GARNiDELiA are a J-pop duo who launched their career on the Japanese video-sharing platform Nico Nico Douga and have since produced numerous songs tailored for animated works.
The male-female pair released their latest digital single called “Gen’ai Yuugi” on Sept. 30, created as the opener for the Japanese TV anime series My Master Has No Tail. The track, inspired by vintage Japanese pop and anime songs, breaks new ground for the unit that has produced signature tracks infused with traditional Japanese music-flavored melodies.
In a recent interview with Billboard Japan, MARiA and toku of GARNiDELiA spoke about the production of their latest single and shared their thoughts on the music that accompany animated works.
You recently launched an NFT art project using numerous stage costumes as motifs called the GARNiDELiA 3.0 Project. You always seem to be challenging yourselves to try new things. Could you tell us your thoughts on releasing this new NFT project based on your stage outfits at this point in time?
MARiA: We have many fans based outside of Japan so we’re often asked to take on new challenges on a global scale. We’re experimenting and challenging ourselves as we go along. We participated in its launch, but we’re also looking forward to seeing how the project will expand from here. I think there will be unexpected developments in the future that will make us go, “Oh, I didn’t expect this to go in that direction.” We think there are various ways to do this, so we’re still exploring and hope to make this something we can enjoy with all of our fans.
You also restarted your J-pop cover project, GARNiDELiA Cover Collection, in March.
MARiA: This project originally got started on YouTube due to the pandemic. It’s become something of a hobby of ours, so we enjoy doing it just for fun.
toku: The songs we cover are well-known, so I thought people would enjoy the difference after we infused them with some GARNiDELiA flair and presented them with MARiA’s vocals. The series allows us to see people’s reactions right away, like when we used to upload our songs to Nico Nico Douga and get a reaction immediately upon release.
MARiA: It’s really like those vocaloid cover challenges on video sharing platforms (that originated from Nico Nico Douga). We’re originally from that niche pop culture, so I guess it’s just that the focus has shifted from vocaloid numbers to J-pop songs. The boundary between vocaloid culture and mainstream J-pop is blurring now, and songs written by producers of vocaloid music are now leading the current mainstream J-pop scene. So a strange phenomenon where whenever I cover a hit J-pop song, I still end up singing vocaloid music (like in the old days) is happening. [Laughs] I think this mix of cultures is what makes the current J-pop scene so interesting.
“Kaikaikitan” Cover by GARNiDELiA from the GARNiDELiA Cover Collection
Let’s talk about your new song “Gen’ai Yuugi.” It contains elements of vintage and current J-pop while maintaining the feel of a standard anime number. The song is signature GARNiDELiA in the way various essences are condensed into it. This song was created as the opener for the TV anime My Master Has No Tail. How did the collaboration begin?
toku: The producers of the anime series said they wanted “a dance track with a traditional Japanese-style melody, and also add horns to make it flashy.”
MARiA: Our previous song, “Otome no kokoroe,” was the opener for another anime series from last year called Taisho Otome Fairy Tale that was set in Japan’s Taisho period (1912-1926), so that was the same (as My Master Has No Tail). What’s more, the request for horns for a big band feel was the same as our previous track, so we had to find a way to differentiate the two. So after some discussion, we came to the conclusion that we wanted “Gen’ai Yuugi” to have a glaring edge to the flamboyance.
What do you mean by “glaring edge”?
MARiA: My Master Has No Tail is a story about mastering an artistic skill, and although the visuals of the anime is pop, the characters say some edgy things about the world they live in. The story starts out with the idea that you have to be out of your mind to want to live in the arts, and I thought that applied to us (GARNiDELiA) too. [Laughs] As someone who has been in the arts for a long time, I felt a strong connection with (the anime), so in the end we were able to differentiate the new song from the previous one.
toku: My Master Has No Tail is about rakugo [traditional comic storytelling], so I thought it’d be good to pack words into it, with more notes in the chorus than our usual numbers. That way it’d sound more flamboyant when the horns were added in-between. That’s what I focused on.
Combined with the vision depicted in the lyrics, it makes for a thrilling track, while also tapping into the genres of vintage J-pop and oldies-but-goodies anime music. All that while maintaining your signature sound. So it’s really a perfect balance.
MARiA: We’re not sure how we’re giving off that GARNiDELiA vibe anymore, actually. [Laughs] We’ve worked on such a wide variety of genres at this point that everything we create together just ends up like, “Well, that sure sounds like us, doesn’t it?”
toku: Anime music itself is a mixture of various genres and it’s where lots of music that will become the cutting edge of contemporary J-pop is born.
MARiA: It has rock and EDM and even vintage J-pop styles, too.
toku: Anything is possible, and it can be taken as cute or cool depending on the listener, so I guess anything goes so long as it’s effectively linked to the anime work. I feel that people who listen to a variety of anime songs are really in tune with things. That’s one of the things that makes us nervous every time we write a song.
And you’re already set to drop your next digital single called “Oukaranman” on Oct. 19. This is the latest song from your Odocchattemita dance challenge series featuring GARNiDELiA tracks, and it’s different from “Gen’ai Yuugi” in that it’s a pretty straightforward GARNiDELiA number that mixes modern EDM tracks with traditional Japanese music.
MARiA: Miume, the dancer we were working with on the Odocchattemita series, is retiring from the stage at the end of October. This will be the last piece the three of us will work on together, so we started out by discussing what kind of piece it should be. We wanted the song to be a culmination of what we’d built together.
toku: I included a little bit of the melodies and arrangements that give a glimpse of parts of each song in the dance challenge series so far, so it’d be great if listeners take it as a summary of the series.
It’s an irresistible tune for those who enjoyed the series. You really did come up with two completely different songs.
MARiA: It’s interesting, isn’t it? We have so much fun. Both titles are inspired by Japanese four-character idioms, and from the time we wrote the song “Kyoukiranbu,” we thought we’d run out of songs flavored with traditionally Japanese sounds that have four-character idiom-like titles. But we still managed to make a few. [Laughs] Since we’re fortunate that our fans, not only from Japan but from around the world, ask for more, we can’t just say we’ve run out and have to come up with what they want.
toku: I was thrilled when the song that’s an extension of the Odocchatta series was chosen as the opener for My Master Has No Tail.
MARiA: That is how big an impact the Odocchattemita series had on us. It’s a project that changed our lives. It helped us meet lots of people and gave us opportunities. I think it was reason why we were able to create the song “Oukaranman.”
GARNiDELiA’s catalog can be heard here.
—This interview by Tomokazu Nishibiro first appeared on Billboard Japan
