Initial D

Initial D (Japanese: 頭文字D（イニシャル・ディー）, Hepburn: Inisharu Dī) is a Japanese sports manga series written and illustrated by Shuichi Shigeno. It was serialized in Young Magazine from 1995 to 2013, with the chapters collected into 48 tankōbon volumes by Kodansha. The story focuses on the world of illegal Japanese street racing, where all the action is concentrated in the mountain passes and rarely in cities or urban areas, and with the drift racing style emphasized in particular. Professional race car driver and pioneer of drifting Keiichi Tsuchiya helped with editorial supervision. The story is centered on the prefecture of Gunma, more specifically on several mountains in the Kantō region and in their surrounding cities and towns. Although some of the names of the locations the characters race in have been fictionalized, all of the locations in the series are based on actual locations in Japan.

Initial D has been adapted into several television anime and original video animations series by OB Studio Comet, Studio Gallop, Pastel, A.C.G.T and SynergySP. A live action film by Avex and Media Asia was released in 2005 and its sequel, Initial D 2, will be released in 2016. Both the manga and anime series were initially licensed for English-language distribution in North America by Tokyopop (2002–2009), however, the anime license has since been picked up by Funimation Entertainment, while the manga is no longer available in English.

Dave Rodgers

Dave Rodgers (born Giancarlo Pasquini, February 21, 1963) is an Italian songwriter, composer, and producer.

Career

Born in Mantua, he started production with the band Aleph. Since then, he has collaborated with artists from around the world and has produced several multi-platinum albums. Rodgers has been honored by the Japanese music industry for selling more than 30 million albums as a singer, composer, and producer.

He is the owner of Rodgers Studio,and A-Beat C Productions co-founded with Alberto Contini. Considered by many to be the "Godfather of Eurobeat", he has written and produced songs for J-pop artists such as Namie Amuro, V6 and MAX, which helped introduce some Japanese music fans to the electronic music genre known as Eurobeat. He has produced countless works for the Super Eurobeat series, the world's longest-running series of dance music compilation albums, since its earliest issues.

Many songs produced by Dave Rodgers have become massive hits, such as "Space Boy" by Rodgers, "Music for the People" also by him and covered by V6, "Try Me" by Amuro Namie, "Go Go Money" by Neo, "Original Sin" by Powerful T. and "Get Wild" as a collaboration with Tetsuya Komuro. A handful of these songs are used in the Initial D anime and video games.

Go 2

Go 2 is the second studio album by the English band XTC, released on 6 October 1978. The United Kingdom version contained no singles, but the American and Canadian versions included the single "Are You Receiving Me?" (released 27 October 1978, the same month as the album's release). A promotional video was also made for the song. An earlier version of "Are You Receiving Me?" was recorded during the Go 2 sessions and was later released on the Coat Of Many Cupboards box-set. Other outtakes from Go 2 include "Sargasso Bar", "Us Being Us", "Instant Tunes", "Looking For Footprints", "Things Fall To Bits" and "Strange Tales, Strange Tails".

The album's title was chosen in reference to the board game Go in order to continue the black-and-white colour scheme from White Music. The "2" was added by keyboardist Barry Andrews.

The initial 15,000 UK pressings of the album came with a bonus disc of dub remixes entitled Go+. Go+ was eventually re-released on the Explode Together: The Dub Experiments 78-80 CD.

Eurobeat

Eurobeat is either a form of the British dance-pop variant of Eurodisco or Hi-NRG-driven Italo disco music that both developed in 1980s.

In the United States, Eurobeat was sometimes marketed as Hi-NRG and for a short while shared this term with the very early freestyle music hits. Italo disco was often referred to as Eurobeat, probably due to the negative connotations of the word "disco" in the United States in the 1980s.

"Eurobeat" is also directly related to the Japanese Para Para dance culture as it influences many song and business decisions.

History

Origin of the term "Eurobeat"

Initial

In a written or published work, an initial or dropcap is a letter at the beginning of a word, a chapter, or a paragraph that is larger than the rest of the text. The word is derived from the Latin initialis, which means standing at the beginning. An initial often is several lines in height and in older books or manuscripts, sometimes ornately decorated.

In illuminated manuscripts, initials with images inside them, such as those illustrated here, are known as historiated initials. They were an invention of the Insular art of the British Isles in the eighth century. Initials containing, typically, plant-form spirals with small figures of animals or humans that do not represent a specific person or scene are known as "inhabited" initials. Certain important initials, such as the B of Beatus vir... at the opening of Psalm 1 at the start of a vulgate Latin psalter, could occupy a whole page of a manuscript.

These specific initials, in an illuminated manuscript, also were called Initiums.