More demanding is the arrival of a stranger emerging from the deep distance, at first glance another Miku but naked and with a skull face. Miku’s companion is a cute, tubby cartoon cat fixated on being her guardian, desperately hanging onto their bond as the singer slips from it: another instance of Miku’s removal from her teen world.
Miku’s self is as unstable as the world around her - other figures appear, evoking other dimensions to her psyche. And akin too to the replicants in Blade Runner and so many other sci-fi creations, artificial beings for whom sudden awareness of mortality, in the face of their apparent perfection, is overwhelming - hence the play on “perfect”/’imperfect” in The End’s libretto. Shibuya and team have thus created a Miku who is transparently a virtual human, akin to Skeleton, the android who performed in response to the music of the composer and the Australian Art Orchestra in OzAsia’s Meeting Points: Scary Beauty. And unlike her in-concert self, she rarely moves with simulated human agility save when running though outer space, she is frequently still, seen in radically shifting perspectives, often face to face with us, or floating. Instead, in fragile spaces that blur and fade, she is subject to ominously recurrent transmission glitches.
Also missing is the stable animated world that sustains her in manga and anime worlds. Gone too are Miku’s multitudinous songs about love, replaced with recitatives and arias of contemplation and internal conflict. So have the sexy outfits, replaced with a Louis Vuitton-designed range patterned with large and larger checks in a limited set of colours. She looks similar to her pop self - skinny, wide-eyed, ribboned turquoise hair flying wide - but the calculated cuteness and sexy teen moves have gone.
In The End, composer Keiichiro Shibuya, himself famous, and his team emphatically duplicate the concert feel with a big screen and powerful wraparound sound, but lift Miku out of the pop realm into an existentially fraught cosmos. The eternally 16-year-old, 3D-animated vocaloid singer Hatsune Miku (literally “the first sound from the future”) has a huge following in Japan and Southeast Asia, appearing on large screens in concerts and singing to live musical accompaniment. The End is a highly unusual meditation on mortality in which a virtual pop star suffers intimations of her coming death.
0 kommentar(er)
