The Neglected Garden (feat. Kaori Takeda)

This is a pre-release single from the newly recorded Ghibli song cover compilation "Café Après-midi Meets Studio Ghibli," featuring 12 super-talented artists and themed around "afternoon coffee-like happiness," supervised and curated by Toru Hashimoto (SUBURBIA), with artwork by Jiro Fujita (FJD) and mastering by Calm!

This Ghibli song is a wonderful collaboration between cubismo grafico, the solo project of Takeji "Charbe" Matsuda, who has been active as an important figure in the highly sensitive Japanese indie music culture since the 1990s and expresses his diverse talents in various forms, and singer Kaori Takeda, who, as the vocalist of TICA, gave a new direction to the music scene in the 2000s and whose subsequent works have received tremendous acclaim. The Ghibli song is a cover of Cecile Corbel's "The Neglected Garden," an insert song from Hiromasa Yonebayashi's 2010 film "The Secret World of Arrietty."

This reinterpretation of the original's majestic Irish sound into a groovy and mellow 6/8 rhythm, combined with a diverse drum pattern, freely moving piano, and pizzicato accents, creates a thrilling and captivating arrangement over which a silky yet husky vocalist sings with vibrant energy. It's a wonderful cover that, with its rich ideas, brings out a different kind of charm from the original.