Curated playlist
Anime composers
- Mina KubotaMina Kubota began her professional journey in the Japanese music industry as a composer and vocal arranger. Her early training laid the groundwork for a career that would span anime, film, and video games. She entered the field during a…
- Yoko UenoYoko Ueno is a Japanese recording artist. Her catalog holds nine solo CDs, a remix collection, one DVD, and four soundtracks for anime and film, spread across a decade and a half. Before any of those solo releases appeared, she was already…
- Kentarō HanedaFans knew Kentarō Haneda by the nickname Haneken, a name that spread across the communities he worked for. He died of liver cancer on the 2nd of June 2007, at the age of 58. His composing career stretched from the late 1970s through the…
- Mitsuto SuzukiIn the early 1980s, Mitsuto Suzuki's life changed when his older brother brought home a synthesizer. The instrument became a playground for the young boy who would later shape video game soundscapes. He enrolled at Yamaha Music School to…
- Masashi HamauzuMasashi Hamauzu was born in Munich, Germany, into a household where music was not an elective subject but a household language. His mother taught piano. His father, Akimori Hamauzu, sang opera. By kindergarten, Masashi had already…
- Yuji YoshinoYuji Yoshino began his career composing for video games in the early 2000s. His first major credit appeared on .hack//Legend of the Twilight, a title released during that period. This project marked his transition into professional game…
- Hitoshi SakimotoHitoshi Sakimoto was born on the 26th of February 1969 in Tokyo, Japan, and by the age of 16 he was already being paid to compose music for video games. Not just the music itself, but also the underlying program to play it. His debut as a…
- Yoko ShimomuraYoko Shimomura was born on the 19th of October 1967, in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, and started taking piano lessons "at the age of four or five". She graduated from Osaka College of Music as a piano major in 1988, intending to become a piano…
- Hiroyuki NambaHiroyuki Namba composed the score for Dallos in 1983, entering a format that had never existed before in anime. Dallos was the first anime released directly as an Original Video Animation, made for home video distribution rather than…
- Joe HisaishiJoe Hisaishi was born in Nakano, Nagano, Japan, and by the age of four he was already holding a violin, learning through the Suzuki method his parents had chosen for him. Alongside those lessons, his father took him to the cinema again and…
- Nobuo UematsuNobuo Uematsu was born on the 21st of March, 1959, in Kochi, the capital city of Kochi Prefecture, Japan. He never took a single formal piano lesson. He started teaching himself at age twelve, and by the time he was a young man working in…