BIOGRAPHY
Soroban was a Japanese indies visual-kei band that started in April 2004 and disbanded a few years later, in August 2006.
Their music sounds like heavy rock, with distorted guitars and wonderful grooves. The band-members are all pretty young but they're really talented and promising, so keep an eye on them!
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Soroban’s history started around April 2002. Yumehito, guitarist and leader, started the band
Primrose together
with the vocalist Ryuuji, bassist Tatsuhi and drummer Yuuya.
Despite their young ages -when they started the band members
were between 14-16-, they had quite some success.
They had a nice number of
songs and they
released a single (although mail-order only). They performed a lot; in the very
beginning in talent shows for teenagers and such, but later they participated in
bigger events.
For a while another guitarist, UZ played with them but
he was only part of the band for a short time.
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Two years later, in April 2004 they changed their name to Soroban (which is Japanese for ‘abacus’). With Primrose they had participated in smaller events, and didn’t appear in any magazines, but with Soroban they seemed determined to make it big. So, with a new name, a new look, and new songs, they started anew.
On June 17th they had their first performance as Soroban at the Ikebukuro Cyber, and on this night they distributed their
first single “Shirokuro radio” for free. They gave away 100 copies, and on the next night they performed at the Takedanobaba area, and gave away another 30 copies. The single sounds quite heavy, lots of guitars, pounding bass and
drums and scream-like vocals. However, it's incredibly catchy!
It’s worth mentioning that Shun, the guitarist of Duel Jewel produced this single.
In the following months they had quite some performances, appeared in the magazine Hevn, and in September they were
featured on the Hevn compilation album ‘Kaizokuban’ with the song “Tenpaku hashi (Kari)”.
On October 6th they had their first one-man at the Akasaka lan. This one-man completely sold out on pre-orders already!
A month later, on the 1st of November, they released the single “–RAM-/Orange Tegami”. It ranked 7th on the Oricon indies charts and it sold out pretty fast. They released a second press of it on December 12th.
The first part of 2005 was devoted to a lot of performances and live-only singles.
They participated in various events, and just to name a few bands they had coupling concerts with: 12012, Joker, Bis, Kalen, Zeek, Ruvie, Henzel, and they had a two-man tour with Shoujo Lolita 23 ku.
Four singles were released, which were only available at lives. Momoiro no ichigo on March 20, the 'twin' singles (but on mini-disc) Charu and Chaarii in May and June, and Misui on August 5th.
On August 24th they finally released a 'normal' single: Sora ni hanabi.
After the summer they continued touring and ended the year with a performance at the Stylish wave countdown event.
Their next release was on January 11th, 2006. Geki Irodori Chappuru was their first mini-album, which contained re-recordings of most of the songs that had been released on live-only singles before.
A line of singles followed, and they released 3 singles; Koudou gestalt, Ginmio Hyderation and Kinmei nouzenharen. They were released in January, February and March, each one of them containing one track.
A few one-man concerts followed, and some of them were sold out as well.
However, after the release of these three singles, it turned very silent around the band. No new concerts were planned or announcements were made about new releases...
In July 2006, an important announcement was made: after 2 years and a few months, Soroban would disband. Because of the same reasons most bands give when they disband: the musical differences, the members weren't feeling the same about the way their music should sound anymore, so they decided to disband.
Their last concert was on August 2nd, on a huge event in four different halls in Tokyo. A sad thing to see such a talented band split up so soon already, but we can only hope they will continue their career in music and hopefully we'll hear something new of them soon!
This biography is copyrighted by me and do not take it without permission.