"It feels like a series of ideas" -- I assume this is correct! For people looking at this comment before the Analysis - Lyrical Dive section ( 38:25 ): This song is, (as it is literally said in the title,) a combination of cutouts from interviews done to Noël (the vocal), from three magazines, "HEAVY EDGE", "SOUND AROUND", and "✝V-ROCK HEAVEN✝". The questions are only written in the lyric sheets (not spoken at all). Each magazine has its own "theme music", which plays at the section start. This song is... well... the most scattered-around music from Sound Horizon lol, other songs keep more focus on one or two themes. Maybe listening to some songs from "Märchen", like "The Princess Sleeping In The Glass Coffin" can give you a better idea. Thanks for your great and interesting reaction! :)

Great reaction! As a Sound Horizon fan, I suppose I should enlighten you a little bit 😅 If you're not very familiarized with Sound Horizon, it's a band focused on story music. Each album is a big story, whose songs are like the chapters or episodes. There are narrations, voice acting, sfxs and more in their songs. This music is part of a 3-songs Single disc named "Vanishing Starlight". The story of this single is about the character Noël, who lives in a parallel world strangely similar to ours. (Up until then, Sound Horizon releases were always settled in fantasy worlds or in the distant past) Noël was a talented, yet frustrated musician who once met Revo, a misterious music producer (who's also the singer of this song, and the composer, lyricist, leader and arranger for Sound Horizon as well) who gave Noël the opportunity to enter into the stardom. Noël gets the chance to make his own band, which he names "Vanishing Starlight", the name of the release. In Noël's world, Sound Horizon doesn't release the Single, since Vanishing Starlight is a real thing there. Noël instead releases a single song named "Yodaka no Hoshi" (Nighthawk's Star), which is Vanishing Starlight's first music (both in parallel and real world, in the Sound Horizon single disc). Then, Revo invites Noël to do the opening act for the Sound Horizon 10th anniversary live event, in the real world. There, Noël sings his Yodaka no Hoshi song and cover some other Sound Horizon songs, including one named Mother (which is Vanishing Starlight's second song in the Sound Horizon release). But in the time between the invitation and the opening act, Noël gets called to three interviews, in which he tells his story as a musician and invites the audience to go watch the Sound Horizon 10th anniversary live concert (which actually happened, and Noël was there, being performed by Revo while a Revo doppelganger was acting as Revo in the audience. Oh, and the interviewers were also there. You can find the whole live concert in KZfaq, I'll link a video to it if you're interested. Noël's travel to the real world has a great impact upon him, which would change his life forever later in the following Sound Horizon release: Nein, the 9th Story Album. Noël is a recurring character in Sound Horizon since his first apparition in the Vanishing Starlight release. He appears in Nein and in the newest release, the Ema ni Negai wo Full Edition Blu-ray. But that's kind of a spoiler, though 😅. Sorry for the long comment, it's just that Vanishing Starlight is one of my favorite Sound Horizon releases.

So cool to see your reaction to this song, even after almost a decade since it was released! I've been an SH fan for nearly two decades, starting with their debut albums back in 2004. They've been a big inspiration for my own journey as a composer, but I have to admit that I don't always see eye to eye with their creative choices. Their way of composing is quite unique and, well, let's say it's not everyone's cup of tea. Some fans love the intricate musical ideas all wrapped up in a single song, unified by a common story. But it can be a bit much for others, which has undoubtedly limited their ability to grow fanbase in the mainstream market. Still, it's impressive how they consistently manage to hit the top spots, even sometimes temporarily reaching number one in the JPOP market during album releases. It's hard not to feel a bit envious of their ability to stick to such a distinctive style and still pull in good sales numbers. As a composer, I tend to favor a more economical approach, using themes and materials sparingly and developing them extensively. "Interview with Noel," on the other hand, takes the complete opposite route. It can feel a bit disjointed, especially in the storytelling aspect, because the song only contains Noel's "answers" to the interview questions. The questions themselves are found only in the physical CD album booklet, each mapped to specific transitional motifs that you noticed. It's part of their philosophy - their songs are never complete without diving into their lyric booklet while listening. Their album booklets are often very over-engineered, not just completing the song's story but also offering intricate puzzles for fans to solve. Their most recent move has been quite bold. They've ditched the traditional CD format in favor of selling only blue-ray DVDs. These blue-rays are interactive, allowing listeners to decide the outcomes of the story themselves at checkpoints, and of course, the music will be also completely different. This means they have to record tons of music for each track, and figure out how they connect. As a fellow composer, I can't help but admire their boldness in taking these experimental approaches to their music. But, I share the concerns that it will not find a good reception in the market. Sometimes, I wonder what they could achieve with a slightly more mainstream approach, but, well, there's no room for "what ifs" in their artistic journey.

Oh my goodness you actually did a Sound Horizon song

Hello friend, I just wanted to highlight a point that you highlighted and that is the fact that the song is a loop both in the different sections and in general, and that is that Revo always plays with cyclical stories and even some of the horizons (the stories of their main albums) end that way. Revo is a monster!!! Thank you for your reaction and giving this tremendous group a chance.

Great analysis on this beast of a song! I think it's totally fair to feel that this song is disjointed and difficult to listen to as a song if you don't know much about the story. Ironically, this is a beloved song for fans of the band Sound Horizon. I saw other commenters already explaining a bit about the song itself as well as sound horizon as a whole, but I also wanted to add that not only do sound horizon singles and albums contain their own stories, the stories also ebb and flow into each other. So there is somewhat of an overarching universe within the entirety of sound horizon. This song, its single, and its following full album is a total callback to the whole history of the band up to that point (also as a part of the celebration of the band's 10th anniversary). That's why, at least to me, this song just gets better and better the more you know about Sound Horizon, and Revo's songs, as a lot of the lyrics and melodies carry a lot of emotional weight. It was definitely interesting to hear an impression of this song as someone's first exposure to the band, but if you continue to listen to more of sound horizon, then I hope you'll be able to revisit this song one day and see if those impressions change.

Not only is the cover anime, but the music sounds like it belongs to an anime too, with each "section" accompanying a very different aspect of the story. Like, I could imagine this fitting right in with an off-the-wall anime like FLCL. As a piece of standalone music I don't think it works too well without knowing the lyrics, because it very much seems like a story is being told and the different sections are meant to accompany that story. Without the story it just sounds very incoherent. Still a lot of fun, though!

The other comment covered things pretty well, but one thing I'll add is that the composer (Revo) also has done some compositions for games and anime. Most famously a few of the openings to Attack on Titan (including the first one), and also the Bravely Default and Bravely Default II OSTs.

This is so funny. Possibly the strangest thing I've ever heard. I don't know why, but this just sounds 'Japanese'. :)

there´s a lot better songs of SH trust me