Scarlet Weather Rhapsodies - Part 1

So I've been considering whether I really want to write about the stuff that came out of Reitaisai or not, and truthfully, I don't think writing about music is particularly compelling either to the writer or the reader, and I don't think that I'm particularly good at even that.  I never write quite what I want to write about the album, and I'm never satisfied with the result.  Honestly, neither should you, if you know anything about music or writing.  Still, I might as well write something.

Reitaisai 9 was very successful.  I do not know much about the games that came out, nor the manga - that'll all be scanlated later (and my Japanese is barely decent enough to get through a four panel comic strip), but the music and PVs were almost invariably awesome.  I'm going to get to the music, but I really want to try something new here and talk about the PVs: two, specifically.

東方夢想夏郷 - A Summer Day's Dream, Second PV
Remember way back when, I talked about those two independent anime projects, both of which were flawed but progressing with new episodes, supposedly?  Probably not, unless you're a Touhou fan reading this, so here's the brief version.  The first project is produced by a studio called Maikaze, who released their first episode a few years ago.  It was...not very good, for a couple of reasons.  Maikaze hired big-name voice actors for their cast of not particularly well written characters, going through their not particularly interesting plot, in a singularly ugly looking world, observed poorly by a poor director.  Yet, a 30 minute Touhou anime episode is still a pretty cool thing, and it's a good thing that, now, we are still assured that progress is being made on the second episode!  What's particularly amusing about this is that they seem to be funding the production by selling the trailers on DVD.  It's a strange sort of crowd funding: produce a trailer, and if the fans buy it, then it gives them the money to follow through.  They're certainly taking their time with this one though.  I can't say I blame them either: they took the cheap route the first time and we ended up with crap.  And, from this new trailer, they seem to be in a good...ish way.

00:27 - Okay, Reimu's hand doesn't have one too many fingers anymore!  Good sign, good sign.
00:32 - *sigh* They're still going with little kid Suika.  These guys did play the games, right?
00:49 - My god, it even sounds like an anime theme song.  ...not a good anime theme song, but...
00:57 - "Aright so in this scene, you watch the moon dramatically, then turn!"  Looks like we got the same director alright.
01:10 - Sweet watch.
01:12 - Alice Margatroid's in this one.  Lots of weird looks of ennui in this trailer, but Alice makes it look awesome.
01:16 - No really, why is Youmu naked?  And have the body of a 12 year old?
01:20 - Ah, she was taking a shower before her fight scene!  I must say, this opening shot kinda impresses me.  They're definitely getting better at this.
01:27 - Not that their editing has improved by too much, but eh, it works.  You know, I just read a manga called Youmu vs Udongein.  An Imizu work, of course.
01:35 - Yep, the animation quality is definitely better this time around.  Now it looks like a low-ish budget television anime rather than a low-ish budget indie production.
01:39 - Player 2 Reimu?  Well, I guess she has to have other clothes.

So yeah, I'm exited.  It's going to suck, but I don't care, because cheesy bad anime is fun.  Honestly, this is what I imagine a real, professional Touhou anime would be like, not Manpuku Jinja's vision, as much as I may like to imagine the production committee would take the show seriously.  It's charming, in a way.

花鳥風月 - Fantasy Kaleidoscope PV
Manpuku Jinja were the other guys: the good ones, who produced the 15 minute adaptation of Perfect Cherry Blossom.  Manpuku Jinja has a good grasp on the feel of Gensokyo, and have far better production values in their work, both in pure animation quality, and in the quality of the design elements.  In fact, it's the charisma of the setting itself that sets theirs apart from anyone else's, I'm willing to say.  Characterization obviously doesn't happen in a PV like this, as it shouldn't, because the focus is Gensokyo itself, as we will see.  I hear they published an art book with this one, which I'd love to get my hands on somehow.

Anyway, they have stated that they are not, in fact, working on a second episode because of money and time, which is okay: they put out quality work anyway.  Their last PV, from Comiket, I did not particularly like for various reasons, but this new one is a return to form.

00:22 - Interesting image.  It's surreal, but it totally feels like something Marisa would do.  Also, maybe a Super Marisa World reference?
00:35 - I think this is the only major shot in the PV I don't really like.  Something is weird about the framing and colors and...well, I don't know.
00:58 - Dear god, I am just in love with this one though. The composition is perfect, the way it draws the eyes along the plane of focus across the shot, Yama's expression, the way the color changes with focal point...just, yes.
01:15 - And Yuuhei Satellite isn't a bad band, either.  The lyrics are pretty neat.  "Kachou fuugetsu" means "all that's beautiful in the world."  Indeed.
01:19 - The old maids of Gensokyo: Yukari, Yuyuko, Kanako, and Eirin.  All of whom are rather generously endowed, it seems.
01:26 - Manpuku Jinja really likes drawing Reimu with wistful expressions.  Huh.
01:29 - They also really like drawing boobs.  Well, who can blame them.
01:45 - We all live in a Lunarian submarine!  Lunarian submarine!  Lunarian submarine!  Seriously though, I'm really not sure what this is about.
02:16 - Yeah, I'll admit, Manpuku Jinja can be fanservice heavy, but at least it's really competent fanservice.
02:23 - Daily life at the Scarlet Devil Mansion.  I'm not sure why those characters have as many fans as they do, but this is a pretty well put together little vignette.
02:32 - Okay, Youmu's fight in Maikaze's trailer does look cool, but not anywhere as cool as this.  Then again, it's not actually a fight scene but a little vignette of her practicing her stuff.  That seems to be mainly what the PV is: a look at the daily lives of Gensokyo's denizens.  I like the idea a whole lot.  Montage theory is pretty great.
02:47 - That's another Manpuku Jinja trope: they love shots of people jumping and turning mid air.  I think there was one like that of Alice in the original Memories of Phantasm, and in their previous PV.  Not one of my favorite things in the world, but eh.
02:53 - Lewd.
02:55 - Reimu's hair ribbon looks like it's about to take off and fly into the porch light.  I like their character designs, but Reimu's really is kinda excessive.

Well, no guesses as to which one is the prodigal child.  Man, it'd really be a shame if these people never got to live up to their potential, because I see a whole, whole lot in these guys.  These PVs remind me of the Daicon III and IV animations by the group that would later become Gainax.  It's not as easy a market to get into these days, but man...what if these guys became a real thing?  Where's their Wings of the Honeamise?  Or are they content with this?

So anyway, the music.


11th Spell 〜 Overflow

Well, album art is not their strength.

I have never talked about xi-on (pronounced, she-on) on this blog before.  They're a metal and hard rock act.  They've got a nice sounds.  They're not as good as Demetori.  And that's about it.  I'd say that the variety in their instrumentation is a very nice feature.  Crow's Claw, Demetori, and Unlucky Morpheus are all very focused on the traditional metal arrangement.  While there's a heck of a lot you can do with that, and honestly, their guitarists can coax more interesting sounds out of their instruments than xi~on, but they don't have quite the aesthetic.  I can't compare this album to any of their previous work, since I haven't heard any, but I'll have to fix that in the future (and once I get a bigger hdd).

So, I won't bother going track by track, because that's boring, so here are my three favorites.  The album has lots and lots of Perfect Cherry Blossom arrangements, and is about 30 minutes, so it works as a nice little concept album.

Overflow is a nice little variation on Yuyuko's theme.  Mostly straight guitar and drums, but with judicious use of sampled strings and shakuhachi.  It's really a strange melody to hear in metal form.  It's nice though, very nice.

広有射怪鳥事 ～ Till When？breaks out the Hammond B3s!  I've honestly never heard a single one in any Touhou arrangement before this (though Crow's Claw's album has one later on, which we'll get to), so it's kinda funny finding it here now.  I feel like I'm listening to ELP, not xi-on.  It doesn't vary very obviously from it's source until the end, but passes through some neat places by the end.  It's not very heavy at all, either.  (track title in English: Hiroari Shoots a Strange Bird)

死霊の夜桜 has some more guitar work, this time, and a very nice drum accompaniment.  Drummers really are important, and they got it down well.  No really, go listen to it.  (English: Cherry Blossoms OF THE DEEEEAAAAD.  Emphasis mine.)

They didn't over-extend themselves with this one.  It's short, but it feels just the right length.  Quality stuff.  Not amazing, not really, but really great, even if just to have on.


Abandoned Dancehall

Guh, slutty bioluminescent Sanae.  Really, Tats?

Another Dancehall album is always welcome.  Honestly, I don't automatically associate Alstroemeria with quality, and I didn't care as much for Killed Dancehall, but I do very unequivocally love this one.  It plays like a very good house set.  A very, very good one.  Like, go find this if you like this stuff.

Integration under the moon of codes is a really great track not by Minoshima.  As it turns out.  It's a long and rather uninteresting intro, but when the song really starts, the brilliance of the way the atmosphere is maintained becomes clear.  Also, the lyrics are about physics.  Which is kinda awesome.

DREAM A DREAM really, really reminds me of Cheek Colours from Harmony, an old-ish school Minoshima album that I think I talked about at one point.  There's a certain dissonance between the synth and vocals at the chorus, and it works wonderfully.  It's pretty airy, almost disco-esque.  But better.

Necro Fantasia (ALR Rewind Remix) is a remix of a song from one of Alstroemeria's Lovelight-era releases, For Your Pieces.  Strangely, I do not have this album *goes to download it*  The original is a good song, and it has absolutely nothing to do with this one, so I don't know why he even mentions that it's a remix.  This song is much more dance oriented, but is no less good.  It's downbeat, but with a strong pace, and excellent feel to it.

Blossom

Purdy.  Mokou's looking not so hot
though.  Huh.

Avidya was a bit of a surprise for me, in retrospect.  I ended up listening to that album more than I did Killed Dancehall.  Syrufit's got his own thing going on, and he does it more consistently sometimes than Minoshima.  He also works a lot with Mei Ayakura, who many artists use, but Syrufit moreso.  Linjin as well, but we'll get to him later.  On Blossom, he uses her exclusively.  A good decision: she's a strong vocalist.  Not the strongest, but reliable, and a friendly enough person, if the livestream a few months back is any indication.

Well, this time, I don't think he beats out Minoshima, but he does tie him for playtime.  Some really great electro here.

Monochrome is a really, really great track.  It starts off kinda low, which is not Mei's strength, but it gets stronger as it goes on, and boy does it have a great progression.  It's got that weird use of mora-phrasing that Syrufit likes to do, which in and of itself isn't remarkable, but overall flow is excellent, and the pathos is great.  I'm loving the instrumentation too.

R.I.N is a bit out of place, isn't it?  ShibayanRecords isn't billed on the cover, but nobody's ever going to mistake his style for anyone else's.  Even Mei sounds different when singing his track.  What sets this track apart even for Shibata-san is the industrial sounding accompaniment.  Also, "nyani ka," in an otherwise serious song.  Rofl.

Cloudy, later fair, reminded me a tiny bit of the Macarena at first.  But only a little, and only at first.  What's more striking is that it's much more house oriented than the rest of the album, and quite vocal-centric.  Strong sounding, I think, is how I'd describe it.  Very strong sounding.

Bossa Nova ToHo

Good to see Remilia getting out of the
castle now and then...I guess...

So yeah, ShibayanRecords doesn't just do electro.  He also does Bossa Nova.  He did some easy-listening-ish stuff before, and I believe that he had a similar album at C81, which I didn't listen to, but it's still kinda odd to think that they both come from the same guy.  I still think he's better at electro, but he's improved his Bossa Nova mojo as well, it seems.  This isn't one of my favorite albums from Reitaisai 9, and it's very telling that two of my recommendations aren't vocals at all, so only go into this if you have a) hdd space to spare or b) like breathy Bossa Nova stuff.  I guess those people exist.

I think it's good to note that the album gets progressively a lot better as it goes on.  Like, a lot better.  Like, I'd probably recommend almost anything after たまにはSUNを, but almost nothing before that.  It's a 36 minute album though, so eh, nothing lost.

Also of note is that he only uses one singer twice: Fukami Chie.  Huh.

たまにはSUNをis like the easy listening tracks of Shibata-san's previous albums, but good.  There's not as much remarkable about it, actually.  (English: Occasionally the Sun...)  Can't find on youtube.

Otemba de Jane-yo is very up-tempo compared to the rest of the album.  Everyone plays really well on this track.  It comes together really well.  Oddly, it doesn't sound much like Cirno's theme at all beyond the first few bars.  (English: I'll be Tomboyish, Then)

Shadow of the boundary has Engrish, I think.  Or maybe it's Flançais.  I honestly can't tell.  Can't find on youtube.

Divine

I'm okay with this.

So, Sound Online is a circle I haven't heard much of lately.  Tsukasa and Minoshima haven't worked on anything together in a while, so I guess that's why: I didn't pay as much attention to him on his own. It turns out that, in the mean time, his style has changed quite a bit.  Or, at least so it seems.  There are only three tracks on this album, both vocal and instrumental versions.  The first two are pretty okay.  The last one is actually pretty neat.

Mochi no Tsuki, Yoi no Utage is an arrangement of Mamizou's theme, which already reminded me a bit of Sound Online.  It's not surprising that this ended up good, both the vocal version and the instrumental, but I'm going with the vocal version, because nobody's uploaded the instrumental.  It's also a curse, because it does sound a heck of a lot like the original.  Still, if Sound Online made another album like this, it'd be pretty sweet, I think.

EastNewSoundBest Vol.2

Yuyuko is busy right now, it seems.
Let's not disturbing her.

So, I downloaded the first volume just before Reitaisai 9.  Didn't care for it too much.  Which is a shame, because EastNewSound is actually pretty good, for the most part.  I say this, yet, if that was their self-proclaimed best, then why did I not care for the album?  How can I say that?  Well, Uncanny Instinct was proof that they're talented, and I've heard individual songs on youtube.  That, and Vol.2 here is actually pretty good.  They've got their eurodance-y aesthetic to them, but after hearing a whole album of their original work, I can definitely say that they do their own thing more often than not, and it's not quite eurodance nor is it quite Touhou.

Compared to the other albums here, this one is pretty long: 58 minutes.

PiPiPiPARU feels like an iosys song, almost, with the lyrics and vocal register.  Well, except that it's actually a pretty decent song too.  Normally, this sort of vocal performance is offputting for me, but the delivery and metering actually make that into an asset, make it desirable.  Also, taught me the word ねたましい.

無炎舞踊≠循環 is basically for Nuclear Fusion what 緋色月下、狂咲ノ絶 was for U.N. Owen Was Her.  I find few other ways to describe it.  As it is the same arranger, from the same composer, this is highly unsurprising.  It is a Good Thing.  Listen to it.

I:solation is pretty much what's good about EastNewSound trance.  In that way, it is both extraordinary and unremarkable.  Huh.

Excelsior

Good cover art?  Good cover art.

I'm really not sure how I want to classify this album, if at all.  It's not big-band, it's not disco, it's not any sort of modern dance music. Not sure, and I don't particularly care: it's a really nice album.  I'm not very familiar with what precisely is normal for Pizuya's Cell.  I only remember them for working on a thing or two with MyonMyon - a metal act.  This isn't a lot of things, but it really isn't metal.  The two members listed on touhouwiki are the arranger - who plays the guitar and writes lyrics - and the pianist.  I don't have complete album information (and I'm too lazy to look it up on the site), so I'm guessing they do lots of collaboration, as their way of making a living.  This time, they've teamed up with the vocalist 3L. 3L is really good, and she sounds especially nice here.

A real class production.  I just wish I knew who to recommend it to, because it is definitely good, whatever it is.

DD -Instrument- has got some neat stuff going on, I'll say.  The flautist knows his stuff, for one.  It's not easy to get a flute to do some of those things.  The call and response is pretty exceptional, and the electronic components lend it a certain something.  Can't find on youtube.

Old Nezumy contains tape noises and an answering machine.  Also, really strong vocals and disco-like accompaniment, but also tape noises and an answering machine.  Because it's awesome.

Original -Instrument- is something I really have very little to say about.  For some reason.  Not on youtube.

実は繊細な貴女とたまに勇敢な私のなんだか騒いでるって話。

｢ながすぎてる名前話｣

Yep, this is a ButaOtome album.  Which means that it's awesome.  ButaOtome is another one of those bands I never really mentioned here except in passing (they had a piano album, which I think I might have mentioned).  They do lots of jazz fusion, blues, folk, and not-precisely-ska stuff.  They also have my favorite singer on the Touhou doujin scene: Ranko.  An amazing voice, and their arrangements (disproportionately from ZUN's music albums) are generally excellent.  Good musicianship in general.  This album, whose name in English translates to A Story of You, Whom are Actually Delicate, and I, Whom am Sometimes Bold, Making a Riot of Some Kind," is certainly well worth your time and hdd space.

丁か半か色即是空

紅い記憶、白い未来

永際の幸

Lightning Discharge

Marisa Kirisame: An Oriental Western
Magician Musician.

Crow's Claw is the good Touhou metal act (discounting xi-on) that's not Demetori.  And there, is the operative argument: not Demetori.  Nobody is Demetori but Demetori, but Crow's Claw does pretty damned well for themselves regardless, and they're certainly more prolific.  They went so far as to publish an independent album - a compilation of original works by themselves and a couple other circles, including Demetori.  Lightning Discharge is an arrangement album, however, and is quite superb.  It's pretty straight metal, and well conceived.  Crow's Claw is good, and this album is too, and I have very little to qualify that with.  Yeah, their drummer doesn't do much in one or two out of the nine tracks, but that's hardly anything.  It's non vocal, it's got pretty great musicianship, and both the arranger and original composer are pretty great.

The Third Eye has the misfortune of having to contend with Demetori's version.  Well, both of them are really good, so perhaps that language is too negative.  Also, I am incredulous that whomever uploaded the video I linked to couldn't find a more...fitting...picture of Satori.  Here's a better one.

Legend of the Great Gods is an incredible name, right?  It is also a great song, fortunately.  It's probably my favorite on the album.  The sense of rhythm is really quite nice.

Rigid Paradise is, basically, Crow's Claw playing something kinda like Rigid Paradise, and I have little more to say about it other than that: of course it's cool.

So anyway, great album, go listen to it if you like metal, but first, I feel like I did not do Demetori's Nada Upasana Pundarika any kind of justice when I talked about it a few months ago.  This album is really great, but if you haven't listened to either, listen to Demetori's first.  It's seriously amazing.

...dammit Crow's Claw, stop reminding me of other albums!

So, I'm going to make this a two part post, because it's already getting ludicrously long, and I still have Poptrick, Trojan Green Asteroid, ZEphyr, and 東方四重奏６ to cover.  I have other things I want to write, and this is taking a ludicrously long time for something that nobody is going to want to read in one sitting.  In the not-too-distant future (next Sunday A.D, let's say), I'll probably talk about Toonami, Sins of a Solar Empire, and a few other things.  If I'm not writing anything else, anyway.


Anyway,

I need to listen to more Fatboy Slim...

Good for the Good God!

Utility for the utility throne!


Ah, the Tau: our friendly neighborhood extremist Space!Utilitarians.  I'm told I can rest assured that the horrible hellfire their fleet used to cleanse those major cities from orbit directly proceeding our joining the Tau Empire ensured the happiness of the majority.  If /tg/ and tvtropes are to be believed, the phrase "good for the good god" came from the gravely mistaken belief by some newcomers that the Tau were the "good guys" of the Warhammer 40k universe.  I am not sure how anyone could possibly come to that conclusion, but then again, I'm inherently suspicious of two things: dem commies and dem God-Emprah-hating xenos.  The Tau happen to be both.  Well, except when they're not.  How could those vile traitors who joined the Tau ever leave the caressing hand of the Imperium?  I haven't the faintest.  Only the God-Emprah knows, I suppose.

Would you believe that this is a lead-in to me talking about music?

Well, it is.  For some reason, I always associate the album Cross by Justice with Warhammer 40k.  I'm not precisely sure how that happened, but it did.  Something about reading through some codex entries at the time, probably.  Whatever the case, for what it's worth, I'm probably the only person in the whole world who has made this connection, so yay me?

Cross

oooOOOOoooEEEEEEeeeeooOOoo〜

Now, you may remember me making a reference to Justice in reference to broken stereo equipment a while back, and I think I have to explain myself.  Justice is actually really neat, but compared to Shibayan, their style is much darker and more aggressive.  The distortion is greater, the dynamics louder, and the tone darker as a whole.  Some features are not dissimilar to brostep, as strange as it is to say.  However, the form is still purely house...well, electro-house, and lacks the distinct reggae flow and time signature, much less wubby bass drops (thank god).  One of these days, I'll have to go on a hunt to see if I can find a good, authentic, Bristol-style dubstep album to talk about, but for now, let there be Justice!

Dear god that was lame.  Should give you a hint to just how professional this review will be, what with the ever so classy track-by-track analysis and sentence fragments.  Anyway, the album opens with a 60s sword-and-sandal movie soundtrack...or so it seems.  This seems entirely appropriate, for a track named Genesis.  The orchestra drops into an funky synth-guitar-thing with nice use of sampled vocals, redoubled with a wubby sounding synth.  The slight chorus in the background give the track a very grandiose, deep feeling, and the heavy, syncopated bass beats hammer the point home, smoothing into a bit of a transition track (I hesitate to call it filler) called Let There Be Light.  Justice seems to be dropping The Book on us with the Biblical themes.  Hey, electronic dance music is exactly the time and place for bombast.  Of the track itself, it adds little stylistically except as a bit of an emotional refractory period.  It does not have as clear a progression, except for the addition of instrumentation.  That is, until the end of the track, where a light, wet synth is introduced, carrying a light theme on top of the base.  D.A.N.C.E follows, and plays on the lighter feel of the end of the previous track, with a more disco-y feel to it, and a Jackson-5-esque vocal section.  If the Jackson-5 wrote stupid lyrics, that is.  I suppose if you're looking for awesome lyrics, electronic dance music probably isn't the place to look.  Unless you're a Touhou Doujin.

So anyway, the next track - Newjack's - instrumentation still has the characteristic Justice open transformer circuit buzz, but the overall style reminds me more of Daft Punk.  The heavily fragmented vocal samples make for a catchy melody, and the chime backing and interludes work well with it.  Then the album takes a turn for the heavy, and goes into Phantom parts 1 and 2.  The main melody is at first carried by what might or might not be a really, really heavily vocoder-ized voice, or might be an exceptionally voice like synthesizer.  Either way, it gives the track a very distinct, unique feeling.  We get an interlude of broken transformer circuits arcing in minor keys, leading back into the main melody with renewed vigor, now with mild un-distorted electric guitar.  Part 2 leads into a logical progression of the first part's themes, except the buzzing synths take the lead, and the vocoderthings take a continuo position.  Disco strings return here, and they give a rather eery feeling, being certainly in keeping with the track, but somehow feeling at odds with the form.  Justice samples at prolifically from all concievable sources, and the finished product, while composed of constituent parts that may on their own make no sense together, when used for Justice's purposes, make for truly unique aesthetic that can only be called Justice's own.

We're given a bit of a refractory period with Valentine.  Compositionally, compared with the heavily sampled tracks that proceeded it, it feels very simple.  Standing on its own, I'm not sure it quite holds up, but it functions very well in the context of the album.  After that comes TTHHEE PPAARRTTYY.  We don't talk about that track.  For what it's worth, this singer does the Ke$ha thing better than Ke$ha.  Regardless,  *skip*  What I really meant was that the next track is DVNO.  This is also a vocal track, though with the saving grace that the actual lyrics are very hard to decipher.  I might have to make a misheard lyrics video for this one.  The vocalist - a male - does not have the most precise voice, but it has an interesting texture, and is expressive to the extent that it lends more to the track than simply another instrument at Justice's disposal.  He reminds me a bit of MGMT's singer, actually.

The next track is Stress, and belongs in an Alfred Hitchcock movie from hell.  I would say there were sawing violins, if they were actually violins, and I would say that there were quavering violins too, if synths could quaver.  Eventually, more samples of instruments that come and go too fast for me to identify give the track more melody, but it's still very much focused on the suspense.  It maintains this atmosphere very well.  I have no idea what DJ would ever play this track in his or her set, but it's pretty damn fascinating as a case study in atmosphere in the age of electronic composition.  And as just being all around awesome.  Speaking of awesome, Waters of Nazareth!  Timpani drums!  Not often you hear those in electronic dance music.  Which is a shame, really.  Also, some is going "guh" into the microphone.  And lots of distortion.  ALL the distortion!  The intro is rather repetitious, but leads into a cool organ section with Justice's signature growly and beepy synth work backing it.  It works exceptionally well.

The final track is One Minute to Midnight, with has some neat, highly compressed and manipulated electric guitar action.  There's not much going on in this track, but it's a very nice lead out to the album.

This is the only Justice album I've listened to in its entirety, but I haven't heard anything quite like what I've heard on Cross.  Shibayan is the closest, having some heavy Justice influence at times, but they both have their own distinct styles, and listening to their albums back to back (I just put on Musou Materialise right now), I have a hard time comparing the two on any level except, perhaps, technologically.  On the other hand, like Shibayan's albums, Cross is far more uniform in style and mood than, say, Daft Punk.  They do not vary from track to track as much, and though Cross does not run into problems of listener fatigue (that I've encountered), this is not their strong point.  Still, it's a singular album that anyone looking for something different in house should sample.

Ah, I feel I should also mention this.  The album itself is not particularly well mastered: it's very loud.  It's not much of a problem, but it's sometimes enough to be noticeable.  It's a shame, really.

Some Other Notes
I'm currently waiting for the Dark Moor album Hall of the Olden Dreams to come from Amazon, at which point I will talk about that.  I've been listening to quite a bit of Dark Moor recently.  They're very good, and I look forward to talking about the album.

I hear Daft Punk will be coming out with a new album, possibly this summer.  I can't wait for more news.

Also in the cue, Reitaisai (a convention where Touhou doujin sell stuff) is coming at the end of this May.  Syrufit will be coming out with a new album, as will TAMusic.  I will likely talk about both, as well as anything else interesting that comes out then.

Until then, enjoy some mega-cheesy fantasy power metal:

DAWNNNNNRIDAAAAAHHHHH~!

¿Omaqué?

From my Pol Phil class "notes."

Okay, so this is going to be an "omake" post.  "Omake" is a Japanese term meaning "bonus."  You see it very often on the Japanese speaking parts of the internet.  Western bloggers have also adopted the term for their own use.  It now means "I don't have anything to say, so I'll just throw a bunch of random shit up and hope it sticks."  Such as, explaining the definition of omake.

End of Evangeliffect

A long time ago, I promised I'd write something about Mass Effect 3.  That never happened.  Now it's been too long for me to write down my thoughts completely uninfluenced by the intervening time: the intervening time during which the whole internet bitched about little else but The Ending.  Admittedly, it's not a good ending, but the point has been belabored for so long that it no longer really interests me (if you want a very nice rundown of the technical details why it sucks, this guy's got it covered).  Here's what I do have to say about it, and the one thing I haven't said yet: Mass Effect could never have "ended" well.  Mass Effect's emotional weight - and a good amount of its narrative - was delivered through direct interaction with its world.  For there not to have been at the very least a disappointing break in gameplay, the denouement must in and of itself have been interactive.  A truly fitting ending would have involved Shepard - or someone, anyway, not necessarily Shep - traveling throughout the galaxy and seeing for herself what sort of shape the galaxy was in after the Reapers, and what direction it was heading.  It could be heartbreaking, it could be inspiring, it could bring closure like little else.  As it is, the game was bound to have ended disappointingly, and now Bioware's going to add more cutscenes to fix the ending, which is more likely to induce Return of the King syndrome than anything else.  If Return of the King had originally ended on Mount Doom with Frodo and Sam about to die after destroying The One Ring, and then later, the six other endings were added in the DVD, I'd have been glad to have seen the six other endings, but I'd still have more respect for the version that ended exactly and precisely when it was supposed to.  It'd still function better as a film.

Anyway, everything else has pretty much been said and done.  The only thing that really bugs me about the internet's response - besides the ludicrous entitlement issues that always disappoint but never surprise - is how some people seem to see the "synthesis" ending as giving the Reapers what they want.  The Reapers want to eradicate advanced civilizations and turn them into Reapers so that the next generation of intelligent civilizations may rise.  Nowhere is transhumanism mentioned in this.  Individuality remains intact.  Multiculturalism remains intact.  The only thing that changed was everyone...glows green I guess?  To be perfectly honest, that's the one thing I can say for certain I thought Bioware did brilliantly right: the ending isn't "good Shepard vs jerkass Shepard."  Pretty much all the major choices before came down to "do the ends justify the means:" the Rachni, the Council, the Collector station, winning that game of poker with Adams.  To be honest, that's deeper than most other games ever tread, but it was still rather frustrating at times.  The Ending, however, was much more nuanced.  When I was at that point in the ending, late at night, before it had really sunken in just how stupid the whole Reaper thing really was, I was actually half-way impressed.  Or at least, so it seemed, then it turned out that it didn't actually mean anything, and I joined the rest of the internet in a moment of silent "what the fuck just happened?"

Oh Hey, More Touhou

Okay, so here's something a bit odd: people keep saying that Imperishable Night is the easiest of the Windows Touhou games, but I can still barely complete the game on normal without slow-modo.  On the other hand, Perfect Cherry Blossom is pretty easy for me, yet it's one of the harder ones for the rest of the internet.  I beat it on normal on my first playthrough: that's something you're not supposed to be able to do in a Touhou game.  When it comes to games like this, I'm a firm believer in "if it's not kicking your ass, turn up the difficulty or gtfo."  Perfect Cherry Blossom is still my favorite Touhou game on account of its soundtrack, art, and design, but I do usually end up playing Hard more often than Normal.  I think the internet and I can agree on one thing though: Subterranean Animism is fucking insane.  Like, I-still-haven't-beaten-the-third-stage-boss insane, and it takes several continues sometimes to get through the second.  Then again, I've really only been playing it during D&D while the rest of the party is taking their turn in initiative, or arguing about loot, so it's not like I've had lots of time to practice.

Anyway, I've lately downloaded and been listening to the album Musou Materialise (for some reason, it's always romanized British style) by ShibayanRecords.  I've written about this album's direct predecessor, and I came to the conclusion that, because of the similar natures of the songs, and Shibayan's own style, it didn't bear extended periods of listening.  Musou Materialize does not encounter this problem.  In fact, it's an improvement in almost every possible way, sounding like what you might expect the love-child of Justice and Daft Punk to sound like, except Japanese.  I am not going to detail it here, but if you like Justice, Daft Punk, Touhou, or all three, then definitely check it out.  The funkiness is overwhelming (and unlike Justice, not as likely to be confused for broken stereo equipment).

Stripe Pattern in a nutshell.  (image rights
belong to him, 訴えないでください)

I still mean to do that article on Touhou doujin manga, but I still have not had the time I wanted.  I shall likely not have that sort of time until school lets out.  This is a shame, since recently, the man known only as SMS Skull 1 got me turned onto an artist called Stripe Pattern.  He has a very distinctive style of art and storytelling that bears further analysis.  While manga - especially, it seems, Touhou manga - is generally quite expressionistic, Stripe Pattern takes it up to a new level.  Moreover, he always has very interesting insights into previously ill-examined characters.  I'm tempted to make Battle Cry required reading or something, for when I do write that article.  Looking at the touhouwiki archives, it looks like KafkaFuura had a hand in translating some of these.  I'll have to ask him about it: some of these translations definitely feel very loose, as if the original made use of lots of double entendre and meaning that didn't quite translate literally.  Not that the dialog is particularly necessary in some of these works.

Ender's Publicist

So, filming of Gavin Hood's adaptation of Orson Scott Card's seminal SciFi novel Ender's Game began at the end of February, in New Orleans.  I don't know what's in New Orleans that they specifically need to shoot there, but who cares, because this film is definitely getting made.  Will it be good?  Damned if I know, but it'll be interesting to see where this goes.  It'll be at least as interesting to see how it's marketed.  With a cast of kids, will they market it like any other YA novel adaptation?  Will they spin it as a summer blockbuster?  How do you handle the marketing of a novel whose cast would fit right into Harry Potter or The Hunger Games, but who today's kids won't remember (or, most likely, even understand)?  You'll get the literary Sci-Fi crowd easily enough: both those who read it when it came out, and those like me who, the discerning nerds we are, picked it up out of curiosity.  Will they be satisfied with that though?  I doubt it.  Films take lots of time and effort, and if they don't try to sell this to a broader audience than that, then they're not doing their job.  Especially if the movie ends up being good.

Whatever the case may be, they've already made at least one overture to we the Ender's Game fans who live on the internet: someone's started a production blog.  It appears to update every week on Wednesday, though my hypothesis may be proven wrong if no new post occurs within the next five hours of me writing this.  The posts set the right tone, in my opinion.  They aren't informative about the film itself (they shouldn't be), but they portray a sense of enthusiasm and excitement for the project.  Whether or not it actually reflects the atmosphere of the production, it's fun to read, and heartening.  After all, I've said many times that when a movie sucks, the two main reasons are almost without fail either the script or the crew's ennui, and I have good reason to believe that the script is at least solid.  Of course, all that really means is that we probably wont be watching it in Riff Club a few years from now.  Movies are strange things.

Anyway, the film's release date is a long way off (November 2013, according to Wikipedia), so I'm not precisely exited about it, per se, but it's an interesting thing to keep tabs on.

Edit: hypothesis confirmed, it does indeed update Wednesdays.  New picture is of Ender's room.  Looks pretty much perfect.

Dusty Cels

If you're an American anime fan, and were born sometime in the early 90s or very late 80s, you probably watched a programming block called Toonami on a basic cable TV channel called Cartoon Network.  Even if you didn't watch it, you probably still heard about how, on April 1st, this previously cancelled block made a return.  For one night, exactly.  Certain parts of the internet exploded with renewed frustration at its cancellation, and desperate hopes that it might return.  For the first time in, perhaps, all of internet history, those hopes actually have some basis in fact: Cartoon Network has not denied that they are considering brining it back, and in fact, has said that those interested should make themselves audible so that they can better evaluate what sort of audience it would get.  I am sorry to say that, since my TV isn't hooked up, I watched a not-quite-legal livestream of it, but if it were to return, I would definitely watch it.  I can think of few better ways to spend a Saturday night than watching awesome, poorly dubbed anime, hosted by Spike Spiegel Roger Smith Grunt Captain Bartlett Steve Blum.

Of course, in all likelihood, Toonami won't be coming back.  Licensing and dubbing anime is a high-tension bet when your audience is so uncertain.  I have reason to believe that they could sustain a pretty decent audience, but there's no way to make that argument in a way that doesn't rely on the hear-say of any number of given 90s kids and internet nerds.  If they were to restart the Toonami block, they'd be jumping off a cliff without making sure the stranger you just met tied the bungee cord right.  Still, since speculation is what I do, suppose that Toonami did start again.  What would they show?  Certainly, I foresee the occasional Trigun, Cowboy BeBop, and Tenchi Muyo! reruns, but they wouldn't survive on nostalgia for long: people would actually realize how awful the dub of Gundam Wing really was.  They would definitely have to license new releases, but what, pray tell, might they license?  The production committees favor shows that cater two Japanese otaku, who watch it on Japanese television, buy the ridiculously expensive Japanese DVD releases, and the hilariously weird Japanese exclusive merchandise.  While there are many on the internet who watch and appreciate Nichijous and such, that's not the sort of show that drew in people to Toonami.  That's been true since the early 2000s, and if you just look at the Wikipedia page, illustrating Toonami's lineup by year, you can see for yourself how much the quality of shows had thinned out.

Once again, then, what would they air?  It would seem a problem, except that I'm feeling rather confident about the direction the Japanese industry is taking.  The last couple of seasons brought us shows like Tiger & Bunny and Madoka Magica, and this season is in the process of giving us things like Jormungand.  I would like to think that it's a sign of the times that Japan is slowly starting to realize that making the occasional non-pandering title now and then is not only feasible, but profitable.  That's all we really need at this point.

So, off the top of my head, here's some new shows, movies, and OVAs that have come out since 2008 that I think Toonami, should it come back, would be remiss to miss:

- Eden of the East + Movies

- The Rebuild of Evangelion films

- Tiger & Bunny

- Puella Magi Madoka Magica

- Jormungand

I haven't seen a lot, so I'm sure there's perfect stuff that I've missed, but pretty much all of those would fit perfectly with what people seem to have loved about Toonami.  The only thing that gives me pause is that first episode of Madoka Magica, which, though I love the series, is still hard for me to sit through.  Here's how it goes: "OMG THIS IMAGERY FUCKING ROCKS AND oh, it's another middle school slice of life show.  Huh.  I have to give it to them: this is the most inane dialog I've ever heard.  Oh wait, what's this now?  A mysterious transfer student?  How impressive.  I'm going to stop watching this now."  That's pretty much exactly what happened the first time I tried to watch it, and then abandoned it, and I'm worried that might be what happens if it aired on Toonami.  Which would be a shame, since it's an awesome show that everyone who has ever watched an anime and liked it should see.

Taking a Jormungander at the New Season

A young boy living with a pimp arms
dealer learns to accept guns in his life.

Anyway, speaking of Jormungand, that's one of this season's shows, and it's awesome.  The writer is Yousuke Kuroda, who also happened to be behind one or two other anime, like Trigun, Tenchi Muyo!, and the Hellsing OVAs.  It's about a former child soldier named Jonah, who hates everyone associated with weapons, and yet travels as a mercenary with an arms dealer named Koko.  Despite his hatred of war and murder, he's come to depend on guns, and has become as dead inside as you'd expect a former child soldier working as a mercenary to be.  Also, lots of gunfights.  The writing is spectacular, of course, but there's something about the character designs that make it work that much better.  Koko is one of the most insidiously menacing looking characters I've ever seen, and Jonah compliments her excellently.  The use of white symbolizing death is not uncommon, but somehow, it works.  I'm not quite sure precisely why it works this time more than others (perhaps it's the way it ties into the characters' mannerisms), but it does.  Of course, this show could easily end up forgettable after all, but if it keeps up at this pace, I'll be very happy.

Bodacious Space Pirates is continuing into 26 episodes, and is still a very well put together thing, but I feel it's lost its way a bit.  The early episodes had a very specific vision of what it wanted to do with Marika's character and the world of the story.  With the introduction of the two princesses, and their storyline, that got muddled a bit.  She's stopped growing, or rather, we've stopped finding out new things about her.  The two new characters have little in the way of depth to take its place.  Cowboy BeBop could get away with that, because Spike, Jet, Faye, and Ed are inherently fun to watch, but Marika and her crew, while fun in context, doesn't really have that quality.  That's not what the show was ever about.  It's still a good show, of course, but not as good.

On the other hand, we have Yoko Kanno and Shinichirou Watanabe of Cowboy BeBop fame making an anime about Jazz, which, for those playing at home, is shorthand for "holy crap this is going to rock."  I need to look up when that's going to air, and if it'll be simulcasted.  Expect to be hearing about this one.

To Make the End of Puns

And now, I must attend to other, far less important matters like homework.  Until then,

Don't you love how villains in old Japanese video games speak?  かっこいいぜ！

Disinterested Lecturer - Touhou Music 101

I talk a lot about music from the series of bullet hell shooters known as Touhou, specifically about works based off of them.  Naturally, anyone coming across this on the internet likely doesn't know what a Touhou is or what music sounds like.  This is problematic.  For one, people won't understand half of what I say.  While it's obvious I don't write this with the idea that people actually read it, it'd be nice if any hypothetical readers were able to understand it.  Also, Touhou music is amazing and people don't know about it: this is a huge problem.

So, to help with this, I've put together a guide to 15 of the most prominent compositions from the Touhou series, along with a short explanation.

The ZUN Scale - Menu Music

F A# C D# C A# F A# C D# C A# F A# C D# C A# F A# C D# C A#...you will hear this on opening almost any of the windows era Touhou games.  It may not be in the same key, or in the same place compositionally, but it will be there.  It gets you in the mood to dodge rain high above the scenery of Gensokyo - a serene yet surreal place where gods have nothing better to do than shoot lots of magic at each other and drink tea and sake.  It's not as often you hear it arranged, but when you do, it's usually the first track on the album.  For instance, R.E.D. from Sound Holic's album Metallic Vampire.  ZUN says the theme sounds "Japanese" to him.  ZUN says that about a lot of his work, and still nobody really knows what he means.  It's definitely a very calm and airy sort of progression, and as ZUN pointed out himself, doesn't sound much like a shooting game.

Bad Apple!! - Elly's Stage Theme (Lotus Land Story)

While arrangers frequently use music from the PC-98 era Touhou games - you still see lots of Casket of Stars and Romantic Children - few of the originals are within the fandom's consciousness.  They're known almost solely by their remixes.  This is mostly because the PC-98 soundtracks were not encoded into mp3 files, and must be played through an emulator.  Bad Apple!! is Elly's stage theme from Lotus Land Story, but is more commonly known because of Alstroemeria Records' seminal work based on it, and the PV that helped make it famous.  The Alstroemeria verison's riff is actually slightly different: it ends up at the bottom of the octave rather than the top of the next.  Its actually kinda odd, being used to the one that ends in A#6 instead of A#5.  It's also a good place to track the progression of ZUN's style, since according to him, this is like his earlier works from before he began making the Touhou games.  Most obviously, all the PC-98 compositions had to be simpler in structure because FM-synth only allowed for so many tones at once, without as much variety in tone type.

Beloved Tomboyish Daughter - Cirno's Theme (Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil)

Cirno is a simple character, and she has a very simple and melodic theme.  ZUN set out to write a stupid sounding song, and in a way, I suppose he succeeded.  It has a certain air of innocence and simplicity about it, certainly.  There's not much complexity to the composition itself: a beat, a bass guitar, and a keyboard part (followed by a piano part).  A few measures into the main body of the piece after the introduction, the keyboard joins the piano, and there is some minor polyphony between them.  This is a popular song to play on the piano due to the simplicity of its arrangement, and yet, one does not too often hear doujin arrangements of it.  In a way, having such an easily recognizable and simple melody makes it hard to make an arrangement of it that doesn't simply take the song verbatim and transpose it onto different instrumentation.  No matter what you do with it, it'll always be Beloved Tomboyish Daughter, and nothing else.

Locked Girl - Patchouli Knowledge's Theme (Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil)

ZUN wrote Locked Girl to be very heavy despite its fast tempo.  He rather succeeded.  The composition is fast, with a constant percussion part and base, but the melody itself has a sort of air of melancholy to it, as well as the grandeur given to it by its form.  The introduction of the piece with a strongly stated melody rather reminds me of some of some of the more bombastic stuff to come out of the late classical and romantic period.  Certainly, Dvorak loved this trope.  We also get introduced to ZUN's love of trumpets here.  Those trumpets appear in freaking everything.  Locked Girl is known in the fandom both on its own, and also for Cool&Create's arrangement of the same name.  Understandably so: both the song and PV are ridiculously cute.  The melody and feel of the song lend itself very well, being already very expressive and voice-like.  At least, that's what I seem to take from it.

Septette for the Dead Princess - Remilia Scarlet's Theme (Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil)

Remilia claims to be a descendent of Dracula himself.  This is a rather obvious lie, but nobody calls her out on it: she has nothing to prove, and would rather sit inside and drink tea all day anyway.  Because of this, her theme doesn't sound much like a final boss theme at all.  It's got ZUN's signature percussion, and despite the complexities of its many layers, has a strong central theme to it.  It's one of the most "charismatic" songs from the Touhou games, befitting Scarlet.  It's not actually a septette: there's percussion and trumpet, piano, and some other synthesized instruments that don't quite have any equivalents.  Unlike most of his other pieces, it doesn't have a real prominent continuo or bass part, not like, say, Locked Girl anyway.  ZUN says it's a Jazz-Fusion sort of piece...ZUN's descriptions can be pretty weird sometimes.  Given how he writes most of this stuff while drunk, this is unsurprising.

U.N. Owen Was Her? - Flandre Scarlet's Theme (Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil)

Flandre is gonna kill you all.

But at least the last thing you hear will be here theme song.  It's probably the second most well known composition from Touhou besides for Bad Apple!! and Doll Judgement.  It's been spread around the internet as McRoll'd and as John Stump's Death Waltz (the latter was how I found Touhou to begin with), some people never even realizing what it actually was.  It's a pretty strange piece structurally.  You have the intro segment with the rapid fire riff, string continuo, and weirdly non-metric percussion, which goes into the much simpler coda that transitions to the main melody.  It's a simple melody, as always, and a powerful one.  There's a tempo shift as it goes into the next segment, which is several octaves lower and serves as a coda back into the melody.  ZUN said he had a lot of fun writing this one.  It definitely comes through.  It's interesting to note that the weirdness with the tempo and meter creates some pretty big problems for people who have tried to make arrangements of it.  Incidentally, here is the arrangement through which I discovered Touhou in the first place.  It's like Scott Joplin decided to write a piano rag that could only be played on player piano.

Doll Judgement - Alice Margatroid's Theme (Perfect Cherry Blossom)

Kirai...kirai LAABIN~
Dare ga, dare ga KAN BI ALI FAU TSU
Doushite?  Naze kashira...
WAI WAI WAI WAI MISSHU A LOT FOEBAA~

For doubtlessly a good 90% of Touhou fans, they will feel the urge to sing these lyrics on hearing this song.  This is called IOSYSitis, and it kills untold multitudes each year.  In all seriousness, the IOSYS arrangement called Marisa Stole the Precious Thing (listen at your own peril) is probably why it's so well known, but it'd be one of my favorites regardless.  It's got ZUN's ever common busy piano work, which works with some synth sounds to create some rather eerie feeling polyphonies, that lead without coda into the main melody.  ZUN says that he composed this one with renewed vigor, and that he wanted to emphasize how laid back these girls are as they blast each other with arcane power for fun and profit.  I don't think he quite nailed the laid back part, not with the erie feeling and melancholic melody.  A lot of ZUN's better work feels kinda melancholic, come to think of it.  That, and nostalgic, but this is definitely not a nostalgic piece.

Ancient Temple - Youmu Konpaku's Stage Theme (Perfect Cherry Blossom)

If you were to ask me which composition most embodied ZUN's style, it'd definitely be Ancient Temple.  It's got the eeriness and nostalgia, the laid back feeling, the pentatonic scales, the key shifts, and the semiquavers, all conversing the same ideas and melodies.  It doesn't feel much like any other soundtrack I've heard, and doesn't fall neatly into any compositional category besides romanticism.  ZUN said (I feel like I'm quoting Confucius or something) that it expresses a "nostalgia that is deep within every Japanese and the frantic feeling that arises when someone is approaching."  For once, ZUN's commentary actually makes a whole lot of sense: the pentatonic scale and shinto-like flutes and percussion seem very nostalgic, and yet, I also get a strong feeling of ZUN despite it.  I wonder if ZUN would want to live in Gensokyo...he always comes through so strongly here.  The music helps define the world, so it's very much his world, reflecting his beliefs.

Love Colored Master Spark - Marisa Kirisame's Theme (Imperishable Night)
This one isn't nostalgic at all though.  Marisa climbs through windows and borrows peoples books with no intention of returning them.  She spends all her time coming up with inventive and impractical spells and teaching youkai lessons in respect with her love-colored magic.  When it comes down to it though, make no mistake: she's chaotic, but chaotic good, and her theme reflects it perfectly.  It's got the ZUN trumpets, and an electric guitar part, a heavy beat, and lots of energy.  It's got a grandiose sort of feeling, but it's also very directed.  I don't really have much to say about it compositionally, except that it seems to have a very FM-synth like continuo part during some segments.  Perhaps it is a callback to Casket of Stars, one of her themes from the PC-98 era.  Come to think of it, Marisa has a lot of themes, but this is really the only one you ever hear about.  Anyway, it's rather direct for ZUN - it's very game-like.  He doesn't do game-like often.

Maiden's Capriccio - Reimu Hakurei's Theme (Imperishable Night)

This is the theme of Touhou's other rather dubious protagonist.  It is not actually a capriccio.  Like Love Colored Master Spark, it's a very game-like and direct.  It fast in tempo, and it moves along quite rapidly structurally too.  Unlike Marisa's theme, it has a strange feeling of valor and power that really doesn't feel like Reimu.  She's the protagonist of these games only when people yell at her enough to actually do her job and keep Gensokyo from falling apart while she pretends to clean up the shrine and drinks tea on the veranda. I think it's the fact that it feels like a victory march played in double time, with the constant trumpet melody and simple structure.

Maiden's Capriccio is also a victim of IOSYSitis, with their seminal earworm Neko Miko Reimu.  Sing it with me:

Neko Miko Reimu, ai shiteru! (Cat-eared Miko Reimu, I love you.)
Neko Miko Reimu, nani shiteru? (Cat-eared Miko Reimu, the hell are you doing?)
Neko Miko Reimu, shuran yurari... (Cat-eared Miko Reimu, hopelessly drunk...)
Neko Miko Reimu, muron furari! (Cat-eared Miko Reimu, and aimless, of course.)

Lunatic Eyes - Reisen Udongein Inaba's Theme (Imperishable Night)
Actually, come to think of it, most of Imperishable Night's soundtrack was pretty heavy.  However, there's nothing so "heroic" in Lunatic Eyes as Maiden's Capriccio or Love Colored Master Spark.  It's actually a rather spooky theme, which is fitting for an encounter with an uncanny lunarian rabbit in the middle of a bamboo forest during an unnaturally long night.  The frantic lead-in piano and synth to the kinda hard-rock-ish melody feels like an idea I've heard before somewhere, and not just in other soundtracks either.  I think the defining feature of this piece is how its A melody is a restatement of the same riffs in different keys.  I think there must be something inherent to that construction that resonates with us as being "frantic" or "insane."  Anyway, Lunatic Eyes also has a well known IOSYS arrangement called Stops At the Affected Area and Immediately Dissolves.  It will not leave you singing any lyrics, only saying to yourself "wh...what just happened to me?"  I think this song is the closest I'll ever come to an acid trip.  There's rabbits...and everyone is speaking nonsense...and some girl who looks like Robin Hood if he were a girl and dressed like a nurse talking about suppositories...and now they're playing DDR...WHAT'S HAPPENING?

Flowering Night - Sakuya Izayoi's Theme (Phantasmagoria of Flower View)

Sakuya had a theme in Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil, but this one is probably her better one, even though I hear arrangements of both with equal regularity.  It's a softer feel to it than her other theme, though it also feels a lot more generic in form and structure.  It's got a simple melody without too many moving parts.  It's A segment goes C G F# G F# G A G F# G D E B A B A B D B A B in various keys over and over, unless it's doing the B segment, which does something else over and over again.  This, of course, is not necessarily a bad thing, it's just a trait it has.  ZUN said that he wanted this one to sound more human, and at the very least, he made it sound not nearly as noisy and cluttered as Lunar Dial (her theme from Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil).  It's another one of those pieces one doesn't see too many arranges for, except on piano.  It lends itself quite well to piano (I even taught it to myself for the computer keyboard - it's not difficult either).

The Gensokyo the Gods Loved - Nitori's Stage Theme (Mountain of Faith)

In a way, you can call this "Gensokyo's theme."  ZUN wrote this to be a liberal and melodious piece to reflect the scenery of Gensokyo that appears to Marisa or Reimu as they enter the Youkai mountain: a place of majesty and beauty where mythic beings live apart from humans, unused to them.  For this reason, it's a simple piece, with a strong but complex melody stated in different keys by ZUN trumpets and piano, with his usual percussion and subtle FM-synth continuo.  Unlike, say, Ancient Temple, this composition isn't generally associated with the boss it precedes - Nitori Kawashiro.  For this reason, it made a good choice for Yuuhei Satellite to arrange for the OP to Manpuku Jinja's Memories of Phantasm: The Spring Snow Incident.  Given how well The Spring Snow Incident embodies the soul of the Touhou games, it was a good choice.

Naitive Faith - Suwako Moriya's Theme (Mountain of Faith)

Gensokyo has many gods, and yet, none.  To ordinary humans living there, even the lowly fairies are gods, not to mention the human magicians and mikos that can strive even with the real gods.  This is the theme of a god: a rather childish looking god with a hat that looks like it has googly eyes stuck on it.  Such is Touhou.  Befitting such a character is a rapid, childish sounding theme.  ZUN used lots of piano in Mountain of Faith, and it shows up here, doubled up with some sort of synth string.  In structure, it's not unlike The Gensokyo the Gods Loved, except far more rapid and game-like.

It suffers from IOSYSitis, at least, to people who understand some Japanese.  The song in question is Kero⑨Destiny, which turns it into the worlds weirdest childrens' song.  Odd how the life of a several thousand year old god who once led an army has been simplified to that of a child.  There's a lot to be said about Suwako's character in general, really.

Nuclear Fusion - Utsuho Reiuji's Theme (Subterranean Animism)
Utsuho Reiuji - better known as Okuu or Chernobyl-tan to fans - is the most outright "villainous" boss character of the Touhou games, but not because she means to be.  She was a hell-raven who obtained the power to control nuclear reactions and misheard some voice that she thought told her to destroy the surface world.  A misunderstanding or not, in terms of sheer power and dangerous intent, she's one of the most formidable characters in Touhou, and her theme - Solar Sect of Mystic Wisdom ~ Nuclear Fusion - reflects this.  ZUN tried to make it as "boss-like" as possible, and gave us a very heavy and complex piece with trumpets and pianoforte and heavy percussion.  It starts with a descending scale reiterated in different keys, starting strong, and going into an A melody, and flowing naturally into the main B melody: a strongly stated, dangerous piece, aided by the persistent percussion, and yet always remaining clear.  Though they are both final boss themes, it's interesting to note how diametrically opposed Septette for the Dead Princess and Nuclear Fusion are.

Personally, I consider Demetori's version almost canon.  The original may as well be metal anyway.

Homework Assignment:
Now that you've been introduced to the barest essentials of the Touhou musical canon, if you've got another 20 minutes, here is an excellent piano medley, which includes all of the songs mentioned here.  It highlights some of the problems encountered when trying to arrange these compositions, as well as ways in which these problems can be turned into features.

Here are some of the better known doujin composers:
TAMusic: Makes good chamber music, crappy electronic-chamber hybrid.
WAVE: Arranges for a real orchestra, forgets what they were arranging.
Virus Key: Arranges for a midi orchestra, adds faux choir to ALL the things.
Buta-Otome: Makes cool fusion arrangements of Magical Astronomy.  Also, sometimes actual Touhou.
Alstroemeria Records: Makes house, sometimes quotes Touhou and calls it an arrangement.
Syrufit: Makes electronica and engrish.
Demetori: Makes a lot of incredibly awesome noise.
Xi~On: Makes slightly less noise, slightly less awesome.
ShibayanRecords: Makes bad easy listening, kick-ass electronic music.
Unlucky Morpheus: Makes kick-ass Jazz, kinda neat speed metal.
EastNewSound: Makes you forget you're listening to pop.
Sound Online: Doesn't make much nowadays, but used to make really clean sounding electronica.
Sound Holic: Makes lots of different stuff with varying degrees of awesome.
Cool&Create: Makes alternative rock, funny sounds into the microphone.
Tomoya: Makes awesome piano music, awful recordings.
REDALiCE: Doesn't make much anymore either, but used to make lots of really fast techno.
Yuuhei Satellite: Makes awesome PVs and electronic music.
IOSYS: Makes absolutely no fucking sense.

Compound Backlog Increase - Issue 3

Yay, this isn't anywhere near on time.  I started writing it a week or so ago, but that never happened.  I had too much stuff to do.  I still do have a lot of crap to do, actually, and it feels a bit like the whole damn academic sky is deciding to fall on my humble head all at once, but that's unimportant.

To the blog, I mean.

Anyway, this one is about crap I've been watching.  I can't decide how structured I want this to be.  I don't feel much like writing long tracts right now, so probably pretty broken.

Bodacious Space Pirates

It's kinda like this, except not at all.

Well, in Japanese it was called Mouretsu Pirates, but that's boring, so I'll call it by its English name.  Can you believe there are actually people who don't like that title?  It sounds like the most fun thing ever...well, assuming you like fun, and all.  Also, assuming you didn't live through the 80s when people actually said "bodacious;" then I can imagine it being annoying.  Fortunately, I'm a 90s kid, so yay.

Anyway, the show - so far - is about an ordinary-high-school-girl who is heir to a pirate spaceship, and the whole thing is a bildungsroman where...

...okay, if I spell out the premise like that, it sounds intensely awful, and then I'd be doing a disservice to the show.  I won't lie and say it's not trope heavy: it's trope heavy.  It's not a deconstruction either: the tropes are being played with, certainly, even occasionally subverted, but there is nothing edgy or groundbreaking here.  The thing with Bodacious Space Pirates is, even though it's only seven episodes in (eight, if you're watching fansubs or a paying member of crunchyroll - I am not), while it has these tropes, there's always a level deeper than what meets the eye that turns what would be surface level cliches into rather interesting characters, and an otherwise standard setup into surprisingly intricate science fiction of the sort not normally seen outside of literature.  While this alone does not a show make, it's well made, and rather fun in a way that few shows nowadays are.

As I was saying, it's about a girl who becomes the captain of the pirate ship Bentenmaru, a vessel handed down to her by her mother, operated under a letter of marque.  Technically, this makes them Bodacious Space Privateers, but since it takes five or so episodes for her to even come to the decision to take up the offer, I suppose the emphasis isn't really on the "pirate" part of the title.  The show sets up the protagonist, Marika, and her life before being a space pirate before anything else.  As it's a 26 episode series, it has more than enough time to do this, and I think this sort of leisurely pace helps ground the show quite well.  We get a good sense of Marika's motivations and character, and a good sense of the general mood of the show (unless the unlikely happens and things take an Evangelion-like turn, but this show is too tightly produced for that).

I get the odd sense that this is a project that the director and writer got more exited about than it deserved from its conception.  It's undeniable that the tropes here pander very much to the merchandise-buying Japanese otaku.  The opening credits seem like someone looked at a list of theme songs from successful otaku-bait anime, chose some elements at random, and hashed something together from that.  They feel like the opening credits to the show this by all rights should be, but somewhere along the lines, someone with talent got exited and started writing actual characters behind the tropes, and thinking up how the mechanics of future space actually work.  I seem to remember in particular something that happened early on with the mysterious-transfer-student, where with one line she manages to not so much subvert her character type but build underneath it into something still recognizable as a mysterious-transfer-student, yet divergent in some fundamental way.  It's a shame that what and when this effective piece of writing actually was, of course...but it happened, I swear.  I remember that, at least.  Derp.

I shouldn't have to mention that it has a bunch of really heavy handed self-realization metaphors - it comes with the territory, but maybe I have a weakness to that sort of thing in the framework of a space opera.  Somehow, it doesn't evoke much narm bathos in me.  So far, anyway.

It also gets points for not being over the top with fanservice, which, given how in the future, people seem okay with wearing skirts on spaceships in null gravity, is rather surprising.  I can't remember which of the first classic Sci-Fi writers it was who first pointed out the logistics of such things.  Asimov, I believe it was.  He seems like that kind of guy.

The Sky Crawlers

It's a bit like this...

Mamoru Oshii is probably Japan's second most visible auteur in the west, second to Miyazaki.  Oshii directed the adaptation of Shirou Masamune's manga Ghost in the Shell, a work which explored themes of transhumanism and the mind/body problem in the context of cyborgs doing cool things in future Japan, with lots of gunfights and (totally symbolic) nudity.  It partially inspired The Matrix, and is one of the few films that people will go to besides the works of Hayao Miyazaki upon being asked what anime is.  Oshii's filmography also includes the Patlabor films, none of which I've seen, but which I hear are quite excellent.  His films are known for having very sparse dialog, and yet, also for ridiculously dense - and sometimes contextless - exposition.  He has stated outright that in his films, visual elements come first, before story, and before characters.  Meaning he emphasizes visual storytelling and atmosphere to create meaning, as opposed to dialog.  In a way, he's Quentin Tarantino's polar opposite.

The Sky Crawlers is about a young fighter pilot who, knowing no other purpose than being a fighter pilot and accepting his eventual death as a given, goes through the motions of life without much care or motivation, only with a sense of malaise.  As all the pilots, he does not remember where he was a year ago, and likely wont remember where he was a year from now.  The pilots are "kildren" - likely clones of various other pilots - perpetually young, though whether this is because of genetics or because none of them live long enough to grow up is never quite made clear.  The young fighter pilot flies for Rostock, a private military corporation waging war against another PMC called Lautern.  They are disconnected from the rest of the world, waging their war visibly, but never intersecting: only there in the back of society's mind.  There is a nominal antagonist in the form of Teacher, an unbeatable ace flying for Lautern, but defeating him is only tangentially related - though important thematically - to what's going on.  The film is focused on Yuuichi (the main character) and his existential problems, which is conversed mostly through scenes where he and another character come to silent realizations, up to and including the final shot, which is held for a good 30 seconds, and involves the dog standing around before deciding to join the others and walking offscreen.

It also involves cool planes tearing the crap out of one another.  That happens.

Oshii has stated the film is meant to be a commentary on the malaise of Japanese youth in general, but also specifically of otaku who are content to consume entertainment of tired tropes reiterated over and over again rather than living actual lives with real motivations.  As Yuuichi himself says while one may travel the same path over again, it's always possible to have new experiences.  However, I don't think I really have much to say about this, so if you want to read a good analysis of the film's main theme, check out Justin Sevakis' review here.  It is a theme well served by almost every aspect of the film, though perhaps not obvious enough that it'd be apparent to many viewers.

However, it also appears to me that the metaphor of the road traveled down repeatedly, and yet new experiences being possible can be applied to any sort of genre film.  A film which takes a certain framework, with the initiative of the writer and director, can say something new or different while still retaining its shape.  As a matter of fact, I am tempted to say that Bodacious Space Pirates provides an excellent example of this (though I am pessimistic about the prospects of it saying anything truly new about self-determination).  Oshii believes the industry as is to be creatively bankrupt, and yet his own Ghost in the Shell certainly has genre elements, so it's not too much of a stretch to believe that this might be intentional.  All this reminds me a bit of Neon Genesis Evangelion, which frames the issue in a similar, though far more hard-line way: Anno believes that true originality in anime is mostly impossible, and that everything must inevitably be conversed through recycled elements.  I rather think that Oshii would disagree (and he might point to Anno's own work to prove it).

What I found rather striking about the film that I'm fairly sure was not intentional on Oshii's part was the way it depicted - or rather, mirrored - the life of a fighter pilot as it might have been during, say, the Battle of Britain.  The film is very quiet for most of its length, punctuated at times with periods of life-or-death struggle.  Part of the film's premise is the fact that these pilots might be called upon at any time, and may at any time die, which I imagine was not a situation unfamiliar to those of the RAF.  What made the pilots of the RAF different, of course, was that they had motivation, purpose, and personality.

Of course, when aerial conflict does happen, it's really freaking sweet.  Oshii is not a dry art film director, and I am doing a disservice to him with this dry article.  The animation of the planes is videogame-like 3d, in contrast with the flat and ghostly characters.  The use of CG is very conspicuous, but perhaps because it does not try to hide, it is not a problem.  The aerial sequences are "breathtaking" and "stunning" and all those adjectives that people seem to love throwing at beautiful aerial sequences.

Also, Engrish, Engrish everywhere, Engrish so you start wondering if you're really the one who's saying it wrong.

Other Stuff

Seeing it in thumbnail form is kinda depressing, actually.

I was originally planning on talking about Tree of Life as well, but I don't think I really have enough to say about it for a full length spiel.  In short, it's a really freaking well directed film: it captures something deep about the human experience in its imagery and atmosphere.  These characters feel incredibly real and compelling, and the cinematography is easily the best I've seen all year.  Yet, like 2001, I can't help but feel that the themes that it actually tries to converse are rather simplistic and ill-fitting the feat of filmmaking serving them.  While I enjoyed the film, something inside me rejects it at a level that I can't really recommend the film other than as an interesting piece of art, much less call it anything like a favorite.  At least this film has more of an actual structure than 2001, though I don't really see the point in the "creation of the world" scene in the beginning, other than as a rather sarcastic response to the question "why are things this way?"  It's beautiful, but if your film's plot synopsis includes the line "the universe was created," then your film better be about gods, and certainly not a Texas family in the 1950s.

I don't think Tree of Life really deserves the oscar for best picture, but Terrance Malik definitely deserves the award for achievement in directing, and Emmanuel Luzbeki way deserves the award for cinematography, even though it does a disservice to Robert Richardson, Hugo's cinematographer.

Incidentally, I hear Terrence Malik convinced the special effects artist who did 2001's stargate sequence to come out of retirement just to do this film.  I'm not surprised.

Don't you see that releases like these are necessary for
the industry to survive this new market?

Puella Magi Madoka Magica is coming out on DVD and BluRay!  Four episodes at a time.  For 30 dollars each installment.  Over four months.

...yeah...

The first installment (containing the first four of PMMM's twelve episodes) came out earlier this February, released by Aniplex.  Aniplex follows the Japanese model, which is to release shows slowly and at a high price, but with a bunch of collectors items packaged with it.  This model serves to make a profit only off of the ones who are guaranteed to buy it: the otaku.  It's a model that has worked in Japan, and I suppose it's a model that makes very good sense for a market that generally sees anime as a disposable form of entertainment.  However, that does not make it any less ridiculous that a 12 episode series - one that is best suited to be marathoned over a short period of time - costs 90 dollars over four months.  I fully intend to buy this show.  But I have not yet.  I am hoping that eventually it'll come out in a box set for, ideally, not 90 dollars.  However, there is absolutely no guarantee that Aniplex will ever do that.  They already have it streaming on CrunchyRoll, so perhaps it doesn't even make any business sense to do so.  I'm worried that a year from now, there will still be no word on a box set, and it'll be already out of print.

I'd imagine the scenes inside the witches' barriers would look quite excellent on BluRay.  Except my laptop doesn't do BluRay.  Damn proprietary media formats...

Madoka Magica is one of those shows that I often worry about forgetting why it was I liked it in the first place.  Being able to watch it all the way through again - legally - would be very nice indeed.

Speaking of things I want to re-watch, I also still want to see Rebuild of Evangelion 2.22 again.  I saw it in the theatre, once, and my impressions of it were strong, and yet, only of the film as a whole.  I want to watch it again and get a more detailed impression, especially since it was so (seemingly) awesome.  I wonder whether I should get it from Netflix and waste my parents' money by taking up a slot, or just get it on DVD and waste my parents' money that way...

Man, I really need to find a part time writing job on the internet somewhere just so I can have some money I can actually spend on stuff that's not food or school supplies.  Then again, it's not like I could show anyone this blog as an example of my writing, not with the severe lack of effort I put into it.

And Another Thing,
Since I'm pretty sure I won't be crippled with work, I'll probably finally be getting around to writing that thing on Touhou Tonari tomorrow.  Probably.  If I don't decide to do something else instead.

It's a good thing I'm doing a variety now, because this spring is going to be a spring of epic gaming.  Here are some games that are coming out (or have come out) that I'm likely going to be picking up:

- Mass Effect 3 //Well duh.
- IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Steel //So I can get my ass kicked online by people with xbox flightsticks.
- SSX //One of the few parts of my childhood I don't mind returning.
- Asura's Wrath //Once it goes down in price...a lot.
- The Witcher 2 //Well, if I have time for another really long story-focused game.

That, and I'm still slowly making my way through the Touhou games.  I wish I could run them full screen, that'd make it quite a bit easier not make some of the sillier mistakes.

But that'll all be tomorrow.