Hi all, here’s another SEVENTH HAVEN interview from pop culture news site KAI-YOU.net. Thanks to fc and Puchi7TL for translation and editing. Please enjoy.

T7S Composers kz x Hige Driver Conversation - 2D idols are now full of emotions!

On February 24th, the smartphone game Tokyo 7th Sisters (T7S) released a new theme song for 2016, “SEVENTH HAVEN”, composed by kz (livetune).

T7S is an idol raising rhythm and adventure game released by Donuts, known for various web services and mobile games starting with 10 second video community Mixchannel.

Since its release in 2014, [T7S] has steadily gained users, and in 2015 has continued its multifaceted media mix expansion by releasing a full album, hosting its 1st live, and starting its own novel and comic.

Furthermore, T7S will celebrate its 2nd anniversary in 2016, starting with the release of its 2nd album and its 2nd live.

This time we focused on T7S, talking with kz about the feelings he put into “SEVENTH HAVEN” and Hige Driver, the sound producer behind “Snow in ‘I love you’” and “YELLOW”, about the appeal of 2D idols from someone in the real idol scene.

What follows is a frank and stimulating conversation about 2D idol songs, different from anison (anime songs) and [real] idol songs, as well as what makes an ideal idol.

How kz and Hige Driver first met

──When did you two first meet?

kz It’s been 6 or 7 years since we first met, hasn’t it.

Hige Driver Yeah. But we haven’t had many chances to have a good talk just between the two of us.

kz We’ve met in various places, but we’ve never properly spoken before so there’s a lot I don’t know about you.

Hige Driver If I remember correctly, the first time I met kz was in 2008 at an event called “DENPAI!!!” That was the first live either of us had done, and we were both shy (lol).

kz At that time we didn’t really have much time to talk either. It’s been 8 years since then, and we can finally talk to each other (lol).

──Did you know of each other before you two met?

Hige Driver When we met, kz had just released a major CD. Vocaloid’s popularity had just started rising too, so I had this impression of “The new generation has come”.

kz You know, I was scared of you, Hige.

Hige Driver Eh, what do you mean “scared”?

kz If I had to say both of us are “born out of net culture”, but there are lots of different places in that net culture. I’m from Nico Nico Douga, but you’re from muzie (One of Japan’s largest indie music sites).

I had the impression that musicians from muzie were “people from the dawn of net culture”. I felt like we were country bumpkins by comparison…… (lol).

Hige Driver You say that, but NND was one of the main ways I got more popular.

──At that time, did you listen to each other’s music?

kz At the time I didn’t really listen to other people’s music, I was too focused in my own work (lol). But now when I listen to Hige’s original songs or anison, their strong melodies leave a deep impression on me.

Hige Driver Thank you. I didn’t listen to Vocaloid that much around then, but when I heard kz’s “Tell Your World”, I thought that this guy was the real deal.

Around that time somewhere inside of me I rebelliously thought “Everybody’s listening to Vocaloid just ‘cause it’s the hot thing right now”, but there was real talent that came out of all of that. In the end people who could sell actually sold.

The last boss feel of new song “SEVENTH HAVEN”

──Hige, have you already listened to kz’s new T7S theme song “SEVENTH HAVEN”?

Hige Driver I have. You could say this about all of kz’s songs, but right from the start it made me think “Ah, so cool”. It was the best.

kz It was really hard this time (lol).

Hige Driver Was it?

kz If you don’t do EDM right it just sounds gaudy. Gaudy and stylish are different, so when you mix EDM with idols or anime or games, it’s hard to find the crossover point between the two.

How do I put it, T7S doesn’t betray its fans: it only has straight, conventional songs. I too have followed this as I made songs, but this time I needed to change things up quite a bit. I was worried whether fans would follow along.

──Was that a request from the T7S side?

kz Yes, it was a request from General Director Motegi. For each song he’ll send me a 7 to 8 page proposal, and in it Motegi will tightly construct the worldview, timeframe, and story of T7S, all of which I follow when writing a song.

This time, I figured that if I put together everything as requested it would come out to be something like what it became, so I just made it the way I wanted.

──Certainly, compared to your previous songs “Star☆Glitter” and “Sparkle☆Time!!”, it’s an aggressive song that has quite a different feel to it.

kz ”SEVENTH HAVEN” is a song from around the time of canonically legendary idol group Seventh Sisters’s debut, so it is a song that has to be overwhelming, one that is fit for legends.

That part was hard for me, and I think it was hard for the voice actresses as well. T7S has several new voice actresses, so it’s not like everybody has a lot of experience. And they still had to exert a legendary feel.

But when I looked at what Twitter thought, I saw people saying “last boss”, “demon king”, etc, so I was relieved that with the MV I was able to convey that last boss feel (lol).

Songs which you can imagine live

──kz, what is your impression of Hige Driver’s songs?

kz T7S songs or not, Hige’s music does have some complicated parts, but its main appeal is in its strong yet simple melodies. I don’t think I’m very good at constructing melodies, so I’m quite jealous of that.

Hige Driver Thank you very much (lol).

──Hige Driver, you’ve been involved not just in 2D idols like T7S, but also many real idol songs as well, correct?

Hige Driver I’ve done quite a few. Currently I’m involved with Lovely Doll and Cheeky Parade, but I’ve written for other groups in the past as well.

──Do you actually have a different way of making idols songs compared to other songs?

Hige Driver It’s the so called “live feel”. Songs for groups like idols tend to focus on lives, whether a song will get the audience excited when sung at a live.

kz Hige’s songs have that, don’t they. They are songs which you can imagine live. You can see where the audience would respond with calls.

Hige Driver I often watch a live before making a song. Fundamentally, the audience—no, the fans want to make noise (lol). They want to do something with everybody together. I always think about the audience’s responses when I make songs.

kz You’re right (lol). Back in the day, I didn’t have any experience making group songs. I had done songs for smaller groups like RO-KYU-BU! (voice actress unit for TV anime Ro-Kyu-Bu!), but T7S was my first time making songs for a group larger than four people.

When Motegi gave me the offer, I often listened to Love Live! and iDOLM@STER songs, and I was just thinking how I wanted to do group songs, so I accepted.

In the beginning, I didn’t really pay attention to live responses, but recently over the past year or two I’ve gone to anison artists’ lives like May’n and LiSA, and I’ve gained an “awareness” of “how” responses should be. So, songs like “Star☆Glitter” or others from earlier are different from my more recent songs in their awareness of this.

──Has the experience of going to lives influenced this song?

kz I’d say so. Using an EDM track as the base, I tried to add gaps for the audience to do responses, but I’m still studying how to do this, so I wasn’t exactly sure how to include them.

Motegi may have been imagining some heavy EDM in his head, but, in a kind of last-ditch resistance (lol), I tried leaving in my own pop flavor.

How radical it is to be able to trust General Director Motegi

──We’ve been talking about General Director Motegi for a bit now, but what kind of person is he?

kz How should I put this……He’s more of an artist than we are.

Hige Driver Yeah. You don’t expect it, but he’s an interesting guy who exudes this kind of “Let’s do it!” feeling.

kz His love for his work is very deep. That is connected to the strength of his works, but at the same time he’s a guy that’s got a few screws loose.

Hige Driver For example, for the first [T7S] song I wrote, “PRIZM♪RIZM”, he made me auto-tune it quite a lot. This came straight from Motegi.

If you modify the voices sung by voice actresses, the fans get angry. But Motegi said “As long as the song is good” and made me auto-tune the voice actresses’ voices. In that respect, he’s a bit weird (lol).

kz It would be better if it were for a voice actress’s album, but you don’t do this kind of thing normally.

Hige Driver General practice says let voice actresses use their unedited voices. So that part of T7S, or that part of Motegi, is interesting.

kz I get the feeling that he can deal with such things. That’s why I can put my trust in him.

Different from anison and idol songs, “2D idol songs”

──The idols in T7S belong to various different units, and each unit’s music is different. Do you think about each unit’s type of music [when making songs]?

Hige Driver I don’t think about it. For that, I just follow the worldview Motegi has created.

──Is it the same when you work on real idols?

Hige Driver For Lovely Doll I can pretty much do whatever I want, but Cheeky Parade is constrained by its worldview that it follows in its lyrics, so I was told to follow the lyrics’s world when I make songs.

kz Idol groups have various different personalities as well, huh.

Hige Driver Even for Morning Musume, if you read the lyrics you realize that there are actually many Morning Musumes (lol). There are both idol groups unrestrained by worldviews and those which strictly follow their own worldview.

──So you’re saying T7S is constrained by its worldview.

kz I don’t just do composition and arrangement, I also write lyrics. At the time I was thinking about Seventh Sisters’s image as a whole as I wrote the lyrics.

To me, T7S [songs] are “2D idol songs”, which are in a slightly different vein than anison and [real] idol songs. I think that 2D idol songs are completely different from real idol songs in that 2D idol songs have more emotions contained within them.

Hige Driver What do you mean by emotions?

kz Simply put, I mean drama. I think that real idols aren’t as dramatic as 2D idols.

For example, a situation where only one person attends your live would never happen in real life. But, in the 2D world, idols struggle to climb up from the very bottom, and the emotions born from that performance are contained in their songs, so they leave the audience with a different impression.

Seventh Sisters are already legends, so I didn’t get to include these emotions, but in 777☆SISTERS’s music, which Hige is in charge of, he could start from their starting point, so I was a bit jealous.

In my mind, it’s “idols = emotions”. Just seeing a group of girls trying their hardest makes me want to cry.

There aren’t any particular differences musically, but I feel that when making [2D idol] songs, such emotions naturally seep in.

Growing along with its fans, T7S

──T7S’s releases at first weren’t promoted at a large scale from large record companies, but started from a commercial booth at Comic Market.

It slowly expanded from there, and there’s this image that T7S is a franchise where the fans grew along with the idols. Were you conscious of this when you were making songs?

kz Yes, definitely. Haven’t you met a lot of T7S fans, Hige? Don’t all of them really love T7S?

Hige Driver Of course (lol). When I do anison DJing, whenever I put on a T7S song, everybody gets super excited, and afterwards people thank me for putting on T7S.

kz Yeah, you’d definitely get thanked (lol). [T7S] isn’t such a large franchise yet, but I feel that the fans are passionate and really want it to succeed.

Hige Driver Motegi also said that while T7S started from the bottom, he’d like it to grow larger. I think people have started getting excited about it by now.

──Do you think anything else has songs that excite people like T7S ones do?

Hige Driver Nope. I think that it’s because it is T7S that people get excited.

kz There’s a feeling of “It’s our T7S”. People want the catharsis of seeing T7S go from zero all the way to the top.

Opportunities for 2D idols as seen in T7S

──Most of the voice actresses for T7S were new when they were picked up by T7S, weren’t they.

kz With that, there’s a feeling that everybody is growing together. I was happy to see T7S’s 1st live succeed as it did.

Hige Driver It really was very exciting.But, as a live it was still at the beginner-level. Rather, the voice actresses were still unsophisticated.

kz Yeah, the MCs were too long, for one (lol). It was pretty tense.

Hige Driver Certainly. But, with all of that, it makes you want to root for them. You watch as the voice actresses who started with T7S grow and get lead roles in anime and then you meet them again to work on anison together. We also grow along with them (lol).

kz So far I only write songs for T7S once a year, but even then everybody grows so much every year.

For example, Minase Inori (Nanasaki Nicole and Rokusaki Coney) and Fuchigami Mai (Hanyuda Mito) have become famous seiyuu in the blink of an eye, and every year they come back home more successful (lol).

──But, for modern 3D idols, instead of such a process of growth, there’s this image that they have to be perfect from the beginning.

Hige Driver That’s true. Currently the real idol world is oversaturated, so right now it’s very hard for a beginner to steadily grow and become super famous.

Because of this, I think T7S can have the emotions of moving up in the world that you can’t get with real idols.

kz It’s because they are 2D idols. If they say they filled Budokan, then they filled Budokan, and you get that feeling of accomplishment. I think their strength is in being able to properly create a story.

Hige Driver Personally, I think that idols are fine being illusions, I just want them to show me a dream. Please don’t show me reality (lol).

Real idols often frankly talk about [their experiences] after they graduate. I really wish they would stop doing that. Kind of like “I don’t really care”.

──So you’re saying if it’s 2D, they can become the ideal idol?

Hige Driver Yes. In that way, I can watch them without having to worry about anything.

kz There’s this sense of relief. The way I see it, it’s fine as long as there’s a girl you want to cheer on and a good story, no tricks needed.

Hige Driver Yeah, the story is important.

──Both of you, how are you planning on approaching T7S’s future developments?

Hige Driver I want to produce respectable songs. But, as somebody who has produced many songs and gone to many lives, I think I have a good grasp of what T7S could do to become even better, so it would be great if I could get the opportunity [to use this knowledge].

kz This is what Motegi always says to me, but I would also like to make good, conventional songs that can complement the story known as T7S.

──Thank you very much!

kz Sound producer/DJ

Starting with ClariS and Tokyo 7th Sisters, kz is a music producer who has been involved with anison, games, j-pop, etc. Also, as a DJ he has broken genre barriers at various events and festivals such as “ROCK IN JAPAN FESTIVAL”, “COUNTDOWN JAPAN”, “ULTRA JAPAN”, “Chokaigi”, etc. In 2016, he started work on a new event “YYY” with Tanaka Yasutaka, tofubeats, and banvox.

Under the name livetune, he has worked on various Hatsune Miku songs like “Google Chrome-Hatsune Miku ver-” theme song “Tell Your World”, “Magical Mirai 2015” theme song “Hand in Hand”, etc, as well as with vocalists like SEKAI NO OWARI’s Fukase and Golden Bomber’s Kiryuuin Shou.

Also, in 2015 he started live unit livetune+ with vocalist yanoanna under record label unBORDE.

Hige Driver Technopop musician

A technopop musician who works mainly online.

He specializes in songs with catchy melodies and fast tempos, but also has made instrumental and techopop + rock songs. He also writes lyrics and sings, often featuring delusional lyrics of uninteresting guys. He also does remixes and works on a wide scope of songs for singers, idols, games, and anime.

In recent years he has created his own band, “Hige Drive VAN”, where he is in charge of vocals.

On January 20th, 2016, he released his first best of album, Hige Driver 10th Anniversary Best.

He is scheduled to announce a collaboration song “SUN ELECTRIC” with POLISICS.