>>1285 Haha, haven't been by in a while...It sounds interesting. No details yet on what it's about?

Marty Friedman was recruited as guitarist, Sascha is the narrator.

@PD All we know now is that it's about some forest which leads from middle ages to modern ages.

Translation of the snippet on the site:

This new story is set in a gloomy German forest which leads from the middle ages to near modern times.
A village where everyone disappeared.
And, Id who calls out to humans.

-Fairytales always begin in the grave...-

ttp://www.kingrecords.co.jp/soundhorizon/exceptional/

Is 'Id' supposed to be a person, because that's kinda the vibe I'm getting here.

>>1287 Ooh, thanks for the info. ^^

>>1289 I read somewhere that 'Id' is Latin for some sort of consciousness, a psychic vibe.
Of course, knowing Sound Horizon, they'll probably turn it 360 degrees to awesome. =D

@Anosan

Id is the black haired + pale highlights person here: http://soundhorizon.com/information/index.html#100525

Single is leaked on the chinese SH forums.

Thoughts, anyone? I seem to be missing the lyrics for the first song in the booklet or something....

But man, I'm already loving Id just from his few lines of dialogue. Is Revo using Miku as Elise's singing voice? That's sort of...interesting.

>>1292
Do you have a link?
If what you say is confirmed and revo indeed uses Miku I'm giving up on the band.

http://www.mediafire.com/?jfj1izfztmr

The mike thing was confirmed way back when the preview first came out. I'm not too big of a fan of mike myself, but isn't giving up on the band an overreaction? Revo uses it for like what...four lines of melody?

Lol auto spellcheck fail.

Replace all mikes with miku.

the meaning of"ID"
1.a name
confirm,on vocal list,there's a name "Idofried"
also on Revo's website mentioned before,a character Id ,a navigator
2.In Jap,Id means water well
confirm,
3.a psychic vibe of psychoanalysis of Freud
It means the instinct or desire of human

>>1294
I dislike Miku with a passion and think Revo is either too lazy or spent too much money on the "new people", but he could have used any of the old staff. There's ZERO justification for using Miku on a serious project like this.

I also watched the PV and I must say I was horrified by it. What the fuck Revo? WHAT THE FUCK? Please tell me it was your records company who made you do that. The scenery and the concept were nice, but revo looked like some trash dir en kei (or whatever that musical genre is called)groupie.

I didn't like Roman much, Moira made me fear for the band and this single's first song made me lose all hope (the other 2 are pretty good actually).

Yes, call it overreacting if you want, it's how i sincerely feel.

>>1298
DO U REALLY A SH FAN?
just watch all their PV in the past.
most of them are not good,PV is the weak pt. of SH.I think it's difficult to make their PV.

then,many fans dislike for Revo using miku.
But there are also many fans agree it's a good use after listening,For miku play a role as a doll.

finally, Revo said before:
the member may change,
The SH may not be the SH before,

Not a Miku fan either, but I think you should look it at Revo having some fun and trying something new. Sanhora after Aramary is after all purely his personal project. (Heck, I just noticed Jimang is not on this CD. That's the first time since Chronicle!)

So, anyway, does MIKI or Joelle sing Kono Semai Torikago no Naka de? Joelle, right? She's awesome, has this warm tinge to her voice. I'm already looking forward to the live performance.

Story looks interesting, but as usual, it's hard to make any sense of it before someone does the hard work and transcribes all the spoken lines etc. And, as usual, it's so fun to pick up the little things that may or may not be callbacks to past works, but looks like these are few this time. Only thing I can think as of now is Yield - the narrator mentions Therese as being both sister and mother to Marz, which would make him the fruit of an incestuous relationship between Therese and her father, which is pretty much the story of Yield. Also, there are phrasing parallels between the last lines of Semai Torikago and the refrain of Yield:
傷を舐め合っただけの幼い恋だと、キミは笑うだろうか？(will you laugh it off as puppy love, just licking each others' wounds?)
不毛な恋と　君は笑うだろうか？ (will you laugh it off as fruitless love?)

Anyway, anyone willing to do a character lowdown? Who was Elise again...?

Elise was presumably the doll Elisabeth gave to Maerz during their last meeting.

The storyline in this prologue maxi is surprisingly easy to understand by SH standards, imo. But then again, it's only a prologue to something much greater.

>>1299
I am a fan of sound horizon's music, not an hypocrite groupie. I won't go all "OH HEIKA YOU SO GENIUS XD!!" because that looks and reads ridiculous.

Read my post again, I wasn't criticizing the PV's quality (I actually said it looked pretty good) I was horrified because of how revo looked like some generic visual kei retard.

Miku can't play a good role as anything because she isn't a singer, she's just a piece of shitty software that sounds like crap. call it experimenting if you like, I call it either lazyness or lack of budget to hire a real person to play the role of the doll.

>>1302
I disagree with you saying that Miku can't play a good role as anything; have you ever listened to a proper Vocaloid song?

>>1303

> have you ever listened to a proper Vocaloid song?

I can't hear what doesn't exist, bro.

HEILIGE SCHEIßE!

GERÄUSCH HORIZONT BENUTZT NAZISPRECH! FICK, DAS KLINGT SOGAR NACH NAZISPRECH MIT HALBWEGS ORRRRRDENTLICHER AUSSPRACHE. Jedenfalls klang das sicher um einiges besser als die Froschfressersprache die in Roman gesprochen wurde.

Kraut here guys. hearing DEUTSCH in a SH single sounds quite disturbing for me, even more with a quite proper pronounciation.

To vocaloids: there are some nice proects with them, but I don´t think any vocaloid should be emplyed in SH. The best cast still sould be Aramary in my opinion. But it seems there was some severe war between her and revo, so she still isn´t back.

Apparently the war wasn't between Aramary and Revo as much as it was between Aramary and the rest of the band. I loved Aramary's work in Elysion, but if SH still consisted of her only then we wouldn't be able to expect fantastic concerts.:/

I do agree with the anti-Miku anon on a few points though. To me, Miku has always been a sort of 'placeholder' program mainly used by aspiring doujin artists for their compositions cause most of them can't afford to hire real singers, and I always download real singer covers of vocaloid songs if I like them. So Revo using it in this CD was quite jarring for me, but luckily it wasn't all over the place.

I'm willing to bet that Revo's reasoning behind using Miku boils down to "it seemed like a good idea at the time." I don't condone cheapness or laziness, so I don't forgive him for it, but I'm not going to give up on the band just yet. I'll at least wait for the full album before making any judgments. Most of the band was missing from this CD, anyways.

Apparently young Maerz's voice in track 3 was made by an in-development vocaloid.

I'm sort of impressed. I totally thought that it was just a young boy singer.

I think the concept is neat so far. I couldn't care less what Revo wears. I also think the miku is a nice touch as she is playing a doll. He obviously has people who could sing instead so it's idiotic to say it's laziness. Just part of the vision, like it or not.

Differences between limited and normal edition:

• The bonus track in the normal edition is longer (3:13) than in the limited version (2:15)
• Revo is credited as Marchen von Friedhof in the limited edition and Idolfried Ehrenberg in the normal one. Looks like this isn't true for all copies, though.

May be more. Also, so lines are only hearable in Surround Audio. Heika, what are you planning this time...

Revo seems to be pretty sick of fags telling him to "make songs like that one again!" or "use [insert name of singer here] more!", so I'm kind of thinking we'll get a completely new cast soon.
Seems like people are forgetting that Revo is the only actual member of this band. Still he's in his mid-thirties now, I really wish he'd stop cosplaying.

Also, if he used Miku out of laziness I really doubt he'd get Miku's actual voice provider to do her speaking lines.

>>1334
That's close minded, thinking that someone his age shouldn't cosplay. Everyone should cosplay if they want, regardless of age.

Question~ what time period do these three songs take place in? I'm getting a lot of mixed messages on the history of the story from looking at the art and stuff. So I did some research and now I'm more confused.

The last outbreak of the Black Plague in Germany took place in the mid-1600s. Germany was still notorious for witch-burning during that era, so it's plausible that it takes place then, buuuut I'm going to nitpick because I'm a huge fashion history geek.

Maerz's collar and breeches are early to mid 1600s style, but loose sleeves and boots were also the style in the early 1600s. Maerz's upturned sleeves and his shoes are the style of the latter half of that century.

Elisabeth's dress doesn't fit either way. It would look like this picture if it was from the same century as Maerz's clothes. In that era, women wore big poofy sleeves and dropped shoulders. Elisabeth's dress is obviously Victorian in style, and from the silhouette shape I would place it in the late 1860s. The bodice is more 1870s style, though. Her hair really doesn't fit anywhere.

Aaaand don't even get me started on interior design :)

I know that no one's as big a geek about this stuff as me, but I'm honestly confused. Wasn't this supposed to start in medieval times? Any way I look at it, the earliest this could be is still post-Renaissance. And then there's lots of anachronisms that are probably just a result of artistic license.

I think how he used Miku was perfectly alright. Miku was used to voice/sing for a creepy ass doll character. And 'Miku' pulls off the creepy doll voice pretty damn well considering what she is.

>>1346

I don't think they even wanted to achieve historical accuracy. In fact, from what the lyrics say (Black Death, Wise Women, Witch burnings..) it could have taken place anywhere between XIV and late XVII centuries.

So my guess is that, both visually and historically, all they wanted to achieve was giving the watcher/listener a "geman-like" feeling.

>>1346

The names of Marz von Ludowing and Elizabeth von Wettin are a something of a hint; real-life Thuringia was ruled by the Ludowingian line until their extinction in 1247, after which they were succeeded by the Wettin dynasty.

Agh, I dunno. Doesn't help that Therese's genealogical tree resembles a lawn trellis, but I like to think Therese's father didn't have any more children but her and that she and Marz ended the Ludowingian line (adds a nice angle to the Elisabeth/Marz relationship) but doesn't really solve anything timeline-wise. Anyway, I'm of the view that the Black Death outbreak mentioned in Hikari to Yami no Douwa is the most well-known one from 1348 (mostly Elise's lines that could be interpreted as being about overpopulation) and that Therese and Marz came to the village well after it became deserted. (Again, Elise's lines sorta sound like that to me, plus if you were on the run from the Landgraaf, what's a better hiding place than an once-village ravaged by the plague in the middle of the forest?)

Okay, I know, I'm not helping. Most I can tell you that the story is definitely long over by the time of the Brothers Grimm, so yeah, anywhere from the XIVth to XVIth century.

>>1333

It looks like Idofried Ehrenburg was a mistake, according to the official site.

But who knows, it could be meaningful.

Also, I've always assumed the man with Elise to be Id(supported by the portrait titles on the official site)...but apparently from the lives Elise calls him "Merumeru", which could be the cutesy variation of "Maerchen(meruhien)", which seems to be what most of the Japanese fandom refers to him as. I'm...confused.:/

Therese was called "Thuringian witch", and Ehrenberg (Idolfried's last name) is, "accidentally", the name of a town near Thuringian forest. All that I can assume from those real-life details is, Thuringian forest was the place where the story took place, and townspeople in Ehrenberg were also those who accused Therese of being a witch and burned her at the stake.

Marchen von Friedhof means "fairytale from graveyard", so that name may just indicate the story, not truly... a name of a person. IMO, "Meru" (Mär) is more like the cute form of März, Therese also called her son "Meru". To make it short, März → Ido, while "Märchen (...)" is telling us an fairytale from the past (prologue) to introduce the character Ido, and the new album will be the real beginning of Ido's story.

>>1355

Therese was called "Thuringian witch", and Ehrenberg (Idolfried's last name) is, "accidentally", the name of a town near Thuringian forest. All that I can assume from those real-life details is, Thuringian forest was the place where the story took place, and townspeople in Ehrenberg were also those who accused Therese of being a witch and burned her at the stake.

Marchen von Friedhof means "fairytale from graveyard", so that name may just indicate the story, not truly... a name of a person. IMO, "Meru" (Mär) is more like the cute form of März, Therese also called her son "Meru". To make it short, März → Ido, while "Märchen (...)" is telling us an fairytale from the past (prologue) to introduce the character Ido, and the new album will be the real beginning of Ido's story... That's what I think :/

The thing is, Revo never credited himself with anything other than the name of the character(Hiver Laurant in Roman, Elefseus in Moira, Shaytan in Iberia), so I think it could be reasonable to assume Maerchen von Friedhof is the character he's playing in Idoido. It's also possible that he was named similarly to Maerz since they're the same person...if you buy into that theory.

idk, I'm probably going with Maerchen for now since that's what 90% of the Japanese fandom calls him...the other 10% seems to stick with Id, but that option seems less and less likely...unless he likes referring to himself in third person.

The casting in Revo's recent birthday concert is quite hilarious. They can't get all the Moira cast back, so they had Jimang as Leontius(with a shovel to boot) and Ike as Orpheus of all things.