Dog Ear Records is at it again. Fans of The Black Mages might want to pay attention later this month, as March 25th will see two new releases from the Japanese label. One of these items is a DVD of a live concert performance of The Black Mage’s third album, Darkness and Starlight. The other release set for the same day will be a CD based mini album entitled Those Who Distorted, performed the cello quartet Cellythm (Kazumi Ando, Takaya Anada, Yoko Ohta, and Yumi Shimazu).
Those Who Distorted is apparently rock themed, and set to have six tracks, half of which are arranged from the rock arrangements previously performed by The Black Mages (“Those Who Fight Further,” “Battle Theme” (FFVI), “Clash on the Big Bridge”), with the remaining tracks devoted to arrangements of other works (“Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin, “Eleanor Rigby” by The Beatles, and “Land of Hope and Glory” by Edward Elgar). While it’s not uncommon to have come across string based arrangements of both pop/rock and video game music, this makes for a rather interesting existence where we have arrangements based on rock arrangements of video game music.
Those Who Distorted is currently set to sell for 1800 Yen (roughly 18$ USD), and samples can be found on Dog Ear’s page for the album here. A preview for the Darkness and Starlight Live DVD can be found here. Both pages are Japanese only, but it’s easy enough to get the info one needs easily from them.
Are you looking forward to either of these releases? Are you happy to see rock classics and The Black Mages together at last?
Tags: Cellythm, Classic Rock, Dog Ear Records, Final Fantasy, News, Nobuo Uematsu, String Quartet, The Beatles, The Black Mages
“Eleanor Rigby” is the shit. This sounds amazing. Looking forward to it.
At least there’s finally a RETAIL release for a Black Mages DVD, instead of fan-club only like the first 2… (Which means it’s much cheaper than paying triple digits on Yahoo Japan Auctions).