’t re-do a concert, you might end up making mistakes, but I still felt like concerts have their own benefits to them too. Although with one concert you can reach a few thousand people, and with a tour you can make your music heard by tens of thousands of them. If I use videos, I get hundreds of thousands of views, which means more people will hear my songs, and videos don’t require money to listen to the music. That’s the kind of thing I was thinking about. I felt that my main method of work really is through videos.

Outside of the anime theme songs you’ve performed as After the Rain, you’ve also had more opportunities to provide songs for series like “Gamers!” and the second season of “Osomatsu-san.” I feel like you’ve been able to stand in the spotlight more as Mafumafu the composer.

It’s an honor to be recognized as a composer. It’s true that now I’m approached with more offers to write songs for other performers than I was in the past, but I don’t let it get to my head, and I think of it as studying that I do every day.

Another big piece of news was the song you wrote for Kudo Shizuka-san. It was an unexpected combination that surprised a lot of people. Can you tell us the story behind that?

She had apparently been listening to my songs before that point, and one day I suddenly received the message, “Kudo Shizuka-san has asked you to write a song for her.” I was like, “Are you sure it’s me she asked for?”

You wrote the song “Kinki to Tsukiakari” for her. How did Kudo-san respond to the song?

She really liked it, and told me, “I’m glad I requested a song from you. Thank you.” I responded like, “No, thank you.” It was a valuable experience that I was able to have.

Last May you organized the event “Hikikomori Demo Fest ga Shitai!” on the large stage at Saitama Super Arena. This caught the eye of many people with other performers in addition to yourself, such as Amatsuki-san, the UraShimaSakataSen members, “XYZ Tour” performers, and more.

Before then, there had never been an opportunity where internet artists like ourselves can stand on a big stage like that and just do whatever we want. I feel like one of my current roles is to plan things that haven’t been able to be done before, or step a bit into new territory. To change the subject a little, over these last 3 years, there have been many people in this field of work who have run into work-related trouble, or been victims of fraud. For example, most utaite and Vocaloid producers do not belong to a big company, and there are also some people who have been victims that were mistaken in choosing the company that they did. I’ve been experimenting to see if I can create an organization that provides an environment for these people that makes it easy for them to work in until they can find their next company to join. As I was considering that, I saw the sold-out arena during “Hikifest” and became confident that I needed to make an environment for video uploaders that’s easier for them to work in, so that more opportunities like Hikifest were able to occur.

I’d like to hear about your album “Ashitairo World End” as well. After receiving the album, I was surprised to see that there were 16 tracks, and most of them were new songs for the album. It’s a lot, isn’t it (laughs). But I felt like I absolutely had to include 16 songs on this album. First of all, After the Rain’s album “Clock Crest Story” contained 16 songs. I felt like I couldn’t have any less than that. Also, when I counted up everything I wanted to do, I ended up needing about 16 songs for all of that. What do you mean by “what you wanted to do”? ”Rinne Tensei” is a song with a synthesizer sound that uses a four-on-the-floor rhythm pattern (T/N: This is a term for a song where the bass drum is hit once per beat in 4/4 time), “Suisai Ginga no Chronicle” is a melodious song in triple meter that gives you sort of a floating feeling, “Futari Bocchi” is a mid-tempo, slightly decadent kind of song, “Fury” is an eccentric song like I’ve never made before, and “Shuuten” is a song I’ve wanted to make for a long time now… When I counted up everything like that, I needed 16 songs. I’ve always planned to make an album called “Ashitairo World End.” But my last album “Yamiiro Night Parade” (released April 2015) ended up having quite a long break before I made this one, and that was because I personally felt like there were too many things I was unfamiliar with when it came to music, and I thought that I needed to grow more before I could release “Ashitairo World End.” Why did you decide on a title first? Ever since I was young, I would genuinely ask my teachers and adults around me questions like, “What would tomorrow be like if I died?” and, “What happens to people when they die?” No one really spoke seriously to me, and my teachers got mad at me. I’ve lived up to today with those strange, mysterious things on my mind. The album “Ashitairo World End” (T/N: “Tomorrow-Colored World End”) was built with the themes of “What if tomorrow has no color?” and “What if there was no future?” After deciding on the title, what was the first song you wrote? The first song I wrote for the album was “Rinne Tensei.” To loosely summarize this song, the lyrics mean like, “It’s time to say goodbye to this worthless life.” Within the lyrics, there’s actually two points of view from people. One is a person harboring hope for the next world, and one is me as a human reincarnating as the character with the name Mafumafu. I wanted to express how the world was still worthless in the end even after reincarnating. I feel like your lyrics often contain nuances of “rejecting the real world,” not just within “Rinne Tensei.” Rather than writing songs for my listeners, I always just write them for myself. That is to say, I’m not someone who is very good at speaking, nor do I have a personality that makes it easy to come to mutual understandings with people, but I use the method of “writing lyrics and turning them into songs” as a way to convey things. It’s a one-way means of communication, but it works perfectly for me. The lyrics I come up with do have meaning to them, but I leave individual interpretation up to each listener themselves, and I don’t think that I need to consider how people will react to my songs. I believe that I just need to make them say what I want to say. You also write music and lyrics for After the Rain. How do you mentally separate your unit works from your solo works? After the Rain is comprised of Soraru-san and myself, and I think it’s something that wouldn’t work without both of us there. That’s why the songs have to be suitable, as things that Soraru-san and I will share together. That’s how I see it, which is why I feel quite a sense of responsibility when I write After the Rain songs (laughs). I study music everyday, and carefully focus my energy on my work. With all that, everything I’ve worked on comes back to me when I make something as a solo artist, and not to say I don’t focus on this work, of course, but I feel like I can express my thoughts and the kind of music I want to make without changing anything. You said earlier that “Shuuten” (T/N: “Last Stop”) was a song you’d always wanted to write. Does that mean you’d planned to end the album “Ashitairo World End” with “Shuuten” from the start? I’d wanted to write a song called “Shuuten” for a while now, and I actually wasn’t sure if “Shuuten” should be the final song, or another song I wrote called “World End” should be at the end. “World End” is a faster tempo song than “Shuuten,” and I wrote about “hope” in a way that was pretty easy to understand. But “Shuuten” became something I agreed with more, so I used that one. ”Shuuten” is the answer to the question “What happens to people when they die?” that you mentioned earlier. That makes it a song that expresses your views on life and death, correct? That’s right. Humans have to let go of everything when they die, and they surely forget that they are themselves as well. I wanted to write about how that’s all that happens. It’s not just a pessimistic view though, and I think you can also see it in the positive way of people breaking free from everything that ties them down. No matter how nice you try to make things look, no matter how unfair the things you did to make money were, no matter how wonderfully you saved many people for a just cause, in the end, everyone arrives at that same “last stop.” If people listened to this song and thought about that “last stop” just a little bit, then maybe things like judging and blaming other people, or trying to obtain things even through unfair means, maybe things like that wouldn’t matter anymore. I wanted them to relax a bit, and to convey that there are many different points of view in life. In the Limited Edition A version of your album is a DVD called “Mafumafu’s Solo Journey ~Aimlessly Going to a Hot Springs Town~” Can you tell us what kind of video this is? It’s really just a live-action video of me going to a hot spring (laughs). I went to a hot springs town called Ikaho, which is in Gunma, and was honored to have the voice actor Uchiyama Kouki-san do the narration. His lines are dubbed in as someone I talk to in the DVD, and what was just footage of me walking around was made into a proper “travel show” kind of video. I also had a specific request about this video being part of Limited Edition A. What was the request? I feel like it’s normal for things like music videos and concert footage to go as a DVD with version A, and then version B has some kind of sub-content with it, but I wanted to try reversing that. My A version is the travel video, and the B version is the MV and concert video. If my album managed to make it to the top of the rankings and the description for Limited Edition A is given, the DVD content will say, “Mafumafu’s Solo Journey ~Aimlessly Going to a Hot Springs Town~,” right? I thought it’d be funny if people saw that and thought, “Eh, what the heck is that?” (laughs). Finally, I’d like to ask you what you’d like to achieve both as a member of After the Rain, and as the solo artist Mafumafu. More than just joining together with someone, I want to always be creating new “chemical reactions.” If one plus one is going to equal two, there’s no point in adding them, since the result will end exactly where it’s hypothesized to be. I want to accomplish things that the two of us couldn’t do without being together. I want to walk 3 more steps further than everyone else into new territory. To say something a bit more ridiculous, I’d like to create a “movement.” I feel like you’ve already created one. I feel like working as After the Rain allows us to walk on a path that we never had before. Like how you would walk on a sidewalk if it’s there, I think everyone walks on a path that someone else built first. But you might actually find a shortcut if you cut through the forest on the side, or a new world like nothing you’ve ever found before might be out there somewhere. That’s why we will keep challenging ourselves to new things, and hope that the people who see that also begin to challenge themselves to new things as well. There are many dreams I want to accomplish as an individual as well. I want to accomplish them all before I die. I think that humans will soon be able to obtain eternal life too. What I want to accomplish as an artist is to complete all the music that I want to make. There’s no point in making music if I run out of things I want to say or create, so I think I’d stop there, but there’s so much music that I do want to make that hundreds of years wouldn’t be enough time for me to do it all, so I don’t think I’ll stop. You’re a vocalist, composer, and performer. It feels like you’ll never run out of things you want to do. I’m a “jack of all trades,” so I want to do everything that people would never predict of me.

#translation #utaite #mafumafu #ashitairo world end

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