Welcome to the Crowdsourcing Mornings segment! Every weekday morning, Geek Alabama talks about and features one crowdsourcing project from crowdsourcing sites such as, Indiegogo, and others. The hope with Crowdsourcing Mornings is to feature and help a project be successful and reach its fundraising goal. Please enjoy today’s featured project!
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Castle & Vergobi is releasing their second album: a collection of violin and piano arrangements celebrating some of the most iconic Studio Ghibli scores ever written.
Matthew Castle and Luke Vergobi previously collaborated on Matthew’s album Classical Encore, which charted at number eight on the Billboard Classical charts in November 2024. That experience affirmed something they had already felt for years while making music together: this partnership deserved its own name, its own sound, and its own future. This new album marks the first official release under the duo name Castle & Vergobi.
This project features music from Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Ponyo, Princess Mononoke, and The Boy and the Heron. Twelve sweeping tracks, each lovingly arranged for violin and piano, reimagining the melodies that defined entire childhoods and continue to move audiences around the world.
Every piece on this album was originally composed by the incomparable Joe Hisaishi, whose longtime collaboration with director Hayao Miyazaki shaped the emotional heartbeat of Studio Ghibli. His music is wonder, tenderness, adventure, melancholy, and hope all at once. This album is our way of honoring that legacy while offering something new and intimate through the voice of violin and piano.
Over the past year, we have been arranging, rehearsing, refining, and dreaming about this record. Now we are ready to bring it into a professional studio and turn it into something truly special.
Your support will help fund the studio space, sound engineers, production, mixing, and mastering needed to create an album that does justice to this extraordinary music.
Backing this campaign means helping two independent classical musicians create an album with the resources it deserves.
Studio Ghibli’s music is deeply emotional and technically demanding. Capturing it properly requires a professional recording space, experienced engineers, and thoughtful production. Your support directly enables us to step into that space and work with the people who can help bring out every breath, bow stroke, and nuance in these performances.
This campaign is also about community. Many of us grew up with these films. Their music comforted us, inspired us, and stayed with us long after the credits rolled. By backing this project, you are helping transform that shared love into something tangible that can live in people’s homes, headphones, and hearts.
You are not just pre-ordering an album. You are helping create it.
As of January 16th, this project has raised $4,500 of their $10,000 goal. This project has 29 days left to raise the $10,000 or it will not be funded. For a pledge of $15, you will get one digital download. For a pledge of $30, you will get one signed CD. To learn more and to pledge money, go to: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/castleandvergobi/simply-ghibli?
Categories: Crowdsourcing Mornings Stuff
