The Black Mages
The band arranged Uematsu's Final Fantasy video game series-based compositions in a hard rock style often similar to progressive metal, achieved with the additional use of synthesizers.
The second album, The Black Mages II: The Skies Above, was released in 2004 and featured additional pieces besides battle themes including the group's first original song, "Blue Blast ~Winning the Rainbow", which was created for Japanese K-1 fighter Takehiro Murahama.
For their first album they performed in Shibuya and Kanagawa, Japan in 2003 and later released a live video of the first concert on DVD exclusively to Uematsu fanclub members.
In 2000, Square Enix employees Kenichiro Fukui and Tsuyoshi Sekito formed an experimental partnership to compose music for the video game All Star Pro-Wrestling in a rock style.
In 2002, Fukui and Sekito decided to arrange some of the compositions of Nobuo Uematsu, the primary composer for the music of the Final Fantasy series.
Declining at first due to feeling too busy with his composing duties and attempts to become a music producer with his Smile Please label, Uematsu agreed to join them in a single live performance as a keyboardist.
[3] The trio arranged, interpreted, and sequenced ten battle themes from various Final Fantasy titles, with Uematsu as producer; the album was released eponymously on February 19, 2003.
[6] Uematsu continues to play rock arrangements of his music as a part of the band the Earthbound Papas, which performed at the Distant Worlds II concert in 2010.
The album contains a selection of musical tracks from the games, arranged and performed in a hybrid of hard rock and progressive metal by The Black Mages.
Like the previous album, it contains a selection of musical tracks from the games, arranged and performed in a hybrid of hard rock and progressive metal by The Black Mages.
It also includes a non-Final Fantasy track, "Blue Blast — Winning the Rainbow", an original piece that was created for Japanese K-1 fighter Takehiro Murahama.
[11] The line "Maybe I'm a Lion" in the track of the same name was spoken by Alexander O. Smith, a translator for Square Enix and close friend of Okamiya, one of the new members.
While terming the music overall as "excellent", he disliked the vocal arrangements in "Otherworld" and "The Skies Above", finding that the voices of the singers did not match with the songs' instrumentals.
[13] Zane of Square Enix Music Online was less approving of the album, calling it "passable" and saying that the new arrangements gave "mixed results".
Like the previous album, Darkness and Starlight features an original piece, "Life ~ in memory of KEITEN ~", which was composed by Uematsu for Yoshitaka Tagawa, a boy he had met who died of leukemia.
[18] Their next appearance was in the animated film Final Fantasy VII Advent Children and its corresponding soundtrack album, where they played—together with orchestration conducted by Koji Haijima—"Advent: One-Winged Angel", an arrangement of "One-Winged Angel" from Final Fantasy VII originally composed by Uematsu and arranged by Shirō Hamaguchi.
The first of these was the More Friends: Music from Final Fantasy event, held in the Gibson Amphitheatre in Los Angeles, California, on May 16, 2005;[27] the concert was The Black Mages' first appearance in North America.
[28] The band performed "The Rocking Grounds" and "Maybe I'm a Lion" from their second album, and joined with the orchestra for "Advent: One-Winged Angel" as an encore to the concert.
[31] On July 7, 2007, The Black Mages appeared at the Extra: Hyper Game Music Event at Shinkiba Studio Coast in Tokyo.
They were the last of thirteen artists and groups to play at the six-hour event, and performed "Last Battle", "Those Who Fight Further", "Maybe I'm a Lion" and "Clash on the Big Bridge".
