Watashinokoko song archival effort
It was only in early 2021 when I listened to Kazuhumi Yosu’s first musical project, kesson shoujo through Spotify. Childhood in Housing Complex remains one of Yosu’s more popular albums this is due to how available it is, being found in almost every streaming service on earth. This is the only one of Yosu’s works that has made its way to services like Spotify or Apple Music.
Many people who have listened to Childhood in Housing Complex aren’t aware of other kesson shoujo albums or have even heard of watashinokoko, many of these releases are pretty obscure. It has been my aim for the past 6 months or so, to track down these releases and archive them through Youtube so other fans can enjoy them.
The first album Yosu made under the kessonshoujo name is an-min, a dark ambient work which includes tracks that would later be reworked into hue drone. It was published through defunct netlabel CMBCMW (Call Me Bitch Cut My Wrist Records) which were so kind to upload them to archive.org, it was quite easy to find but it wasn’t uploaded into Youtube so I went ahead and did it.
https://archive.org/details/CMBCMW010
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4AhnFTdGsVmsSQ9nWwml5TNxItW2-rq-
The second album is Childhood in Housing Complex also published through CMBCMW. A Portuguese netlabel took it upon itself to upload it to every major (and not-so major) streaming service and various free music archives. No idea if Yosu is aware of this, but you can find it pretty much everywhere.
https://archive.org/details/childhood_in_housing_complex-15438
The first EP is LaLa Sings which marks the first time Yosu began to use LaLaVoice as the singer of his songs. It contains iconic songs which would later be included in many albums and compilations yet to come. It was uploaded into Archive.org and can be found in Youtube, but I went ahead and uploaded every song separately so people in Lastfm could scrobble them.
https://archive.org/details/CMBCMW016
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4AhnFTdGsVnmVDTbP6nx8LERfhlIpp01
The last kesson shoujo album before Yosu dropped the moniker was わたしのココ. It was trickier to find and many people aren’t aware of its existence since it would later be re-released. I found it through a lastfm comment before realizing that you could also find it through archive.org. It wasn’t on Youtube so I uploaded it there.
https://archive.org/details/watashinokoko
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4AhnFTdGsVkzRAr-7lfL239P4cTwWi8S
The transition era between Kesson Shoujo and Watashinokoko is much less documented. What I could gather, after the name change Yosu would began to release songs through MySpace, yet not many people archived those songs, so they could have been . It was through sheer luck that I found a fairly recent Youtube video about someone recommending Watashinokoko which had an earlier version of the music video from disgrace/わたしと歩いていると恥ずかしいの.
So I searched through EVERY Youtube video that was related to Watashinokoko and found that same music video, the uploader linked a MediaFire folder which contained old videos, the MySpace EPs, prototype songs and two unreleased songs. These had only been downloaded a couple of times since they were uploaded in 2011, so I reuploaded them into archive.org and Youtube
https://archive.org/details/WatashinokokoEPs (sadly the filenames got corrupted)
https://archive.org/details/watashinokokodrafts
https://archive.org/details/watashinokokovideos
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4AhnFTdGsVkXvjNjH4iC9yUjjD0GHadr
From there Yosu began to release albums through the defunct UGUU netlabel, many of these are the same ones which would later be uploaded into Bandcamp without any changes after UGUU’s site went down.
I should note that according to mirror sites, Yosu had a Facebook account or page (no idea what he uploaded there) and found he currently has a Pixiv account.
https://www.pixiv.net/en/users/93380
It was through Pixiv that I found the answer to the question that every Watashinokoko fan must have asked themselves at least once.... What does the self-proclaimed sister does? She appears to be the protagonist of her own series of art and short stories on which she goes through surreal scenarios alongside her teddy bear which may or may not be actually alive and protects her from evil spirits. We still don’t know whose’s sister she is.
Please donate to Yosu’s Fanbox or buy his albums for his amazing work.