UPDATE (July 31, 2012): Posted some interesting items from the interview. More to come, hopefully.

Kanno and AKINO have a new interview regarding the music of Aquarion from Natalie.mu. Head on down if you can read Japanese. It’s very interesting so I might translate it, but it’s very long! It’s good stuff though so I’ll do my best

Here’s some interesting items from the interview:

1) Kanno was supposed to use AIKI for Aquarion. He was 13 at that time and would have been a good boy soprano, but at that time his voice was already starting to mature so bless4 was called in for an audition. That was where she decided to use AKINO instead because of her high voice. Not as a replacement, but to sing on a “different level”.

2) They talked about her odd Japanese accent since she was brought up in America, and spoke bilingually. After the first recording with her funny accent, her brother (AKASHI, also the leader of bless4) told Kanno that they’ll fix her Japanese before the next recording, to which Kanno told him not to correct it, to their surprise. She wanted the listeners to think of what the singer’s nationality is, and to show that it’s hard to sing in Japanese.

3) In one portion of the interview, the interviewer recalls the *awesome* Japanese catch phrases in the songs, like “ichi man nen to nisen nen mae kara aishiteru…” and also from the other songs, and comments on how even the Japanese people wonder what they mean. Kanno succinctly replies, “That’s a lot of kanji (haha)”. Ms. Kanno please don’t ever change.

4) When asked why the genre of the music sang by AKINO is mostly band-like [maybe in contrast to the rest of the music pieces], Kanno explained that Director Kawamori asked for something catchy, easy to deliver, easy to understand, and has some strange phrases in it. She thought she’d dress the songs down for the audience in order to do this. AKINO had a bit of a difficulty with rock though, since she came from a more gospel / dance background.

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