Yellow Zebra, dissolved

First of all, go through this page (Google Translate if you wanna know the gist of it - don't worry, it makes sense most of the time; heck, even the url gave it away).


So with this, I guess the rumour that I heard of this year being the last M1 was true after all.

Now to be honest I've only watched a couple of the M1 series video, and even then, I hadn't then know that they were produced by Yellow Zebra. But the circle itself, on the other hand...


Because life is full of chances and surprises, I actually found this circle totally by accident, after seeing a list of albums by this circle being hosted at a certain blog. Slightly curious by the name (and the cute album cover, tehehe), I checked out their first album... which turns out to be rather plain, and didn't really had any impact to me at that time. I thought that IOSYS (this was obviously an early period) had better stuff than these guys, and that they are not my cup of tea.


Unlike some other circles which I've immersed myself then (C-CLAYS, Silver Forest), I've decided to stick by to their works, and I was pleasantly surprised listening to subsequent works. For most of the time (with the exception of a couple of albums), they kept a very constant lineup, with Yuki Fujimiya providing the lighter, soothing (and not exactly 'cute', but pretty close) vocal, whereas the other one, ucchi, with that deep, mature sound.

Yuki's vocal

ucchi's vocal

And when they perform as a duo, the result is pretty cool:

I could mention the point that they're pretty underrated when it comes to vocal arrangement, and since this will be their farewell... I thought the timing couldn't be more fitting for me to at least mention about them. It's a shame, since they're definitely up there in my list of favourite vocal arrangement circles, along the same line of Buta Otome and TaNaBaTa. I'm gonna miss them.

And it only dawned to me that they've been in the game since 2006. They've came pretty far don't you think? Five years later, it's a shame they're not as popular as other vocal arrangement circles... but in a way, that is one of the reason why I love them. Being low profile has its own charm, I'd say.

Godspeed Yuki and ucchi, and hopefully we'll be seeing your work resurfacing in a different time, at a different place.

"そして素晴らしい活動の場を与えて頂いたZUNさんに心より感謝致します。"