do you have a comrade
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Thanks for all the info and music recs, everybody! I knew this was the place to turn to.
Heck yes. I’m going to have to get back to watching X so I can finally get to Turn A.
I knew something rock-like itched the edge of my 90’s mind. Touched by VAST is a diamond cut.
First two results uploaders were The Laughing Man and a Veronika Vítková. Perfect
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my fave of this kind of thing (at least until this thread, i will Listen) has always been this Kanno number starblood showed me
though maybe it’s more Celtic via Cranberries influenced rather than Bulgarian folk music
ooh ok and this was in the related videos?
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specially fuggin LOVE Torukia
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Torukia and Cyberbird might be my top 2 GitS tracks
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yessss i crow about Cyberbird everywhere it even tangentially comes up. that jungle beat, the soaring vox, the euphoric strings!
not much chanting though 
i wish youtube wasn’t so resistant to background play now. or that this stuff was available anywhere else
I was at a really weird party a couple months ago. Someone put on that VAST album, and I had to text everyone I knew that that had just happened.
Anyway
Although the stuff in the original post is more pitch shifted sample than Bulgarian Women’s Chorus-y stuff.
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I always subconsciously saw this as a GITS thing
Other examples
That Suik 3 opening was a classic at the time for me, in 2019 I find that music too powerful compared to the rather generic anime badass scenes and there’s just too much of a dissonance
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not 90s but you know
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I am here to rain on the Yoko Kanno parade. She’s a huge plagiarist and there are thousands of artists out there more deserving attention.
I’m bringing this up because honestly I want someone to convince me that my huge collection of her music isn’t wasted money, and I approached the claims when I found out about them belatedly last year with plenty of skepticism. Just checked Torukia and found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USVlqkgxZv0
Maybe it’s not as close as cyberbird, the real folk blues, mushroom hunting, want it all back, crossing, heaven’s not enough, etc, but the structure, rhythm, texture, instrument selection, synth design, are all identical then there’s most of the chord progression, notes.
Here I am with a huge void in my music collection - I don’t like the originals, and feel disgusted by the copies. Mitsuda’s probably my #2, please don’t tell me that’s also plagiarised.
Two for nasally chanting:
Hajime Chitose (song: Kotonoha), also Wadatsumi no Ki which has vanished from the internet in its official form
And this one from Last Exile:
Edit: Or maybe these aren’t quite the same nasally thing. Riffing off Malka Moma
Kanno has tons of starkly traced influences inspirations and yes, outright lifts. Shameless as many seem and I’ve grappled with it too, imo that doesn’t quite disqualify her from being a celebrated and beloved artist, as the skill to compose that amount of work in such a quality diverse manner is still indicative of great talent (as well as sensibilities, taste!).
It really shifts around the scales of how much we ever get to know about an artist’s “sampling” because really, countless successfuls follow huge paths they catch onto and want to refract in their own way, there’s always an audience that wouldn’t have ever known about it otherwise.
More noticed early in Chrono Trigger than anywhere else, there’s plenty where Mitsuda was being clearly inspired off the top of my head. Quick few:
- Zeal theme (corridors of time) - Princess Who Loved Insects, Nausicaa/Hisaishi
- Singing Mountain (unused) - Laputa theme, also Hisaishi
- Robo’s Theme - ever known Rick Astley jam
Dude was also on a crunch for his big opportunity. He’s always worn the world/Celtic/folk styles on his sleeve, Xenogear’s unused opening and beloved closing song are very very much Celine Dion type ballads.
Ugh 
Well what about Shoji Meguro (other than the use of actual samples in P3+)?
The difference for me between plagiarism and inspiration/borrowing a style is being able to pick out a song and say “this riff in song a is from right here in song b”.
Also, FWIW he at least denies it (unlike Kanno who has been silent on the issue): https://kotaku.com/chrono-trigger-composer-never-heard-of-rick-astley-rob-5102689
Okay, not sure that’s a good thing. The worst thing with Kanno is if she at least came out and said “Sorry, I copied these songs: X, Y, Z” I could at least enjoy the rest of her stuff. I guess her career would be over then though.
I’m desperate here, to say the least!
The cave story soundtrack’s original right?
I think commercial composers working under deadlines do this a lot more than we’d know from outside
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Sometimes it’s unintentional too. A scrap of melody enters your head and you think it’s straight off the dome, but it’s actually coming from memory of some other song you can’t identify.
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I can never really get worked up over “copying” when it comes to music anyway. The entire folk music tradition emerged from centuries of musicians freely adapting, quoting, and building on each others’ tunes. That history of unrestricted and unlicensed creativity laid the foundations for all of today’s music, and concerns over copyright and stealing only serve to lock down our collective musical heritage.
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Sure that’s true for folk music, but at the same time they (at least some folk artists) are very up front with what they’re working from.
There are many other genres where artists are absolutely not working with melodic or progressional backgrounds, where cribbing is limited to filter/effect design, and those that come up with a new sound are rightly given huge amounts of credit.
I listen to a lot of Touhou arrangements, and it’s obvious what exactly the arrangers have contributed to the track - you can easily compare with the source, and frequently I wonder what was actually kept from the original.
If we throw away the disappointment, feelings of betrayal, moral outrage associated with the plagiarism Kanno’s essentially done some nice covers of a range of songs. I like Sheryl Crow’s “This Child of Mine” but I’m only going to add that as a footnote when bringing up Guns and Roses because that’s the much more impressive accomplishment. Or at least that’s the level I’d like to believe discourse is at.
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