Unlucky Morpheus Trivia — 18 Entries
18 sourced facts about Unlucky Morpheus.
Trivia
A band that started at doujin sales events, their songs have been available on Daiichikosho's DAM karaoke system since October 2019. Their own site announced it and carries a link to their DAM artist page.
The band treat their two catalogues quite differently, and say why on their own site. The Touhou Project arrangement records are derivative works, so they may only be distributed the way the original author permits, which means doujin shops; they are not supplied to Amazon or Disk Union, and the band warn that a Touhou arrangement CD found on Amazon is an unauthorised resale. The original records, by contrast, go into the ordinary trade through the usual channels.
The two title tracks of the 2018 EP CADAVER / REVADAC are one piece of music read in both directions: play the score of CADAVER backwards and you get REVADAC, as the band's own discography puts it, and the titles are the same word spelled both ways. Two official videos exist for the pair, and one of them puts the score on screen beside the performance so a viewer can watch the trick work.
"U.F.O. - U Feel Overjoyed! -", released on 1 April 2023, is not a cover of somebody else's song but of the band's own. The original had come out under the name of the singer Tokoyami Towa, sponsored by Nissin's Yakisoba U.F.O., and it was composed by Shiren with words by Fuki — two members of this band. The description of the official music video calls this recording a Self Cover Ver.
The March 2025 single "SAKURA chevalier" was written as the theme song of the KADOKAWA Sakura Knights, a team in the professional mahjong M.League. The release page of the band's label, FABTONE, states it.
This band began as an anime-song covers group. Fuki told an interviewer in 2017 that around 2007 she, Shiren and some of the instrumentalists from Light Bringer decided to put together a relaxed band playing anime songs, and that this was where she met Shiren for the first time. The covers band lasted about a year; when it broke up the two of them wanted to keep working together, and Unlucky Morpheus came out of that.
The first CDs were made at home. Fuki has described printing the sleeves double-sided herself, cutting them out and fitting them into cases, two hundred times over; Shiren says all two hundred sold at the first event the band attended. Selling two hundred copies at a merchandise table in one night is hard when fewer than two hundred people come through the door, as Fuki put it — which is what a doujin sales event meant for a band like this.
For years the singer Fuki used a separate name, Tenge Fuyuki, for this band and no other. She explained it herself in a 2017 interview: in Light Bringer she was credited as Fuki, and the alternative name belonged to Unlucky Morpheus alone. The band's current profile page credits her as Fuki here as well.
Shiren, the guitarist who writes and arranges everything this band records, has played alongside it in Yousei Teikoku and Denkishiki Karen Ongaku Shuudan. Fuki introduced him that way in a 2017 interview, while explaining how Unlucky Morpheus had started.
The band played outside Japan for the first time on 5 October 2019, headlining the second day of Metal Matsuri, a two-day festival at the O2 Academy Islington in London, on a bill with Bridear, Fate Gear, Blood Stain Child and AYA1000RR. The bassist Hiroyuki Ogawa said the following year that it was their first time abroad and had felt rather like a school trip.
The covers album Loud Playing Workshop, released in January 2021, is not credited to Unlucky Morpheus but to QUADRATUM From Unlucky Morpheus, the band's four instrumentalists. The bassist Hiroyuki Ogawa said at the time that one reason the project happened was the state of Shiren's arm, which had not yet healed, and that putting something out with just the four players seemed like an interesting thing to do.
The 2022 album evolution was the first Unlucky Morpheus album to use a photographic sleeve. Fuki said so when it came out, adding that having the singer's face on the cover felt very much like a Japanese rock record.
Mahjong turns up a second time. The title track of the 2026 album Gate of Hell existed before work on the record began, and it is used as the opening film of the twenty-fifth Jan'ou-sen A1 League run by the Japan Professional Mahjong Association. Shiren said when the album came out that he had written the piece for that purpose in the first place.
Shiren has called "Onikobe" the song at the centre of Gate of Hell. It came out of the band's 2025 headline tour Ouka Kenran no Jin, which leaned on cherry-blossom imagery in both the costumes and the set: having done that, he felt there was room for a different kind of Japanese-sounding song, and wrote this one to the album's brief of dark, heavy and violent. The same interview notes that its lyric takes Seishi Yokomizo's novel The Devil's Ballad as its starting point.
"Blink of an eye", track nine of Gate of Heaven, is a song Shiren wrote when Puku, the dog his family kept, died. He has said he sat down at the piano thinking that making something in exactly that kind of pain is what living as a musician means, and that he wrote it without considering whether it would suit Unlucky Morpheus at all. Fuki wrote the words after he had talked through what was on his mind.
The plan to make Gate of Heaven and Gate of Hell as a pair goes back, as Shiren remembers it, to about January 2025, when he told a musician friend he intended to make two albums. The starting point was "Sekai Rinne" in the summer of 2024: rather than put songs that accessible on the same record as the violent ones, he decided both would be better served by being set apart.
The band's best Oricon placing belongs to a video release: the Blu-ray of 15th Anniversary Live Tour 2024 REINCARNATION Live at TOYOSU PIT, out on 4 June 2025, reached number 10 on the weekly chart and stayed on it for seven weeks. Their best for an album is number 15, for Unfinished in 2020, and for a single number 24, for Takiyashahime the same year.
On 6 June 2026 the band staged the first festival to carry their own name, UNLUCKY FES 2026, at CLUB CITTA' in Kawasaki. Five acts played: Unlucky Morpheus themselves, JILUKA, Sable Hills, NEMOPHILA and Unholy Orpheus, the members' other project.