Aquasphere Plaza theme music

I ordered Tomita's Tokyo Disney Sea Aquasphere theme music on 6/3 and
received it today from www.yesasia.com via web order and shipped by
regular post. They gave me estimates via e-mail of the time of arrival
and they wound up exactly on their max estimates. While their office was
on the west coast the CD package was postmarked 6/10 in Hong Kong.

No problems with yesasia, I just thought I'd throw in the details. I was
wondering why they only carried this Tomita release. At first I thought
it was the Disney connection, but then I was remembering that they are
definitely a pop idol and sort of glamorous music specialist. The clear
connection is the Walt Disney Records label its on is distributed by
Avex, who made themselves from nothing into a major label status
providing the trendy club music 19 year old japanese women wanted.
Anyway now that premium mobile phone service is eating into that market
Avex seems to be diversifying all over.

OK the cat # is AVCW 12269, its 2000 yen (so there was a pretty good
yesasia markup though not the worst I've seen)
Tomita's name is only in small print as the final thing mentioned on the
obi. The CD is in a regular clear case with no tray card and the picture
disc serving as the back artwork. The inside has a page of notes by
Tomita in Japanese and all the credits just in english. 2 tracks aor
about 14 minutes each. One for day one for night with a probable
connotation that tha day one = arrival at the park and the night one =
departure. They seem to be recorded to seemlessly loop back to the
beginning. The Day theme track on the CD gets through the openning few
bars a second time then fades out kind of fast and mid passage which is
kind of abrupt sounding. The night music seems to fade and thin out the
arrangement so the presumed looped nature sounds far less obvious.

>From the cover it appears the aquasphere is a large earth sculpture in
central fountain surrounded by a plaza.

Day credits Tomita as "Composer, Synthesizer Performance Programmer,
Mixdown" and a gives an engineering credit another person.

Night credits Tomita as "Composer, Electric Performer and Arranger"

Then below is the credit "Recorded in London, Orchestra: London
Philharmonic Orchestra, Conductor: David Firman" and some further
support staff credits.

Day is clearly a very tight and large real orchestra, the style is
clearly recognizable if you know Tomita's orchestra film work. There are
some light hearted Disney style moments along with bold dramatic big
orchestra sounds, Its a lot of shortish passages of different emotions
and theme and variations type links with smooth complete segues between
the pasages. There are some more dangerous sounding parts with the
orchestra and percussion section making big sweeps for waves. I don't
know if its because of the looped nature but the openning is very
strange for orchestral recordings, the first few bars are panned full
right then the counter melody comes in several seconds later on the
left. There is a lot of stereo separation but no where else to that
extreme.

The Night music seems to be mostly sample based synths, theres a harp
melody that sound darn real so it might be, In general its extremely
real sounding though some instruments, mainly becaue of filtering and
reverb definitely can't be real. Then the first quite Tomita style
timbre comes in, a slightly spacey flute. Its slightly pastoral so its
kind of relaxed but uptempo so it's not saying anything about being
tired. A lot of the synthesized sting work both harks back to his older
sound but perhaps highlights weaknesses in not state of the art samples
too. But usually his blend of many supporting melodies keeps things
moving and any not complimentary fakeness from showing. I guess I have
to listen in headphones to figure out to what extent if any acoustic
performances he blended in. Like heaing a few weaker samples makes one
suspect that the dead on stuff is acoustic not sampled. Its quite
satisfying overall as long as you aren't expecting outer space and can
tolerate lighter music with good counterpoint


nick