じ――ンಠ_ಠ。。。

First off, sorry for neglecting this blog for some time. The season of examinations flourishes in my school halls, so there hasn’t been much time to spend on my other interests. (Who am I kidding, I’m such a procastinator.)

Anyway, I’ve talked a lot about the Kumikyoku phenomenon on this site, and really, I’ve seem to become a nicochan since. I’ve also mentioned other versions previously on this blog, but I’d like to say that they actually weren’t related other than the fact that they are song medleys. Today I’m going to talk a little bit about the “official” Kumikyoku series, if you can call it official.

Much to my chagrin, I’ve learnt that the 10-minute medley we’ve all come to know and love is actually the 2nd installation of this Kumikyoku series. The first one is called ニコニコ動画中毒の方へ贈る一曲 (Nico Nico Douga Chudoku no Hou e Okuru Ichikyoku), which premiered on June 5th (hey, my birthday) of last year. It runs at about 5 minutes and is a pretty basic medley of popular songs in the anime community–such as Let’s Go! Omyouji, Maria Stole the Precious Thing, etc. Despite being the first in the series, it never made it big. You can say this was sort of a warm up for the next medley. Below is a YouTube upload of the song (seems to be the only upload of it, actually).

Which leads to the 2nd medley in the series, 組曲『ニコニコ動画』 (Kumikyoku Nico Nico Douga). Not long after the test mix, Kumikyoku aired on June 23rd, leading up to its Nico Singer revolution. It’s still the most viewed medley of the family today, at nearly 3.7 million views and counting; I’d say one of the most viewed videos on Nico in general. Some might say it was the theme song for the Nico site. I think what made this song a hit is the community involvement. Kind of like what YouTube had with the Youtube Stars boom, Kumikyoku created household names in the Nico Singer community, like J, Re:, nayuta, and so on. If there’s anything that helped make Nico Nico Douga so popular, it would be this song.

The 3rd one is called ニコニコ動画物語.wav (Nico Nico Douga Monogatari). At 25 minutes, it’s the longest out of all the medleys, and probably the longest one we ever hope to be. The song starts off a bit slow, a kind of tune that would lull you to sleep, but eventually picks up. The song features many chaos moments, meaning clips where two or more songs are mashed together. Probably because of it’s massive length, the song didn’t become very popular either, but it still sounds a lot better than the first one, that’s for sure.

The 4th and latest one is called ニコニコ動画流星群 (Nico Nico Douga Ryuuseigun), which came out April 11th. Shimo really got it this time around. Lately, Ryuuseigun has gotten pretty popular around the Nico-sphere and I’m not surprised. It has just about every Nico meme (before April), with the right mix of catchy songs and the right length for each song. There are both upbeat parts and soothing parts, and we can’t go wrong with some chaos (God knows + JOINT = epic). I’ve also noticed a lot more new Nico Singers have emerged since Kumikyoku through this song–one of my new favorites is Hong Ko~ng.

[Part 2]

If you want to see any of these on Nico, you can check out Shimo’s mylist (the creator of the series): http://www.nicovideo.jp/mylist/1535765

Be sure to look out for the 5th installment(?).