World's End Girlfriend

World's End Girlfriend (ワールズ・エンド・ガールフレンド) is the musical project of Katsuhiko Maeda, whose work blends elements of electronica, classical, and post-rock music.

Band

World's End Girlfriend is a solo project by Katsuhiko Maeda, who hails from Nagasaki, Kyushu in Japan, and currently resides in Tokyo. At the age of 10, he was inspired by his father's collection of classical music. When he was 12 years old he started composing on keyboards, guitar, tape recorders and computers. To date he has composed more than 600 songs.

Maeda is the older brother of musician Ryoma Maeda, who is better known as Milky-Chu or Milch of Source.

World's End Girlfriend's music has been featured in the Go Shibata directed film Late Bloomer (2004). He also composed the soundtrack to Air Doll, a 2009 movie by award-winning director Hirokazu Koreeda and scored the 2011 Taiwanese-Chinese film Starry Starry Night.

World's End Girlfriend has performed live in Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Hong Kong, Italy, Korea, Macau, Spain (twice at the Sonar festival), Switzerland, China, Taiwan, UK and the US. He did a 32 date tour of North America with Mono in 2007, with whom he also made a collaborative CD. In 2010 World's End Girlfriend played shows in Taipei, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing.

Divine Comedy

The Divine Comedy (Italian: Divina Commedia [diˈviːna komˈmɛːdja]) is an epic poem by Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed 1320, a year before his death in 1321. It is widely considered the preeminent work of Italian literature and is seen as one of the greatest works of world literature. The poem's imaginative vision of the afterlife is representative of the medieval world-view as it had developed in the Western Church by the 14th century. It helped establish the Tuscan language, in which it is written, as the standardized Italian language. It is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

On the surface, the poem describes Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise or Heaven; but at a deeper level, it represents, allegorically, the soul's journey towards God. At this deeper level, Dante draws on medieval Christian theology and philosophy, especially Thomistic philosophy and the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. Consequently, the Divine Comedy has been called "the Summa in verse".

The Divine Comedy (Milla Jovovich album)

The Divine Comedy is the actress-model-designer Milla Jovovich's first studio album; she was billed as simply Milla for this release. The album is named after the work of Dante Alighieri.

Only one music video was produced for the album in 1994: "Gentleman Who Fell", it charted at number 21 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. "Bang Your Head" and "It's Your Life" were released as the next singles, but no music video were produced for them.

Her 1998 studio album, The People Tree Sessions, was reportedly unauthorized, and Jovovich launched legal action in order for it to be taken off the market. In recent years, Milla has opted to release her new songs for free on her official website. With these demos, she extends to all listeners the right to re-mix the songs, but reserves the right to sell the songs, preventing unauthorized resale of her material.

Background and production

The Divine Comedy (Smith)

The Divine Comedy Symphony is Robert W. Smith’s first complete symphonic band symphony. It was based on Dante's epic, The Divine Comedy. Smith had studied this, and Homer’s Odyssey, at Troy.

The classical symphony consists of four movements – each following a distinct pattern.

Movement One: “The Inferno”

“The Inferno” was commissioned by the James Madison University Band, and was completely published in 1995. The movement follows the events of the epic poem, using musical references to the events in select cantos of Inferno. An Oboe solo in B-flat minor begins the symphony. Enormous crescendos, violent percussion, and towering blocks of sound quickly lead the audience into Danté’s vision of hell. A furious ostinato is used three times in this piece, first by flutes, then clarinets, and finally by the saxophones. In typical overture form, the song slows down as Danté makes his way down in the very depths of hell. Each of the movements in this symphony have a vocal effect, and in the Inferno, this takes the form of howls of pain, balanced rhythmically with whip cracks. The piece takes a coda, and finishes with an extremely difficult timpani solo accompanied by violent and sporadic hits of the gong, although many performances however, omit this solo and instead have the timpani rolling into silence on a B-flat due to the difficulty. The oboe, piccolo, and timpani feature prominently in this movement.