EDIT: Bandcamp download now also includes the pdf booklet with comments and credits. Sorry about that!

Reminder: YOU DON'T HAVE TO PAY FOR ANYTHING. TYPE THE NUMBER ZERO ON THE "BUY NOW" SECTION OR REFER TO THE LINK BELOW. \/

Alternate download link:
mega.nz#F!0ZVS0YqI!C6LBlhDzvc5UIBQa-7ztgA
________________________

I apologize in advance for my broken english! I'm not very good at it, but I tried my best to explain everything that I believe that you need to know.

This album is a tribute and a celebration of the Senran Kagura series and a love letter dedicated to it and its creators and, especially, to its soundtrack and composers. Since the ending 2013, when I got Senran Kagura Burst, those games had been giving me the a lot of fun moments, made me meet new cool people and helped me develop a better musical sense while also inspiring me in diverse ways.

I made everything in here taking my time, without rushing anything. They say you can't rush art, right? I believe in that as well. So I gave the album time to put everything I've got into it. I didn't get perfect results by any means, but at least I can say it was worth it. This is a labor of love, not just something I'm doing for a company or something... and yes this also counts for the more stupid and funny tracks.

Every track in this album is commented. I had a lot to say about them (in some of them I didn't have that much, but still). This is largely inspired by the fact that the series composers and the series creator used to leave some comments about each music they wrote for some of the games in the series. I always loved that aspect of those games and I wish that every game developer took the idea of adding those into consideration! Even if they don't have much to say! It brings the players a little closer to the developers and shows the love put into the work!

The album has a compilation of past works from a time that I didn't know if I were going to compile everything into an album or not and some of the tracks were made exclusively for this project. Some past works were remade to better fit the album better and to sound better. All of those have the same release date as this album, while the previous ones have the dates of their previous debut mentioned.

If there is anything I regret about this is not being able to put references to the yoma and not being able to make an acapella of "Resolution of Blooms" and make a mashup with it. I think the overall result of the album would be significantly better if I did those things, but you can't always win right? There is a very slim chance of me working on them in the future outside of this project and then maybe I'll add them here... or maybe I won't, because after this one I need a break. A very long one.

Now let's talk about the name given to this work and the cover art.

Namesake:

The name I gave to this collection of experiments with mashups and remixes comes from a huge brainstorm I had when recollecting my memories about the series.

Back when I played Burst years ago I had finished Shin Megami Tensei IV in its entirety (finished all the endings) a couple of weeks earlier and that game was quite the experience. It was so good that playing Senran Kagura afterwards wouldn't be the same if I didn't play it before. So I felt like giving a nod to another series that helped enhance my experience with that already nice game. The whole good vs evil, the demonic creatures and the other themes the series uses resemble some stuff you would see in the Megami Tensei franchise. So the Tensei part comes from that, but it's not the only reason.

After doing some research on the meaning of the word Tensei, that I did because I mistakenly associated the word's translation with "tale" or "story", I discovered that, besides "Reincarnation", it could also mean "born" as in a "musician being born" or something like that. I used that to reference that as my debut in Bandcamp and also because this is my first music album ever. It's like I'm giving birth to a new album, a new idea, a new "era", a new concept.

The "Kagura" part refers to the Senran Kagura series, obviously, but also the name given to the highest rank of shinobi in the series and to the character that bears the same name (but with a different meaning).

I chose to write the name in romanji instead of using kanji because I wanted to make the name of the album to be as ambiguous as possible. From my point of view you can use all of the interpretations I gave to it, but you can feel free to choose what suits you best.

Cover art:

The background is a vectored and edited screenshot of one of the last frames of animation of the opening that is shown in the first game in the series. That moment is, in my honest opinion, one of the most important events in the games story while also being very iconic in the opening where it appears on.

The symbol in the moon is a version of the one Kagura has in her eyes, something Atsu, a friend of mine, suggested me to put in the cover and I thought it was a good idea because it fits with the name of the album and a bit of what I was going for with it.

The vectored waveform comes from all five of the Hanzo girls singing "Midare Zaki" by the end of "Chaos in Bloom". I got that from the acapella I made using the single where the music was in. I did that to reference the scene on the background, since it is a scene where the same music is playing (albeit a different version). That same sound sample was used for the spectrogram also seen in the background, since I think those overtones give the background a nice aesthetic while helping to link everything together.

The font used for the album's name was handmade with real paint using another paintbrush styled font called "DK Cinnabar Brush" as a reference. That alongside the waveform were put together to reference the style of the Senran Kagura logos but it was also made in a way that it could be it's own thing.