This one didn’t start with a sound.
It started with a mistake.
A melody file that shouldn’t have been in the project folder.
It wasn’t labeled.
It wasn’t approved.
But when we played it…
everyone froze.
Because it felt like Rei.
But no one on the team had written it.
That glitch became the seed of “Phantom Record.”
The idea behind Arc 04 was already clear — a divergence of self, a collapse of consistent memory.
But this track made us feel what it meant to be haunted by a melody you didn’t write — yet recognize with your whole body.
The MV visual prompt came early:
We wanted Rei alone in a data void.
Not dark — blank.
Surrounded by projections of lyrics she doesn’t remember writing.
Her reflection flickers in low-resolution glass. The harmonica doesn’t glow like before — it hums, like something waiting to finish itself.
The lyric line that shattered us was:
「わたしじゃない、でもなくなかった」
(It wasn’t me… but it wasn’t not me either.)
It took two weeks and five translators to let that one breathe in English.
We tried writing over it.
We couldn’t.
From a production standpoint, we layered faint harmonic distortions behind every main chorus — pitched slightly lower than Rei’s voice.
If you wear headphones, you might hear another Rei singing one beat behind.
That’s not an effect.
That’s the core of this song:
the version that didn’t make it still sings.
This was the only MV in Arc 04 where we didn’t storyboard the full ending.
We let the final note ring out… then glitch.
We wanted the listener to wonder:
Was that a system error?
Or was another version of Rei trying to finish the phrase?
Watch it again.
And ask yourself:
If a memory was never yours…
but moved you —
does it still belong to you?