About Gothic Anime Angel
About the Favicon ("Peace Sign/V Sign Miku")
What is Nightcore?
Nightcore is a music movement characterized by editing music tracks to increase their pitch and speed by approximately 35%.
The term "nightcore" was coined by the Norwegian DJs Thomas S. Nilsen (DJ TNT) and Steffen Ojala Søderholm (DJ SOS) in 2001, who together formed the musical duo Nightcore. Their official website gives the following explanation for their name:
"Our name, 'Nightcore', means that we are the core of the night, so you'll dance all night long." - Thomas S. Nilsen & Steffen Ojala Søderholm, 2003
The duo mixed pitched-up and sped-up versions of primarily trance and Eurodance songs, releasing several Nightcore albums which were distributed locally through CD. Funnily enough, despite Nightcore's modern reputation as an Internet-based music movement, Nilsen and Soderholm stated that they never uploaded any of their tracks online and have no idea how their tracks ended up on platforms such as LimeWire and YouTube.
Around 2009, various other people eventually started to make their own Nightcore-style pitch and speed edits of popular songs and upload them to YouTube, typically accompanied by thumbnails and visuals with anime-style artwork, although this was not a characteristic of the music uploaded by the original Nightcore duo.
What is the purpose of this site?
As aforementioned, a quintessential aspect of Nightcore videos on YouTube is the inclusion of anime-style artwork. In fact, the artworks associated with the most popular Nightcore videos have become iconic themselves within Internet culture. However, the sources and origin of these artworks, namely for Nightcore YouTube uploads from roughly 2009-2013, are often unknown. Unfortunately, it was generally not customary for Nightcore creators on YouTube to credit the source and artist for the images they used in their videos in this time period.
Based on my personal observations, a majority of these artworks tend to originate from Japanese eroge visual novels published in the early 2000s and were obscure outside of Japan. Most likely, the (typically not Japanese) Nightcore creators on YouTube looked for "anime art" on search engines and used whatever cool art they could find, which had most likely been indexed from non-Japanese anime image boards (i.e.
Zerochan) or wallpaper websites. My best guess would be that a majority of the time, these Nightcore YouTubers didn't actually have knowledge of the source or the artist of the images that they used in their videos, and thus usually did not put this information into the descriptions of their videos.
As of 2023, the year that I am writing this, the practice of crediting the artist has fortunately become far more recognized in Internet spaces than it was in the era of 2009-2013 Nightcore YouTube videos. Here and there, recent comments on YouTube and other online spaces have been able to identify the sources of many artworks made Internet-famous by Nightcore!
However, I still wish to provide a centralized space on the web for distributing information about the sources and artists of a multitude of artworks associated with popular Nightcore videos uploaded to YouTube in roughly this 2009-2013 time period. In addition, I wish to provide data on the original artists of the music tracks of which the Nightcore edit versions have become viral, as several of them were often sadly eclipsed in popularity by the Nightcore version of their songs. I will generally not be including entries from more recent Nightcore videos as modern Nightcore YouTubers are usually very adept at including this information in their video descriptions already.
In conclusion, my goal was to create a website that allows people to appreciate the artists who made the artworks that bring them major nostalgia through Nightcore videos from the late 2000s/early 2010s (as well as recognizing the original artists of the songs which were featured in these videos!). This online database features information such as the sources and artists of the artwork, the original artist of the song, publishing dates for both the artwork and the Nightcore video, and individually written descriptions with my personal commentary on the source, artwork, or the Nightcore video. It is for this reason that I would like to refer to this website as not only a database, but also an online art museum of sorts :)
I track down all of this information by myself manually, typically using tools such as
SauceNAO as well as anime image boards (i.e.
Zerochan,
Danbooru,
Shuushuu, etc.), to ensure the accuracy of the information that I provide on this website. I hope that my efforts can help some people out there find the origins of artworks that they have admired since the dawn of the Nightcore YouTube scene.
