Lurker > Toxtricity

21th
Game: Imperium
Title: Boss 2
Composer: Tenpei Sato, Tatsuya Sato, Hiroki Uematsu
Nominator: @FL81
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsEPSBlkuVU

So the start of this song apparently entirely adds up to just being 4/4. But you would never guess given how insane that accent pattern is. But I suppose I'm trying to say, this is more like a "weird rhythm" (erratic feeling choice of which notes get highlighted) rather than "weird barline placement" (odd time)

[5+4+4+4+4+5+5+1]/16 is what's going on here. is that clear enough? ok i will type something even more convoluted looking that explains it more precisely:

[1+1+1+2]+[1+1+2]+[1+1+2]+[1+1+2]+[1+1+2]+[1+1+1+2]+[1+1+1+2]+[1]

that clear things up?! now you can head bang to that part NO problem, right.?!

anyway the craziest thing about that is the single [1] at the end. it prevents this from being entirely 4s and 5s, and makes the loop point of this idea actually involve a /6/, if you combine that 1 with the first 5. there's not even really any thing to prevent you from feeling it as a 6, which only discombobulates it all even further, and I LOVE AMBIGUITY OF INTRICATE RHYTHMS OH MY GOD i love that so much

The chord changes are pretty bizarre too. Every time I hear this I feel like the flow is perfect. It begins with something sorta like djenty prog metal, and once it becomes rhythmically conventional it instead swaps the focus from [rhythmic oddities] to [tonal oddities]. This whiplash is pretty important to me actually I think...because it makes for a powerful like...energy shift. I can't really describe this in a non abstract way, but the intro is like the warning about incoming danger: unpredictable---the next section is facing that danger, and learning exactly how frightening and incomprehensible it truly is, even more than you'd have thought

Tenpei Sato worked on this ost?! I can't find much if anything about the other two composers, so no idea how to know who wrote this song, but if it's tenpei sato---way proggier than anything i'd heard by him if so. and i already liked that guy to begin with

here's my silly attempt at a visualizer for this one...:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq5UKxslqzE

it was very difficult with this particular song to get a cleanly timed and comprehensible piano roll layer to the visualizer for various reasons (i could try again later tho if you want). which is a shame, since i really wanted to make it clear to display exactly how strange the scales being used are and all that. i can still talk about it of course: i LOVE the portions where everything's moving in parallel, which IS visible even in that above visual mess. the parts that aren't this parallel movement stuff are super chaotic with so much going on at once too, and it's musically challenging to the point i would imagine a lot of people percieve it as total randomness. i certainly can't pick up and understand everything going on

i think what i like here is how many notes move by whole steps, which to me has always felt "proggy" when focused on, even the natural sequences of whole steps that show up within the most normal major scale. this song is like....using those

i suppose it's mostly actually all 'diatonic', the same sets of notes as a typical major/minor scale, but using really strange modes. i could list them but it's not really using the modes in a like discernable functional way, so it kinda loses meaning in some ways to describe it. it's using things like "locrian" (ie, B to B on all white keys) [insert 40 page debate about how locrian does not exist], but only if you interpret it in a certain way (honestly, i think the fact that locrian is a "weird mode" to the point of almost being a meme in how hard-to-use it is considered to be,,,,even in 1992, would be likely what this song was thought of as having been fixating on as a set of notes. because this song is obviously intentionally "strange" feeling and when you're coming up with fringe things to inject, well that's a pretty perfect one. even if others might not hear the same thing you do)

everything i just said should be taken with a grain of salt tho because it's like...changing scales and changing tonal center constantly with like 0 warning, to the point that it's probably best to not even think about what scales are being used and to just memorize the weird notes that you will be playing on the piano if you want to play this song on the piano.

i would say this is legit one of the strangest songs nominated for my topic in some ways, mainly compositionally. it goes from overtly "serious prog" bizarre, to "a 5 year old could make this?" bizarre, to "WHAT" mind explosions. like i'm not sure where the line even is in this tune for which parts are which of the things i just said. It reminds me a lot of over-nove in a way, proggy but in a way that's like "fuck you" almost punk-prog way. this doesn't give a shit about grandiose presentation or actually impressing anyone, it's wacky for the sake of being wacky, pissing in the face of any perception of musical "rules" rebelliously, and i love that!

hahaha oh my god; what are the chances of that actually existing and me putting those two noms right next to each other

ELIMINATION TWENTY-FIVE

?) hombad46 (Average placement: 141.75)

you were all over the map! you still managed to hit a number of tracks that were quite my thing! mostly things i was familiar with (though the trauma team/trauma center tracks i quite liked, and were definitely new to me). even with the familiar ones, it was still nice to be reminded of why i like what i like, and think about it in a context like this. your set of noms was one where i think i can tell you were trying to find picks that'd line up with the sorta stuff i said i liked a lot, and i'd say you did a good job at that. thanks for the selection!

22th
Game: Undertale
Title: Here we are
Composer: Toby Fox
Nominator: @hombad46
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y49b8aiQVBg

i had almost a reaction of disbelief when i found out that this was really a thing in this game. i have a huge thing for "incomprehensible chimera creatures that are not meant to exist and are hidden away in a secret lab" as a trope or whatever, it's one of my favorite things aesthetically and conceptually as a fiction basis basically. so the fact that this idea, presented itself with a song with odd time and cool transposing chord pads?!?! i was very sold! really i had not expected my favorite song in the game to line up with what was my favorite part of the game as well in many ways. the atmosphere of the presentation was pretty far considering the self-imposed limits visually. i actually sorta had it spoiled a bit too much before experiencing it, wish i could've done it organically without knowing what was going to happen. in fact a large motivation of me completing undertale was because i knew this part of the game existed and i really wanted to see it (i wasn't the biggest fan of the game, but i KNEW i would like this part, so it was my primary motivation for getting through it basically---i wanted to hear this in context! in the end, it was worth it just to experience this for real, with my own control over movement immersing me just a bit more slightly in)

this track really opens uip to me when the piano comes in and you're really starting to get other interactions with these constantly modulating chords; they otherwise might not have as much meaning and may come across as just like "rave chord stab" type existence, where there isn't necesarily any compositional relevance to the thing they do, but the piano ensures that there's some interaction going on where you have to pay attention to how this makes the tonal center flip up and down constantly.

i've also always liked the percussion in this track when it comes in, there's some lightly tonal elements to the drum loops, and reversed feeling sounds. it honestly sounds sorta like a mechanical groove made out of scrapped machine parts, which is well...quite fitting. it feels like an abandoned laboratory no question. but in a strangely funky, hopeful way. this is scary, and sad, but also not?

one element that's tethered to the game itself, is the realization that this track is actually referenced in alphys's theme. it took me forever to realize it, but there's a whole section of her cute tune, that descends into 5 with pretty much these chords and stuff. it's definitely intentional, and is of course as everyone knows one of the endless examples of this soundtrack self-referencing itself like crazy. but i always find that sorta thing very effective. I think the exact way toby's music works in terms of setting every scene, and making sure the music means something in relation to it, is a lot more powerful than any individual track itself. something i realize more and more about why i like what i do from it. it's honestly a big part of why i like video game soundtracks, i like hearing alternate variants and further and further distorting iterations of themes between different songs, that give them all different meanings

oh yeah, i had actually made a GRaVE error on my blog, i said that this song was "all 5/4", but there's at least one extra beat just before :44, making a 6/4 bar there.

23th
Game: Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne *Remix
Title: Fiend
Composer: Kenichi Tsuchiya, clipping., turdl3 [SiIvaGunner Rip]
Nominator: @DoctorJimmy133
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwq6YgRYaRA

since this is a mashup, for reference point, here are the two things it is combining:

Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne - Fiend
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1WeimmTGF4

clipping. - Story 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbU9UUwxBxA

this is pretty funny to me how almost accidentally it winds up lining up even more to my tastes than either the original smt track or original clipping track do. and i already quite loved both!!! as of recent times in particular: i like rapping (i used to not). and i obviously like odd time, so i've always been a pretty big fan of clipping's forays into that combo (definitely one of my favorite artists in the category)! But this mashup adds the own flavor of coolness of smt3's production to a track i really really liked all layers of already! and adds tonal elements that are really engaging and feel like a dramatic video game. and honestly it fits just as well with the lyrics as the original in another way as well. I do wish that the balance of this mashup let me hear each layer a bit more evenly though, but the humor comes from the fact that you're taking an smt song that already has some rhythmically similar elements to the clipping track. both play quite a bit with the way groups of 2 or 3 would feel layered in different combos, and stuff like that. so when moments like :51 hit (even if edited), it REALLY works so well.

honestly, i legit get chills from this, this isn't just "funny" it's like, taking two very serious tracks, and layering them, in ways that maybe make me smile in terms of "heh, that works", but in terms of emotion, it's like the ramped up emotion that each song had already given me doubled! i feel the intensity of the 'story' and it's a lot more deeply alarming when it's this level of tension and drama in it, maybe unfittingly intensely so? maybe. but i think i'm seeing it almost as an alternate universe where the lyrics are told from a different type of mind. the backing of the original story2, makes me feel that it is told from a normally more chill, and now panicked guy, who's panicked now for good reason. this smt version of story2, makes me feel instead that this story is told from the mind of someone who's always a ball of anxiety and constantly comes up with delusional horrible worst-case-scenarios that never happen. except this one happens, and validates all their worst fears

one thing i wil lsay is the timesig change map of this song is actually a bit different than what i would write for the original clipping example itself. this is like 3/8 -> 2/4 -> 5/8 -> 6/8 -> 7/8 -> 4/4 -> 3/4(with triplets) -> 4/4(with triplets) -> 5/4(with layered 5/8 vocals) -> 3/8 -> 7/8. basically, because of the multilayered /constant/ 3 vs 2 or triplets in the smt layer of this, it means you dont' really have a reason to interpret a sharp tempo change when the big moment comes in at 1:28

this reminds me of when my friend made me make 'mashups of Death Grips with random sega genesis songs and they were very silly

24rd
Game: The Silver Case
Title: SUPER MIKUMO BROS. [FUKUDA REMIX]
Composer: Masafumi Takada, Jun Fukuda
Nominator: @Place
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVYanXKYjSQ

sounds like KAZUO HANZAWA THE SIMPSONS. super carnival chromatic but in the BEST way. atonal, bizarre synth sounds, 90s. nice gflitchy start and end. i think the first time i heard this i didn't really conceptualize that the start had an actual meaning, of like a guy trying to learn to play this weird song on the guitar, starting and stopping that cassette tape, that's so cool. and then the song starts 'for real' and it's like you're in his dizzy dream

this song reminds me a lot of this very strange youtube video of a song that is not really what it says that it is but is still extremely cool
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieq_-CMvxZA

hmm as SUPER MIKUMO BROS. [FUKUDA REMIX] goes and continues to go; it keeps adding and developing more layers, and i really appreciate the segueing transitions between these different realms. we have the ICY 90s bell sounds tethering it all together, but its like the train track taking you around the dizzy crazy hellscape non-euclidian backwards realm where there are the evil upside down head guys who laugh at you when you are confused in their maze.

god 3:45 is so funky somehow..

i have said this on board 8 before but i'm not sure if ever in place's presence. which is that i have a tendency to associate these dark and sorta goofy chromatic songs as being like a waitress on roller skates at a diner and the floor is pink and blue checkerboard square tiles infinitely but it's like...they are falling over because they slipped on a banana peel, aand the visual style goes for unsettling angles, unrealistically wide camera lenses, seeing this checker pattern distort (Actually what i am imagining essentially is scenery in The Brave Little Toaster that is almost exactly like this environmentally, just without the people in it)

ioh ok i should explain why this reminds me of Norio Hanzawa; i said "kazuo hanzawa" which was the WROG name (it is essentially now known to be a mistranslated name) . but i said "the simpsons" which was right but also sort of wrong because the real thing this sounds like, both compositionally AND timbrally is The Stretch Panic original soundtrack. here is the entire soundtrack if you would like to play with that
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZITLX-hvHjQ

but i guess i should link a The Simpsons song too so here is one of that for you as well
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T5XV5h4nk8

honestly I never bothered to get a sense of how cool Jun Fukuda specifically is. I fixated mostly on Masafumi Takada directly when i was going through all of his work in the past which i mentioned earlier in the topic. and most scenarios with jun fukuda it's not even necessarily disambiguated so i didn't get a sense to see what this friend of his was like, but this remix makes it pretty clear that SOMETHING adventurous is going on in this guy's mind

overall a track bursting at the seams with interesting ideas rhythmically (i didn't even mention the fading in and out triplet secret that you don't notice because it is so 'subtle') and tonally (crazy chromatic carnival) and instrumentally( every sound and sound 'desig'n in this song is so brilliantally crafted just like an evil castle dungeon. this really feels like a trippy artsy adult cartoon that represents "hell" that i would accidentally see when i am 6 that i am too afraid of and become traumatized by how scary that is

25st
Game: This is the Police 2
Title: Step Aside
Composer: Ben Matthews
Nominator: @kaonashi1
https://bossbattlerecords.bandcamp.com/track/step-aside

oh man; you know, i don't think i even quite comprehended how important certain elements would eventually become to me here when this was nominated. but this is VERY "tough cool guy" music; solving i suppose that void i mentioned earlier, of my being frustrated that music that sounds "edgy" tends to avoid complex harmonies ...but i LIKE edgy. I want edgy music with cool harmonies why i cant i have tha??!t.......but here we got edgy music with HAYATO MATSUO PIANO BLOOD all over the floor. yeah, i'm going to say that word; wait for it---------(quartal). both individual quartal chords, and piano lines jumping around in their angular fourths lines that sound like a circuit board game. they fill the space up with such a beautiful crystalline energy of uncertainty. it's the most 'vivid' color to me in more gritty track overall, and it does a great job being the OH MY GOD THESE NOTES ARE SO GOOLC

i regularly have complained about blues scale in the past, but i think it's really not that in itself that i ever had a problem with, it was simply the evoked imagery to me. often times a use of it will sound uncomfortably like the kinda old people who would be unpleasant to be around who are wrappedu p in non-relatable traditions from the year 1940 that cause damage to me. but blues scale used in a more 'modern' feeling way, that's where it's like shadow the hedgehog instead, and i LOVE shadow the hedgehog....

this song is actually ridiculously _Umbreon, thinking about it. because it's both the jazz side and the ;shadow the hedgehog; side of that; and sometimes the balance isn't quite allowing both to be heard clear

i remember you commenting about this nomination, hoping that i would think this is the "good type of jazz"...well...you nailed it i guess haha. A genre i am notoriously picky about basically BECAUSE of liking it a ton and having such a history with it. but i think this gets there without being explicitly "jazz fusion" which is kinda interesting too...i mean it is fusion, but it if i showed this to most people, unlike most "jazz fusion" they would be able to say that they think this is 'jazz'. iof i asked them what genre it is, as opposed to chick corea elektric band music where if i asked them what genre it is they would say "mario kart" or "persona vibes genre"

you know, i don't even notice the fact that this is in 7/4 sometimes. this isn't even because it does anything to smooth over the barline, but usually i find 5 and 7 the "obvious" odd timesigs that i quickly notice because they're shorter, and simpler, so often more heavy and repetetive than weirder ones. but this track i think actually becomes non-obvious to me because of the heaviness of the entire thing?!

the guitar at 1:50 is REALLY making me think of something, specific, i'm not entirely sure what it's making me think of but it is probably Allan Holdsworth. this'd make sense with the faster stuff later on in the solo, COOL solo.

i can't even decide what my favorite layer is here. i mean it's obviously that piano, but what if it's not ?! WHAT IF my favorite part is the*a quartal happens in the song again* ok my favorite part is the piano.

a lot of earlier jazz tracks brought back bad memories of dedicating so much of my life to jazz stuff. but this one? the memories from this track are entirely positive, hugely positive

this song reminds me why i like jazz.

hmm what do i do now? What else should i say next? I know i will talk about some jazz songs that this song remidns me of. here is the 5th one that this made me think of:

Allan Holdsworth - Metal Fatigue
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FM2sCA1Gxc

tthough maybe i should link the first one that it made me think of too; this one purely about the mood of the brass to me:

Bob Mintzer - Computer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGmuttFIcqw

hmm but it probably ACTUALLY sounds more like this song than any of the other songs i linked:

Panzerballett - "Take Five"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM4W3qaNfng

anoither fun song popping into my head:

Tribal Tech - Mech X
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtLWI3VAf6E

ok that's enough links to 'jazz' songs that are loosely adjacent to this one; i hope you have enjoyed them and this writeup

26nd
Game: Pikmin 2
Title: Red Chasm
Composer: Hajime Wakai, Kazumi Totaka
Nominator: @-hotdogturtle--
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW9x8KdTJoE

i see some claims that this song is actually Kazumi Totaka specifically (who initially wasn't even thought to have composed anything for the game, and still may have not have actually composed a single song for it). AT first i understood this as a completely unsubstantiated claim. the claim is actually based on an idea i often get annoyed that people DONT acknowledge (that in nintendo games: music director often simultaneously means 'composer', but the music director won't be doubly credited under the 'composer' field in the credits, even if they composed lots of songs for the game [in recent nintendo games, this should be practically assumed]) BUT this game is actually before nintendo even started leaning toward that trend of crediting style! So to me it really seemed unlikely. on top of that, there's really no indication that one song would be one composer or the other---or so i thought...! There is apparently some hidden directories that contain a "wakai" folder and "totaka" folder, and this song is described in the totaka folder. tho i wouldn't take this as a composer confirmation myself, as that could mean a lot of things (which of the two was the one to log the file into the game files, which of the two was responsible for implementing an already written song into the game, etc etc). I instinctively lean toawrd the idea that this is Hajime Wakai, but i at least know it's not completely random guess that people are saying this is totaka

anyway, i said earlier that Hajime Wakai is like a top 20 composer for me now, and stuff like this is largely why (unless the rumors are true and this song is not him,...of course...if it wasn't, that wouldn't change how much i like him, or this song, of course). it's honestly largely thanks to YOU hot dog turtle that you awakened me to how bonkers crazy cool the whole pikmin series of music is, which got me noticing the same threads i like about wakai in zelda games, starfox games, etc (and even totaka's weirder side as well). you nominating these pikmins toppled my list of favorite artists and nintendo osts upside-down and made me re think about which game soundtracks are the ones that make me so happy like that

but since "Who did it" is a bit of a controversy apparently i wilil just talk about the traits, rather than the composers* (*disclaimer: i fail to adhere to this only a couple sentences away)--- THE traits i like about this are basically the prog influence. see; hajime wakai REALLY likes emerson lake and palmer and do you know what notes they got a lot of people to play more ofte [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartal_and_quintal_harmony ] ((there are definitely cases of Kazumi Totaka liking those notes as well. See:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNOYu7LPsmw

so anyways those notes happen in some REALLY FUCKING COOL Ways in this song HOLY fuck O H MY GOD i love this song so much; i can't believei ranked it this low (like really i don't even know how it was down here, for some reason i remmebered it as like 9th place ((note: 26th place is like.....9.7 or some shit already at this poin t, so this is not low.... you fool))))

this actually starts pretty plain and unassuming, just sporadic blips of elements, and i have no clue that i'm going to come to love it as deeply as i eventually do later. I just think of it as a fun quirky song that sounds like funny little creatures that look like they are plants. it begins bouncy simply by the wacky syncopation it drenches itself with; it's odd that. it's not musically doing anything i associate with bouncy, it's like, sporadic random generated feeling blips, but something about the placement of each funky bone, that's making me picture those little pikmin guys getting larger and smaller in a cartoony pulsation pattern that looks like those bouncy EVERYTHINg in "Heffalumps and Woozles" music video from winnie the pooh.

i know this structure is largely just because of splicing together the variants of the track, but i get a huge kick out of the gradual natural build this track has from feeling totally, like.,,this very "in one place" form of atonal. you do not hear that much movement between a repeating set of note options initially. but then FINALLY there's a QUARTAL RUN at :55 on cool pitch bends on the weird wood wind. and again at 1:17, and this keeps happening and i consider this to sorta signal the track opening up its options for level of freedom. by 3:10 there's like , the crazy bass clarinet constantly runnin my ears with all these unexpected tones. AND IT JUST KEEPS GOING FURTHER, from this initial claustrophobic state to this super open and expansive state. like further discovering how deep a chasm goes after an initial misjudgement

that particular NEW quartal run at 3:41 is SO GOOD oh my goodness, and then the BIG MOMENT: 3:56. That's when the 70s prog/fusion harmonized analog synth come in and i am in love. it now means that EVERY note is a transposing chord now, on that cool, organic bendy sound. it's like a semitransparent orange slithering Caecilians across the landscape and also it is giant compared to that small size that you are. this track has now jumped to slot 26 (9, probably, on rerank. what the fuck is this song. i CANT HANDLE IT).

a comparison i should probably make here is toejam and early
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEBjbqO0vK0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4eUuNvIw90

(ok now that i am listening to red chasm more, i am starting to see parallels to mario artist polygon studio...i can dig the kazumi totaka theory...slightly more than before)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_b5SZb5n6g

i honestly REALLY wanted to make a channel visualizer thingy for red chasm, especially because i wanted to display stuff that'd highlight all the note sequences i like and then i could take screenshots of when those parts happen so i will feel so happy. but it seems like it would actually be incredibly difficult to extract something particularly useful , despite how much work has been done on understanding this soundtrack's format. so despite hours of looking up random stuff at various levels that is not happening even though this is definitely a "sample-based chiptune"

ELIMINATION TWENTY-FOUR

?) Zyxyz0 (Average placement: 109.75)

you've always had a knack for being fascinated by a lot of the same obscurities as me. 90s edutainment, obscure old mac/pc stuff in general, everything from janky midi/tracker stuff, to fully produced gust-esque ancient-technofuture worlds i can immerse myself in---enthusiastically in all these cases. i've always seen your taste as pretty diverse, but especially since your guessing games i've realized how astounding it is that you hit so many oddball corners that few others share.

all that certainly showed up in your noms, but it's not just those surface source or stylistic descriptors that clicked with me. they were compositionally and instrumentally totally my thing most of the time, entomorph was a highlight in the sense of that being a new discovery of a style i'd been looking for more of in vgm especially. thanks so much for submitting!

27rd
Game: Realmz *Remix
Title: Shop Music (2006 zyx remix)
Composer: Andy/Banal, Zyxyz0
Nominator: @Zyxyz0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvUYHc6NWtI

OH man; so, you have no idea how much i loved the original already. but this "remix" is...well . let me explain: one of my favorite hard-to-find traits in music, is actually the presence of breakbeats/drum loops that DO NOT play at the same tempo as the rest of the song. (so, in music theory terms "polyrhythmic" breakbeats). In this song, i assume 5 year old you went into the tracker and just like fucked up the drum loop timings so that they do not sound like a song anymore. and the end result is that i like it more...((i mean, i assume you suspected this would be the case, otherwise you would not have nommed it))

so not only is the drum loop stretched to be a different tempo from the rest of the song, but it almost /feels/ like irrational time to me, even if that's not quite what it is

so to make that not be like a buzzword; let me explain what that means here. irrational time means that instead of the end of a bar being something that lines up with a 16th note grid, instead it ends with something else (triplet grid, quintplet grid, etc). basically a timesig without a 4-8-16 at the bottom, but instead things like "11/12" can happen, at least for fleeting moments. everyone's heard triplets, but usually there's just 3 or 6 or 12 evenly stretched across one 4/4 bar or whatever and that's it. What if the number of triplets was something that wasn't a multiple of 3 then? That's what happens here, at least, the way this drum loop is stretched.......the way I hear it is 12+10+10 in triplets. This adds up to 32 segments, and actually lines up with a single 4/4 bar of the rest of the song, so they're not actually triplets, just weird 16ths. but since the accents are so starkly based on these hits in groups of 3, what i'm hearing is a different tempo. I'm hearing [4/4 + 10/12 + 10/12], at...whatever tempo that is that makes that make sense. however, because it's technically not /really/ that, it's like...normal. it's actually just REALLY FUCKED UP 4/4. because i mean, obviously; that is what it is!! the drum loop channel i guess was, screwed around with in some way, to where it realigned the accent positions into bouncy groups of 3. but since those are so starkly and regimentedly beaten into me in the way this sounds, instead i get those ridiculous patterns. it's very ..................||virgil donati||, basically. [3+3+3+3]+[3+3+3+1]+[3+3+3+1]

anyway most other elements here are things i already loved about the original song, AMAZING thick synth pad chords on some of the coolest 90s synth pad sounds in this world. and that 'rain' synth preset...all the echoy, ethereal expanse of evoking this album cover perfectly despite that not even being the context of this song. it's been a favorite for a decently long time, so i was happy to see this bizarre version of it nominated. it appeals to me in not even an endearing way, but a genuinely hypnotized and fascinated way.

the kind of 90s tracker songs i like most are the ones that make a big point out of being spacious within their grainy file size limits. filling themselves with stretched samples of synth pad chords, and a lot of use of l/r space carefully, and i think that definitely describes this one.

hmm this is going to be a totally random comparison, but this version of this song with this demolished drum loop makes me think of this track by ATB (ATB - Obsession)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDXqNEkEwZw

especially because of the similar chill oceanic mood being combined with that disjointed pseudo-off aspect

anyways thank you SO MUCH for sharing this absolutely crazy thing. there are probably not that many people in the world who would appreciate this as much as i do, for so many reasons at once.

ELIMINATION TWENTY-THREE

?) deogenerate (Average placement: 123.5)

you definitely like a lot of the same things as me but you also like every single video game song so that might be a bit misleading

anyway you picked pretty well. was totally surprised at this popn one in particular which i would've never guessed could exist in that series.

Marginal Consciousness and High-Speed Lift i was already familiar with; but they left a particularly strong mark on me as well. them being nommed here reminded me of why i like certain types of things i like i guess. all the crazy machine-generated nonsense that marginal consciousness accidentally turned into; and all the odd progressions i like in high speed lift, along with just general enthusiasm for mmz series' really distinct sound (and unique sound format!)

thank you for sharing the songs that you enjoy!

28st
Game: pop'n music 8
Title: Eien to Iu Na no Biyaku
Composer: Shunsuke Kida
Nominator: @banshiryuu
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl_reDBFqeQ

so here we have literally a twelve tone serialism pop'n music tune?! hahaha. ok not exactly that but pretty close?! this sorta systematic-ish atonal music is one of my favorite categories, one that's often mocked as being totally devoid of potential to be understood by a listener, more specific than typical atonal stuff, it delibarately fixates on sequences of notes that rapidly use up all of thier pitch classes without repating any one pitch class more often than another so that they sound like a crazy horror movies. but hey, it tickles my ears pretty well! I remember when i was a little kid i was like "that's so fucked up and scary that you play some pitch classes more often than other ones, what would happen if you tried to make a song where you played all of them equally and obfuscated any sense of the tonal center......... " and then i became arnold. but i didn't know what that was until i was a lot older and when i learned that i thought it was cool because the reason i like music is basically because i like numbers and puzzles and stuff so when music is more like that i get more happy.

anyway, this song isn't quite precisely using that technique, i'm loosely transcribing/playing along right now and there's lots of note repeats or certain pitch classes that don't wind up getting hit. but the point is it is twelve-tone centric, and goes out of its way to choose notes that are NOT the notes that can be used to define a tonal center or conventional scale. it's probably harder to write something that "sounds as random" as this does, if you were literally playing random notes it'd probably incidentally sound more normal than this. so i'm pretty impressed with the way this has gone about that actually!! but it does the job well to avoid any ability for the listener to perceive a center (imo the point of this type of music, largely, a lot of the time anyway---to keep you hanging and untethered to ability to anticipate or feel comfortable, in one place. to keep you lost and uncertain). and all this is exactly what creates the maximum possible beautiful tension here

this reminds me a lot of the "rio/avant-prog" (rio stands for "rock in opposition") category of prog which is my FAVORITE category of prog because of so many reasons (i will go into this more intensely later in the topic, if i remember. you will be able to figure out why if you are a genius). if asked favorite genre (And allowed to be that specific) at gunpoint i'd probably say rock in opposition (aka "avant-prog") is my favorite genre of music. .,...a good example of why this song reminds me of that simultaneously nebulous and specific category of music is this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vpKn4UtsFs

even the fact that this 5uu's song starts with the slow atonal stuff, and eventually takes the same ideas but puts it into something a bit more energetic and fun! (man i would KILL to hear an actual rock in opposition pastiche in a rhythm game...like imagine if thins was in a rhythm game
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1ewvzOKqgM

oh my god that would be so cool. or this (actually this song kinda sounds like Eien to Iu Na no Biyaku)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6wCmPCEHUw

anywaysS BACK TO PYRAMID . so. after that initial section, about a minute in it speeds up and gets a more like...actual scale. a cool weirdo scale that sounds like "Egypt" (i'm too lazy to figure out exactly what it is) but it's a neat contrast to the earlier bit in its own ways. but this song still keeps it's evil crazy notes lurking in the bakc to make sure it's still a connected whole.

i expected this song was weirder to talk about in terms of timesig stuff but really it's just. all 3/4 beginning (very slow 3/4 tho, with very little to indicate the pulse), and then when it speeds up it's 'weird 4/4', that sounds weirder than it actually is because it's three-bar-phrased (this in itself was probably what was throwing me off).

cool song that i did NOT think would possibly exist in a pop'n music game what the fUSE

ELIMINATION TWENTY-TWO

?) Shonen_Bat (Average placement 143.875)

although you did score somehow both last place and second-to-last-place; your higher picks certainly made up for it and your avg ranking in the end wasn't too abysmal

i do think you'll actually possibly rise in my re-rank, not hugely but. a lot of the reason your low picks placed so low was just this weird...very specific-to-2018; aversion to specific cliches, those aversions aren't part of my fixation in a response to a song anymore. the bottom one might stay low for other reasons, but i'm a lot more receptive to that Time's End one in particular these days, especially since i really like atmospheric and dark moods of course. we'll see!

The real treat though was, of course, the stuff i already ranked high and would still rank high! the iji remix was astounding and i listen to it all the time. just the perfect instrumentation/composition combo for me both! and just love the world that it takes me too. strong one was of course something i always liked for its bit of absurdity. World of Nothing was obviously fun as a venue for exploring my attraction to destroyed universes as a concept and the appropriate music to accompany that idea. You clearly were paying attention to what i was looking for, and despite a couple misses, really nailed it when you did hit.

thanks for submitting! I really had fun with these

29rd
Game: Mother 3
Title: Strong One (Masked Man)
Composer: Shgo Sakai
Nominator: @Shonen_Bat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciJPAY_pyDM

even cooler song.

well what do you know, 29th place for the song that is famously in "29/16", what a COINCIDENCE. now i know ther eis going to be a silly boy in the audience who brings up the "aCTUALLY it's 71907/40120" factoid. but it would be pretty silly to write something that can not humanly be counted on sheet music...but if it was like, played back by a computer? (sure, i guess, because it is...). but i mean come on, if you actually counted out like music live human bands played at that precision level, you'd get stuff like that constantly. so it is a very silly technicality to make that defeats the purpose of even writing time signatures in: giving musicians a way to understand what they are supposed to play or what is being played (though there is a conversation to be had that: once you have created this system, that there's no reason you can't have fun with it and break that [here's a relevant thread about a similar topic: https://twitter.com/incipitsify/status/1490346454849839115 ])

anyways, what if i told you that ACTUALLY , both Strong One and this wacky cousin...were actually, officially, written in all 4/4!? Each bar of odd time still lining up to fit within 4/4 and the barlines still lining up! That's right, the way that Mother 3 stores the information of the music, odd time is actually stored as 4/4 time, BUT with carefully timed tempo changes to emulate the feeling of odd time. this is presumably due to the heartbeat system, it seems designed around the importance information being on beats 1/2/3/4, so when a song is not in that, it has to compensate somehow. Here is what i mean:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek14mmKQfXg

as youj can see. It's a 8 quarter beat (2 4/4 bars) loop, and actually lines up with the barlines in this way. It creates it's 29/16 loop, but written in "4/4 with tempo changes" like this:
beat 1-3 = 126.
beat 4-5 = 180.
beat 6 = 236.
beat 7 = 126.
beat 8 = 102

now, just like i said about the "71907/40120 time" claim, it would be very silly to actually write it this way with contstant tempo changes on sheet music. at least any that is expected to be performed by people, that would be so silly. the most practical way is definitely just 29/16. loose imperfection indicated sure, or maybe a note indicating what the song "actually is" but yeah. unless you're indicating something designed for machine level precision, 29/16 is the most practical interpretation...otherwise, you'd get stuff like this in "normal 4/4 songs" all the time in anything played live!

anyways as i said in my above writeup, i also think the normal (15/8 time) strong one is a "cool song",

the normal Strong One makes the 15/8 out of "4/4 with tempo changes" like this:

beat 1-3 = 120
beat 4-5 = 172
beat 6 = 224
beat 7 = 120
beat 8 = 80)

but the appeal of this 29/16 variant is pretty obvious. even MORE crazy asymmetry!

i like these songs actually for non-rhythm reasons in many ways too. the string chords at :41 are BEAUTIFUL and float very nicely atop the chaotic metallic drumscape contrasting them. There's only even two chords in this whole song...but it does not feel like it is that few?! It feels like there must be at least 4...or 8...but nope it is just these two chords. and they are pretty fascinatingly voiced too. exactly the type of chord i like where a harmony involving ~5 different pitch classes represents those through both notes close together and notes far apart. These two chords have both VERY far spread out notes over an octave apart until you get to the next note in the chord, and then like, two chromatic notes next to each other. split between two different string sounds actually. and the end result of this voicing is just...chill, breeze of the sky. it's very pretty which is very welcome given the chaos of the rest, a respite i really appreciate. kinda allan holdsworth harmony actually. definitely my favorite part of the song

*Addendum: although i made a big deal about "practical on sheet music", i want to point out that THE most "practical" way is actually probably a way that breaks it down into two smaller bars, traditionally. This would probably be traditionally written as [3/4 + 17/16] alternating, [3/4 +3/4 + 5/16] or something similar, to give a conductor or other timekeeper an indicator of how to break it down further. could be broken up even further than that. the normal Strong One i'd probably say best interprets as [3/4 + 9/8], or [3/4 + 3/4 + 3/8], for the same reason. not everyone writes this way, and i'd get in fights with more traditional people by saying "yeah 43/16 isn't unreasonable to write in [circumstances they don't acknowledge]" (stuff like that's more normal to feel/read in smaller ensembles, especially ones without a conductor where odd time is more normalized in them: like a prog metal band or whatever. or something very electronic music centric, where a looping larger container is the more important element than understanding how to play something live (see: venetian snares))

it is ALSO worth noting, something i forgot to write in my original writeup, that because of the writing style of changing tempo constantly to emulate these "odd time signatures" as a container, you get some pretty crazy stretched tuplets that naturally form themself (like, within the space of 5 16th note beats: 3 even spaced notes stretched to the space of 5 16ths, these sorta rhythms that are definitely the sort that trip musicians who aren't used to reading weird shit on sheet music up. ironically moreso than a more memetically described "crazy time signature"). so still pretty wild and hard to read, honestly, no matter how you interpret it! and there's certainly all sorts of other interpretations i didn't even touch to describe this odd tune!

30rd
Game: Mother 3
Title: Strong One
Composer: Shgo Sakai
Nominator: @DoctorJimmy133
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qn_mWKeuD8A

cool song

ELIMINATION TWENTY-ONE

?) GameBopAdv (Average placement: 107.2)

OR WAS IT TWENTY-TWO??

you are my longest-time internet friend; and also the person who i came to board 8 in ~2009 because of. technically this topic would not have happened without you haha...i would not even be in this community if i had never met you on the internet

anyways, one way we have always connected is of course an interest in strange music with synthetic timbres. That certainly showed up in your noms, even if you (as you admitted) sorta approached the noms in a joke-y way. They all GENUINELY appealed to me despite your silly approach in your picks:

1.I'm deeply nostalgic for and fond of ambient sound effect loops in myst-style puzzle-adventure games (especially lately, this has been my mood. a 2022 version of the topic if you just nommed entirely rhem ambient 'not music' sound you might've won the topic...).

2.I love many of the sounds associated with glitches (and glitches).

3.I have deep appreciation for opl3 midi (and the space cadet pinball game, as i mentioned, has a pretty strong significance to me historically),

4.and of course, I like jumpy prime-numbered rhythms on "random notes"!

You through your silliness, still clearly were curating your picks to be fun things that we both appreciate, and that makes me so happy!

i'm very thankful you participated, and even if there's still 30 songs left to go, your avg ranking clearly places you pretty high. you'll find out exactly how high soon! thank you for being my friend, and exposing me to so much cool music, so many cool games, other forms of strange experimental media and all that stuff

31th
Game: Corrypt
Title: Hermit's Path (Corrupted)
Composer: Michael Brough
Nominator: @GameBopAdv
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAP3KKK9yEI

Oh right hermits path. Now this song i have fairly strong memories of it in context of the game. Overall the soundtrack is generative and not the same every time. it's sorta "random notes in a diatonic scale" which is not exactly a sound I look for most of the time (i usually want "random notes" to feel MORE "random" than that, or to at least use scales more unfamiliar to me) but THIS song is EXACTLY what I look for despite all that somehow! largely because of the rhythms, but also just because i think the particular way it handles it just works out better to me than other examples of something similar. Well...the original non glitched version was what I meant when I said that. But this destroyed version is even better!!

(In case anyone reading does not know, normally this song does not have the "glitches", this is a factor that happens in a precise circumstance. The normal version of this song would be roughly the same thing but with out the stutter loops and stuff)

The exact ways that this track approaches the glitches are pretty simple, but the exact variety of them spans a great deal of very personally specifically appealing things to me. The shorter buzzing loops that even go as far as to make their own extratone are fun in a COOL YTP TENNID sound effect way, or even granular synthesis type way. but the slightly longer loops are great to me in a /rhythmic/ way. The rhythms aren't deliberate obviously, but they're there. And because I am me I am hearing "polyrhythms" and being like "omg this one was almost just barely 5 notes in the space of one 8th beat" and all those feelings I love so much. Despite having played and enjoyed this game, I probably would never have heard this corrupted variant much if at all if you didn't make this exact recording so thank you for doing that!!!

I'm not sure the exact parameters behind random generation in this game, but THIS room in particular always made me so happy because something about it always enforced these really jumpy 3+2 or 2+3 rhythms. Something I'd probably call "5/16" if this was like a concrete song rather than a "possible song". I don't know how or why this game decides that this rhythm is what you get a high dose of in this room; but I am glad it does! It does fit with the entities that are in here that move in the fast looping patterns. And it does make sense game feel wise. It feels striking when you enter this room and these jumpy rhythms accompany those moving guys (correction, i guess it is really just one moving guy) ((oh wait no it is more than one, your picture is just so very misleading, i believe))

Ever since I was a child I always really liked looking at the game files of the games I played so I could see various components of how the games I played were made. Corrypt presents me with some pretty interesting stuff in regards to the music when I do so, being able to see the sound files for each individual instrument--this is the opposite of what is typical. I'm used to seeing the music files but not the custom soundset they use for the game, or whatever. This makes me think it'd be quite easy to then replace these wav files with different ones to result in this same composition being heard by totally different instruments!? I've never tried this but I would like to

*tries this*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHf3htzQFu0

ok well i have tried that, the results aren't as great as they could be. and the beep isn't replaceable (also i replaced all of the harpsichord sounds...but then none of them show up in this recording? [if they do show up in this video and i didn't noticce, it would be the sound from torin's passage when the guy is denied acccess to that city). it might've been some sorta error in format where the game refuses to read those ogg files now or something, too big? compressed wrong? WHO KNOWs). but it worked with the bass-replaced-with-schizm1rol2 layer at least. could have a lot of fun with this in a more curated sense with more careful experimentation. you could entirely change the basis of scales used in the sample layers too. since the design of the system is that each pitch is an entirely different ogg file. though with the beeps unreplaceable, that'd always not line up with whatever scale you change everything else to (this is very useful to things that do not feature the beeps much though!).

well; i'm glad you think of me when you find weird chiptunes that you like because i do like weird chiptunes! these examples just didn't work out, but some others certainly would!!

32th
Game: Kirby Planet Robobot
Title: Vagrant Counting Song of Retrospection
Composer: Hirokazu Ando
Nominator: @hombad46
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK1_m7f1UhA

did i mention that at one point i considered kirby my favorite well known game series for music? especially at the time i made this topic? especially modern kirby?! yeah i definitely did, you idiot; i'm a genius. tho i probably don't anymore, it's still something i'm usually inclined to respect (Also i still need to listen to the new one...)

this song is one of many that've recently made me realize how much i like hirokazu ando specifically; i like jun ishikawa too. ishikawa is more 'proggy' and CRAZY; but ando excels the tightest at atmosphere and cool harmonies, and this song is a pretty good example of those elements. i acutally don't know which of the two i'd say has more interesting sound design because it depends on the game/song, within this game i think ishikawa has the more crazy ones, but this reminds me a lot of some of my favorite hirokazu ando tracks such as "underworld":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRDjM8tkFXo

this is a surprisingly beautiful song. It starts off so pretty! and despite all the chaotic layers of aggressive and strange electronic sounds of the evil machine devices, it remains beautiful throughout honestly. This reminds me the mood of a lot of stuff i was particularly obsessed with when younger, such as Jean Michel Jarre:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KaJbAXG6A8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRhf9jP8pAw

jarre has these powerful and serious almost classical_music-esque progressions and melodies. but it never stops being furiously electronic, no matter how much it starts to resemble the architecture of centuries ago, everything is still made out of glowing wire frame grids and shiny plastic and steel. that's pretty much exactly the feeling robobot is supposed to have too. Now that I think about it, it makes a great deal of sense with what i understand about the game too (i haven't played it) but like, music that sounds like "rich people music", rich people who woudl have a fancy mansion with victorian architecture and a bunch of paintings of old people on the walls, but then they are turning the entire world into a computer. That's like, exactly what the concept of the game is. so it's pretty much perfect that this song reminds me of these old jarre songs now that i think about it

anyway, Vagrant Counting Song of Retrospection has a really perfect flow to me. it starts off with a memorable sequence of notes, then the same sequence comes in again except it is 2x the speed at the SAME time and then there's like, suddenly a revelation that this song is actually going to be /insane/, and there are going to be CRAZY CHORDS (Which makes sense because. you know, Hirokazu "I love complex chords" Ando) and stuff. pretty much every synth sound in the song is one that i think is "cool". pretty much every glitch and break in structure does something to add to the fullness of this soundscape.i think the biggest thing i get out of this is these HUGE spacious sections like :52, they're just INDIMIATING. and LARGE. they are like, a big evil dark energy sphere that is enlarging and consuming all of reality with you.

another song this reminds me of, that i wasn't originally thinking of ever is Cosmic Joke by Blitz Lunar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAepjzLC0to

(though this makes sense because i know he likes kirby music (but this song didn't exist yet when he made this song)) but those parts like 1:18 of cosmic joke OH MY GOD they are one of my favorite parts of a song., and vagrant counting song makes me think of those parts and that is a good thing : ) this even fits in the sense of both having 'chiptune elements' in a song that is broadly full production, and stuff like that. that's so cool!

Current standings!!
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/1/4/AAefu7AADFUW.jpg

ELIMINATION TWENTY

?) dowolf (Average placement: 190.875)

well you definitely wound up with one of the lowest average rankings, but i don't think that's representative of our actual compatibility in terms of taste in music or anything (at one point during one of the vgmcs, i was somehow like #1 in your compatibility chart even). even if your luck wasn't so hot in this scenario, it certainly would be in other instances. and i appreciate everything you shared with me regardless!

your best performing pick was a gust one, predictably? maybe. anyway i love the stuff you have to share. basically the same thing i said in xp's elimination post, you've had a very profound influence on the sorts of music i'd come to listen to in the future. for many of the same reasons (gust and other jrpgs unfamiliar to me with cool full-produced immersive ancient<->future merged landscapes). pretty much turned my taste upside down and i'm more diverse in musical intake for it by yards, and thankful for that

i can understand why you nommed a lot of the quirky fm chiptunes that i wound up ranking "low" (tho i didn't hate them), since like...honestly i'd probably be MORE receptive to that sorta thing than most people. but honestly, what i'm here for when it comes to the things you like, is stuff like METHOD_HYMME_GRANZERO=SPEAR/. more than anything! and especially a thank you for sharing that one! i wouldn't have heard it otherwise, despite knowing the actual music to the games.

33th
Game: Ar Tonelico: Hymmnos Musical
Title: METHOD_HYMME_GRANZERO=SPEAR/.
Composer: HIR
Nominator: @dowolf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RllGYRY9tUw

vgmc eligible?! well, if i was in charge of vgmc it would be. too bad i'm not

i always heard this song as being way more difficult to follow time-sig-wise than it actually is. but as far as i currently interpret, this is basically:
(0:00 - 0:19) free, would probably just be written the same as the below section on sheet music, just with indicators of looseness
(0:19 - 0:49) [10/8, 10/8, 10/8, 4/4, 6/8, 6/8, 6/8]x2
(0:49 - 2:20) all 6/8
(2:20 - 2:46) [10/8, 10/8, 10/8, 4/4, 6/8, 6/8, 6/8]x2
(2:46 - end) all 6/8

unless i missed something

until i actually tried to write it out for this writeup, i always heard most elements as way more rhythmically erratic than they are! there's a few reasons for that:

1) the start of each bar at :19 is one after the first vocalized note, which is just a pickup to it. I always find that hard to perceive, especially as right before: there's no real indication that note would be a pickup rather than beat 1. so then when these heavy drums start to assert the barlines, i'm already mentally offset before i can count them all. Knowing me, i consider this to be a good/cool thing and the ambiguity is probably deliberate, makes it a lot more smooth and natural than a lot of odd time incarnations too.

2) the all 6/8 parts have a lot of fun playing with accent patterns that aren't the standard 3+3, and it can be really easy to lose beat one and hear things as more funky than simply that!

how rhythmically challenging something 'sounds' is a lot more important to me than what it actually is in terms of arbitrary numbers you write down, so this winds up quite high of course! Ambiguity is more my thing than 'complexity' even

beyond all the number stuff i always like talking about with this sorta thing, i'm big into the instrumentation. maybe this is an "of course", because yeah, i like gust for their ancient-future merged aesthetic. but this track particularly uses some recognizable 90s synth presets i'm a fan of, particularly that harp...it's so pretty! Actually i recently discovered even more instances of actual late 80s or early 90s synths in 2000s/2010s gust games. it makes sense because those sounds are like "new age sounds" or whatever to most ears. and that's definitely a precursor genre to gust's style. but it's rare to see them in such a full-produced scenario, and it's honestly part of what gives gust their distinctive sound. something i often enjoy endearingly, out of nostalgia for an era, but in gust they're used in a much more modern sounding way. it proves that my obsession with those sounds is more than simple period nostalgia, these 80s-90s synth timbres had tendencies that just instinctively feel the most vibrant to me, even when they're put in a context that feels as modern as tracks like these do

this track's tone is slightly different from a lot of gust in that it's definitely sorta got these edm-ish layers despite not being edm at all, but that's something i appreciat,e ,,those super saw constant 16ths at like :35. somehow that's in the same song as...the rest of this song?! wtf. that's so cool. why is gust so perfect. the almost cartoony synths at 1:43 are such a fun contrast from the pretty korg m1 harp being a "beautiful" sound in the song.

dude this video looks like it was made in 2007 power point and that makes me so happy

it's crazy how dense these bulgarian-style vocal clusters are, they /should/ be dissonant, but the dissonances cancel out and create a beautiful laser beam of sound instead. this song makes me so happy!

you picked pretty well with this one! i definitely have consciously thought about the fact that you like dream theater lines up with that you've sometimes been into sakuraba stuff too, so it was a pretty good choice!

34st
Game: Shining the Holy Ark *Remix
Title: The Dance of Light and Death
Composer: Motoi Sakuraba
Nominator: @azuarc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ2wX2H1h1Q

For some reason I expected I'd have to make a lengthy timesig chart out here but it seems that this song is just:
(0:00 - 2:53) all 5/8
(2:53 - 3:51) all 4/4
(3:51 - 5:45) all 5/8
(5:45 - ) all 4/4

Though it still keeps itself rhythmically obfuscated through things like the crazy triplet drum fills and unusual accent patterns. I actually had a hard time telling which timesig it went into when the 4/4 first showed up, because of the accent pattern keeping a heavy hit on the 4th beat (made me think of the heavy hit as the start of the next bar), and it coming right after a very long portion of entirely clear 5---your mind (or at least mine) doesn't instantly jump to 4 when that section ends, making it hard for at least me to initially grasp whenever this happens...which I think is cool!

So if you don't know. There is a musical injoke sorta like "the lick" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krDxhnaKD7Q] ...

...AHEM there is a musical injoke in certain vgm circles called "cumshot", and well...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCuN-su_moE

(huge special thanks to sergio for compiling a list for me of almost all of those examples)

This song is not exactly that. But it is pretty close which is all it needs to be...and VERY repeatedly, and I definitely can't help but smile whenever those portions of the lead play. in fact of every cited 'cumshot' example that i know of, this shining the holy ark one is the one that's just, the most insistent on repeating it to the point it's one of the main hooks of the tune! Really this isn't a factor in my enjoyment in any way other than amusement of it accidentally being part of an in-joke that didn't exist until significantly after this song was released, but it's fun, and honestly...? as a hook, those notes work really well for it...

Motoi Sakuraba was maybe my first "favorite vgm composer". I hadn't really experienced the feeling until my friend shared with me music from Valkyrie Profile which I pretty quickly got obsessed with. I was shocked when I noticed it was the same composer as one of my long-time favorites (Mario Golf Toadstool Tour). And more importantly, I could TELL. This same musician injected his very distinct flavor into two soundtracks I wholeheartedly loved. It made me decide to check out his other work, first thing I checked was Golden Sun and pretty instantly it was clear: definitely the same person who wrote these two soundtracks I already love, some songs really felt like they could've been in valkyrie profile or mario golf in an alternate universe! so, unsurprisingly I loved this too! I just kept going with listening to his stuff until I'd listened to the majority of his available stuff at the time.

Ever since then, I've payed a lot of special attention to the composer of any game I enjoy the music to. Since chances are, if I like one thing they've done, there's more gems to come. It reshaped my entire pattern of vgm listening. I used to go by series of games id played or wanted to play. But now, if I like one song by a vgm composer enough, my first instinct is to binge listen to every single soundtrack they have even one credit on (which would cause me to discover other composers they've worked with, to love, and keep branching in chain of association paths until I listen to every vgm song...). And honestly I have found more music i love this way than any other way I've tried to discover music I'd enjoy. So Sakuraba is very important to me for this reason!

Why I like Sakuraba? Theres a lot of reasons I guess. The obvious one is that he is "prog" and I mean EXACTLY sounds like the most iconic 1970s prog bands when he's going for at least the style he goes for in this song. I wasn't actually as familiar as i am now in "progressive rock (genre of REAL MUSIC)" until years after I already loved Sakuraba. But it made it pretty easy to get into his arrange albums like this one he made for Shining the Holy Ark when I found them! I think I like him a lot more than most actual 70s prog bands too. He sounds exactly like them, but he goes way more all out in terms of fixation on timesig stuff and all that.

[kinda like the whole conversation i had about dream theater above---Sakuraba is maybe like the "dream theater" of "music that sounds like 70s prog" (except it was made in 2005 or whatever), at least when he's going for this style. very very focused on intentionally jumpy feeling odd time to an extent of intensity that wasn't actually usually taken that far at all in the 70s]

The maybe less obvious reason for my fascination with Sakuraba is I actually like his melodic style a LOT. really my answer to why i like it is basically "it sounds epic", ;epic; like, heroic powering-though-the-darkness melodies about fulfilling your DESTINY as the chosen one to save the planet. it's a cliche, maybe, but i've always liked it. but the thing is sakuraba's way of approaching that is...ridiculously distinct? like even if the desired emotion is common: the way he approaches this stuff, most big vgm fans can point to and be like "oh, yep, this is motoi sakuraba alright" within 5 seconds. It's hard to point to exactly every trait, but it's basically he just has some specific chord change patterns that no one else really does but him...and just weaves his melodies around chords in particular ways, etc. i also have always appreciated how almost folk-like his melody style is. I get a big kick out of 3:51 in The Dance of Light and Death in particular, because it takes what was originally very much synthy prog rock, but changes that into like "tavern in fantasy castle world" on harpsichord and other OLD PEOPLE instruments. and man that is just so cool. You GGo do that motoi sakuraba, i love that you are this way so much

Mr Lasastryke posted...

also, i really like the entire soundtrack and i had no idea that many people were credited as composers on it whoa

well, like i said, Kazuki Muraoka is the only composer credited for "Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions". but since at least this song is sourced from metal gear 2 msx...that's why i listed all those names. because msx metal gear 2 /does/ have that many composers.

35st
Game: Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions
Title: Weapon Mode
Composer: Kazuki Muraoka, Masahiro Ikariko, Mutsuhiko Izumi, Yuko Kurahashi, Tomoya Tomita, Kazuhiko Uehara, Yuji Takenouchi, Tsuyoshi Sekito
Nominator: @Mr_Lasastryke
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9AAArXGB28

to be clear because i never really standardized this for this topic, this is like [Masahiro Ikariko, Mutsuhiko Izumi, Yuko Kurahashi, Tomoya Tomita, Kazuhiko Uehara, Yuji Takenouchi and/or Tsuyoshi Sekito] arr. Kazuki Muraoka

Weapon mode appeals to me in some ways I did not expect. At a first glance it's honestly a more simple incarnation of odd time than usually excites me, plain 7/4 all the way thru. But its way less familiar to me than that would imply. Part of it is lots of layers not coming in on where I perceive beat 1 to be (it's actually mostly pretty unsyncopated, but i think some of the melodic patterns, feel like they "could be" moved over by an 8th or 16th beat, and would actually sound more gridded, than their current slightly more flowing incarnation if they were). it's also so HEAVY in terms of accent pattern (like huge kick drums all the same volume) that it's actually pretty easy to get turned around and for me to feel beat 1 in a different place than it "is." especially as the way it manifests this 7 is sorta like alternating 3/4 and 4/4, sometimes i swap which of those two bars making up the 7 is "first", and get turned around in that sense too. and i like that!

Another reason its majorly appealing to my tastes is the instrumentation: instrumentation I often forget is even part of the song until I listen, since its not right at the start. The FLUTE takes this world just enough outside of the wireframe grid the rest of the song is in, and floats me to "virtual jungle" and i like that place even more! really balance between natural<->artificial is one of the most key elements to my tastes, especially in 2022. So the simultaneous gridded synth realm and floating flute and brass atop is absolutely necessary in combination to get this to appeal to me to the extreme extent it does!

that's a big list of possible composers (though Kazuki Muraoka is the sole credited person for this game, meaning they were the arranger, but this originates from earlier metal gear stuff), but my suspicion now that i've learned more about them, is that this is originally by Yuji Takenouchi. he funnily insistently has at least 1 song per game in 7/8 or 7/4 (if not 7 songs per game). One track I really love from him is this which I see as pretty similar (actually maybe it's not that similar but...well he has a lot of songs that are, this is just the first to come to mind):

https://vgmrips.net/packs/pack/x-men-arcade#12-ambience-of-the-underground-stage-4

this one also comes to mind (not actually confirmed yuji takenouchi out of the two credited, but probably him), it's like a darker version of Weapon Mode in a way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3jsMgK6-Dc

well i would have said that, EXCEPT. the song this is actually a remix of is THIS song that's in mostly 13/8!! not 7!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iF_QgTHQxWc

(then again, Crypt Killer does have this [probably yuji takenouchi] song in 13 too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-1zCyAm6bE
)

the original does still sound like yuji takenouchi's computery, mathematical note sequence of 1s and 0s wireframe landscape zone: both that version and the one you nominated. so i still stand by my composer suspicion here, even if it was arranged by Kazuki Muraoka, i can hear the yuji takenouchi beneath both versions, if i'm correct on this

anyway i'm going on and on about 'composer speculation' as i often do.

i like the atmosphere of the song, it generates a VIRTUAL REALITY landscape to me and i like that. it's pretty short and sweet and simple; none of those are bad in this context tho! It has the right balance of computer and green plants, and the right balance of rigidity and convolutedness. to in-the-end be pretty much exactly what i want! thank you for introducing this to me! (i wasn't familiar with that original version either until my friend HidekuniHorita told me about it after he saw that you nominated this years ago, and i've come to love that as well so you basically got me into TWO songs that i really love now!)

dt is; i would say, objectively a lot more deliberately timesig-jarringness focus than any major 70s prog band actually. like that's actually one of their distinct traits that make them stand out from other well-known prog rock/prog metal bands. i own a book of dream theater sheet music and you can like, count, how many bars are like, odd time. the density of such is pretty extreme compared to most other prog bands at their popularity level. it's definitely their focus as opposed to like "yes" which would be more about the trippy long songs for the guys who are on weed (this is reductive, yes is compositionally pretty amazing tbh).

but with dt it's in a specific way. something like planet x or animals as leaders or meshuggah is probably more broadly "mathy" than dream theater. but dt is THE band for if you want to hear a song that'd otherwise be melodically normal but you take random 16th note beats out of all the bars so every bar is a different time signature. not in every song, but very regularly, certainly.

but anyway, i certainly didn't have this conceptualization of them until i actually listened to all their stuff. and i would hear people describe them how i'm describing them and i would be confused because what i would hear was not like that

(to be clear i of all people am well aware that dt is far from the most chaotic timesiggy prog can get lol; but i'm speaking broadly: of popular examples of the genre. they are the one that is consistently the most jagged about how they handle odd time, and most insistent about it being in-your-face and constantly changing. at least in terms of how i personally interpret my meaning of that anyway

not long ago i was doing a big comparison of examples of mixed meter in classic 70s prog vs newer prog, and was finding how rare it actually was for bands in the 70s to do the sorta '[insert random prime number every bar]/16' stuff dt has always done regularly. it was usually in slower x/8 or more conveniently perceptible or transcribable doses. though some groups like king crimson and gentle giant got quite insane in some seriously unusual ways of their own, it was usually in ways completely different from the very specific identity dt cultivated that makes dt sound a lot more centric around how intentionally jarring their mixed meter in itself is)

;haha i actually didn't mean to word it in a way that made it sound like i thought panic attack is a bad song---i specifically like the filthy mind because it reminds me of panic attack!! probably should've worded it a bit differently "realized dreamtheater was much more CRAZY than simply that" or something

i was more just commenting on the experiences of hearing people saying "dream theater has the most CRAZy time signature changes" and then i look up their most popular songs and a song that's pretty much all 5/8 shows up...basically the most common way to be odd time. i'm just like "what are these people talking about" haha. but i respect it as much as anything else by them because it does the things i like about the metal i like (it is like , inside of a volcano and epic)

my favorite dream theater song is probably "Lines in the Sand" (derek sherenian is so cool. you can tell it is one of the songs written by a founding member of planet x)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9j-v9EbBBM

(lines in the sand isn't even that rhythmically complex or anything; which isn't what's most important to me these days anyway! i basically like it because it harmonically appeals to me (quartals (dude it has like hayato matsuo piano bits)) and sounds like you are a cool guy on a motorcycle in the desert)

36st
Game: Terraria Calamity Mod
Title: The Filthy Mind
Composer: DM DOKURO
Nominator: @NFUN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NbQFGnQaCE

yea i love progressive metal, that genre. oh yeah you genius, if yuou can really call yourself that, this is so much like Panic Attack by Dream Theater which is the song that i've seen a high single digit number of people (including myself) say made them think that Dream Theater was less proggy than other prog bands when it was the first song they looked uip. but then they heard other songs later and realized that dream theater was way more cool than simply that. but it is true that plain 5/8 does not seem that crazy once you have been to the movies. that does NOT matter to me in regards to this song (tho it could regarding other songs), i am just commenting about that perception of it sounding like the leasy crazy song by a crazy band

the thing that makes DM DOKURO the most distinctive to me is how good DM DOKURO is at chord changes; like the pat metheny typ(DONT SAY THAT TOO MUCH or you wil lbe made foun of)e. but not always applied to the calm music in the way you hear it when he is being patrick. with dokuro you can get this same tonality ; these same soaring progressions and melody lines connecting those crazy unanticipated modulationcore chords ; but now you are hearing this idea in other genres such as progressive metal. also in ""edm"", which, by the way, i am a parody of nfun.

these are the numbers i wrote down on my 'blog' before:

(0:00 - 0:27) 20 bars of 5/8
(0:27 - 0:48) [6/8+5/8, 9/8]x4
(0:48 - 1:59) 52 bars of 5/8
[loop]

i did make it clear that i think it's actually very likely that this was written entirely as "10/4" in software, since the section at :27 would eventually add up to 10 quarter beats. and you wouldn't have to change the timesig the entire song that way if u wrote it that way. but the way i hear it is definitely not going to be that naturally, i'm going to hear those jagged cliffs of sharp barline shift moments, and breaking longer containers down is the "correct" way to write these things so that a conductor knows where to move that stick they are holding and have it line up with material in a more meaningful way

the thing this reminds me most of these days that i wasn't able ot say in 2018, is Raiden V haha, it's exactly that. fake dream theater but with more modulationcore chord changes, in both cases.

glitchiness at the beginning, and crunchy dissonance, certainly sets the tone. it's nice for introducing the track with a less typical exterior for this sorta composition too; like i LOVE when it is "literally dream theateer" but i like even more when you are hearing the imaginary world of if dream theater made idm which they have definitely never done(oh wait https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_WjsYWgb7U
)

dm dokuro's youtube channel actually has a couple playlists of influences (one of vgm and one of non-vgm) and i was pretty surprised that in the non-vgm playlist there wasn't any big prog metal bands in there. it was mostly like latin jazz from the 70s in really low quality haha. the vgm influences playlist made way more sense though. i guess dokuro just made prog metal by liking proggy vgm but then deciding it should be on a guitar, which is the inverse of what usually happens (where a prog fan makes vgm so then they make prog on a roland sc88pro instead of a guitar)

very neat playlist of VGM btw (OMG i didn't even notice it has sonic shuffle in it until now):
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbrAnF1cQ0SCA1x8fSHd_D59YfpH-HzIW"

[...continued]

(47 minutes 59 seconds)

i was a foolsih dizzy for not getting something to drink before starting this transmission; soon i will lose the ability to think. i love minks. oh there's a GOOD one, [by onei m i mean where you can't tell where beat 1 is if you pretend the drums aren't there]. I have totally forgotten how this song arrived at this point by now. i know how it started, and i know that it got here, but the feeling was too gradual. just like when you fall asleep. it's like the erased portion of memory when you fall into a sleep hole too. around 50:05 it was surprisingly tonal. if it weren't for the surrounding context that part woul bth surgery, and the graphite teaher. I have recieved a text; haha and this chromatic carnival one is so funny. i am suddenly percieving heaviness in repeating elements that have always been there, that i didn't get before. the drums especially, they sound lso loud now, they didn't used to, this is why hypnotic music is so cool. that is so long. piano phase part9 part9.

(52 minutes 43 seconds)

I CAN SEE THE LIGHT; IS THAT IT?! it's on the horizon. I am finally transferring my consciousness (well, atleast one of them) to the new realm, so i can look at it. i really love the book sphere, where they think about things so much. it was my favorite book ,and while i was reading it i was listening to lots of "acreil" which is regularly a similar lengthy minimal experience to this experience. it fit very well, because the ocean is scary, especially when parts of your consciousness are being scared. this track title is so fitting for what the experience of this music is like. that's so crazy, especially as manabu namiki probably did not anticipate anyone listening to this in this form. Oh right i brought up oneohtrix point never, did you know that he likes manabu namiki, and manabu namiki likes him too?! that's so wacky, but it makes sense because hteyt both like the same 'ol sounds just like me. those old ones. segmented commas and re-stepping up finances. The squeal of the finality. will i make it before i am erased? I'm not sure, I think i may be erased, so i am trying so hard to escape from that potential. there are various routes, one of them is to become a fool. another is to showcase my fueled inferiority, to show everyone that I am not afraid of them, even though i actually am, so the only one who is able to percieve me, is myself. When i am the only one able to percieve myself, and i can not peorcieve myself, do i become e rased? everything is turning white. The sound is quieting. I am very scared? did i make it through? is it all gone?

(58 minutes 21 seconds)

i am retreating my elements from north. no one can find me there, back like detroit, like a street fighter. like anger. my consciousness is now a new element in the cycle of perception for all of your jaded seal ass kickin' needs to see. I am a new type. and there's no one left on this world but me. and I am not real. I have not made it to the end. I have been erase}

(59 minutes 56 se|

[...continued]

(27 minutes 28 seconds)

the first hints of "streets of rage 3" have finally shown up, only for a moment, but the darkness that is to come has been hinted to me now. oh. there it is again. This is where this song really starts to jump from "still probably a 7 or low 8" to like, at least considering 9 tier. The crazy thing is, i'm actually impressed how this accidental tune works so well as feeling like that style once it gets around to that part. It's not quite there yet, but once these lower register notes start to present themselves more often again, it becomes REAL "techno music"(genre) again. instead of just like; imagining it might have once been that. Some other layers almost accidentally generate these deep bass sounds that i don't think they're supposed to be generating also, that's...fuckin CRAZY bonkers man. what the JONES. and all of these people have their hsnds in their air. that's one cool thing about being from michigan, it's where detroit techno came from. i probably saw some guy once that yuzo koshiro listened to and he would assume that i know all about techno music because i am from michigan. well that's the ironic part because i lived in nowhere land and detroit was seen as this foreign mysterious island of futuristic dreams. no one in my area even knew what darude-sandstorm was except for me, electronic music was treated like it was an 'obscure' thing and i've never really conceptualized it as anything else and i couldn't believe that stuff was the most mainstream popular stuff in europe. this is probably exactly how koshiro and junichi masuda felt honestly, except they had more obvious reason to because they lived in japan. i lived in the same state as the home to one of the big categories...but yeah i lived in the part of the state with opposite population density.

(33 minutes 33 seconds)

i'm impressed by these natural sidechaining effects that have started to form themselves, now i am really in the zone of what 'techno' really means too. at least, the way i've heard it as a category of edm described, and the differentiation between it and other categories: "electronic music may be music made by machines; but techno music is the music that SOUNDS like it was made by machines", that's basically the difference between "techno" and "trance/house/jungle/[holes genre]/ when deo is my imaginary fairy is in my mouth" and stuff. in my head, and that's why streets of rage 3 is such a good example defining it to me. not all of it is as abrasive as this or sor3, but i'm typically the most engaged when it is. mainly because really nothing generates the imagery of a cool factory setting in a work of dystopian fiction as much as stuff like this. this is like, the fight scene happens, at night, in some abandoned industrial area where there's like a guy with illegal drugs and there are guns or something. and then there's a BIG moment and this part of the song where it's all the wrong notes starts playing booming between the speakers. This is what it felt like when i was watching "Good Time" featuring a soundtrack by Oneohtrix Point Never; there w ere so many moments where it was just these aggressive sequences of notes [nothing as atonal as this, tho certainly as abrasive in presentation on purpose. and it was perfect for the scenario]

actually terminator 1 is a good example of a movie that is kinda like what i just described for real. there was a really cool song [correction: a lot of really cool songs] that movie had really good music that sounded like a robot that was going to kill you. i am afraid of a robot that i tihnk is going to kill me and i still have nightmares that this is going to happen every day, but mewtwo tells me that it is not real, and i am just a crazy person who needs to not think about that

airport. you know what is so funny, i have been to the detroit airport so many times because i used to live ther.e but now i will probably never go to an airport again; because of becoming damaged by the evil beings, especially now that even more evil beings have damaged me. there's so much going on to breach my trust of skin and fur,

(43 minutes 33 seconds)

i'm losting my thought of parkour; and i'm thining about this right now: this song would have been so cool if there were not drums too. I mean i like it so much with the drums because that makes it like that streets of rage 3 video game, but what if it didn't have them? well then it would be like Good Time (2017); but also one factor i wihs i coulcd exprience, is knowing what this song would sound like without drums, because at this position of thes ong, i would definitely have lost where beat 1 is. and that would be so cool. I would be making new beat 1s every time the sequences change to differet numbers. I suppose i could make this sometime, it's not impossible to mute channels in sequenced music . i sware, if you toolk any pof the is this poinky portions of this song now. i would be certain it is from streets of rage 3; and i like that song. streets of rage 3 is so much of one of my favorite songs. But this isn't from that? How can that be a truth? i cant believe it. It's almost like computers sound like that. I mean i like that os much , [the backstory of having been desensitized to dissonance because of the drums on channel 16 no longer behaving the same was as channel 10 and now all of the drums are duplicated by the opl3 piano tones; retelling of this story 35]. I'm trying really hard to focus just on that 16th synth sequence, because some times i really can feel this /hard/ interpretation of beat 1 in a totally different place from where the drums assert

[continued...]

37rd
Game: Battle Garegga
Title: Marginal Consciousness
Composer: Manabu Namiki
Nominator: @banshiryuu
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJwgftd0m1E

(0 minutes 0 seconds)

starts with extra 2 8th notes in ostinato wtf?!?!? i love when that happen and a song has more numbers in it. I'm preparing for what will be one of the longest hours of my life right now. I've experienced this descent into a destruction of consciousness that can only be described as "an experience" before. removing all distractions. there's nothing but me and this song now. this is a song i like though, manabu namiki has been a composer somewhere in my favs ever since i first learned about them. i'm actually not confident where i did, but it may have oddly been as recent as Kokuga that geared me onto the idea that this musician was so cool. was exciting to see someone willingly use synth presets from the 1980s in a song from 2012, especially because that was before the explosion wave of 80s nostalgia, even vaporwave to me was like this "obscure thing", it hasn't hit the mainstream quite yet in my experience. i would always have to explain to people what it was and they thought it was this CRAZY niche obscure thing, i remember talking to people who i became friends with almost exclusively because they liked vaporwave, and we thought that was such a rare commonality we couldn't believe we had met each other. well now everyone knows what that thing is, it's so weird how things can gradually change, isn't it? I certainly find it striking. How at the start of this song it was actually noticably lighter out the window, but now i would say that i am seeing "dark blue" instead (this actually happened pretty fast somehow because i am only 6 minutes and 37 seconds into the song right now). It's part of the appeal and intent of Steve Reich. well, his real motivation was to create a genre of music where the system behind the music was perceptible easily to the audience (as he found other systematic music to be not something the average listener would be able to comprehend as a system.) In that regard, i would say Marginal Consciousness hits that mark, the change is so gradual that you don't really notice it, but it's not like it's mysterious what's happening. In THIS regard i'm actually surprised i haven't seen minimalist composers like reich play with constant key changes more as a mechanism. the stereotype is to literally just play like, the same notes over and over again, but it would be interesting if something repetitive and simple was transposed around like wacky as its method of systematically distorting something initially simpler. There probably is something like that that i'm not thinking of, or maybe even know, but i can't think of whatever that might be right now

(10 minutes 2 seconds)

has it really been 10 minutes? I feel like it's only been a number of minutes that is in the early half of single digits. I'm unsure if this is a relief or not. I actually have a severely poor sense of how long or short something is taking. I can't tell the difference between 1 hours and 12 hours; or 1 minute and 10 minutes. or 10 minutes and 45 minutes. this has actually had strong impacts on how i respond to music as it relates to this community even: i'm unfazed by long songs, or short songs. i sometimes complain about length but it's such an abstract complaint that doesn't really have that much to do with the actual number of minutes a song is for me. because if i'm not counting, and someone asks me how long something took, i likely won't be able to tell the difference between 1 minute, or 10 minutes, or 30. Is this a blessing or a curse? It depends on the circumstance, but in the context of a ranking topic, well, I can definitely say i am more tolerant of this nomination than most people would be. "37rd place" being a signifying factor of that that's pretty obvious i suppose. i LOVE this song, i love it as is, but i'm not sure it'd rank this high if it was just the normal version. As is probably related to what i just said; i have sort of an anti-short attention span. I don't dislike short music though (in fact short songs are often something I'm excited about when i see them show up on albums, because i love that transitional in-between status and just the 'weird feel' interlude type songs can have). but this does mean that actually one of the BEST ways for me to get really into a song, is to listen to it on loop, or do listen to a very long song. when i say anti-short attention span this largely just means i need to take a long time to get "in the zone" to any task, i do not easily switch modes of consciousness fast, so it's beneficial for my consciousness internal setup to be exploring something in a hypnotic slow way. This might, now that i think about it, be part of why i'm attracted to listening to things at half speed or 25% speed as personal recreational listening style a lot of the time[although also it is largely just because i like vaporwave that i do this...]

(15 minutes 29 seconds)

the notes are definitely starting to sound like crazy squeals of the aggressive plastic monstrosity. what was once a deep bass in a dance song, is now like a high synth constant 16th ostinato that sounds like a computer game. this song wouldn't really sound "wrong" to me at a glance yet, in this status, if i wasn't paying too much attention. I'd probably just write off the high sounds as trippy effects, and i'm not sure i'd be confused by the lack of bass because this could easily just be like, a transitional song where there's supposed to be a bunch of low rumbly sound effects they don't want conflicting with the music so they didn't put bass in. or maybe it's just go ichinose being charizard and mixing a song designed around handheld or nintendo switch speakers instead of your head phones. I've always liked high pitched sounds at least, i'm not really sure why, it seems like something i would not like, but i think it's because i associate them with strange overtones, or strange distortions in compressed music that are nostalgaic. They are comforting, in a way. It's definitely a factor in why i like Sega Genesis music, and FM in general (though these days i lean toward prettier FM sounds, it's not like i've grown out of stuff like this). At this point, really nothing is comprehensible other than the constant 16ths synth loop, and the drums. everything else is washed up like artifacts in the disposal unit of the dancefloor; the congruent washington portal of dreams and synapses. Well. Minor Clans. I mean, we've got my helmet here. MANABU NAMIKI'S HEAD KEEPS SHOWING IN MY VISION NOW

[continued...]

The unused ciel nosurge stuff is some of my favorite in the series to be honest. i highly recommend you checking it out! here's a couple of my other favorites from that unused material:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STkBELE216Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ac6fncVciM

i'm also glad to you shared with me qualia, really i think i wouldn't have remembered it was so cool on my own. and it made me happy to see blue refleciton / asano / (or honestly gust in general) represented with a less bombastic pick than they're typically represented with. because as i said i really love asano's approach to quieter work especially

funnily i feel alienated by how little most people relate to how much i talk about music theory, and assume everyone thinks i'm this insane person detached-from-reality on what "really" makes music good (as people like to beat down people who speak too technically rather than abstractly or emotionally, which has been very hard for me to deal with, how isolated i already am having an interest as niche as theory of the uhhh, types of songs i like. and then being told that i'm even MORE "bad" for doing so). but really i never looked down on anyone who's not in that realm as 'uneducated', if anything it's _weird_ to talk about theory, and if you don't latch well onto the language of it or just never learned it, it means nothing for what your taste in music is in the end. like one of my closest music taste friends chz/hidekunihorita basically doesn't know any theory, but he's like...so obviously the same music taste zone as me. same with sergiocornaga.

so PLEASE don't feel bad (or assume there's any correlation?) for not being able to speak in that realm, because the music you enjoy? that speaks for itself. I love the music that you enjoy, it's very distinctive. I hear songs and can think "xp", and that stands for something very real

i'm really not saying that for no reason either, but yeah like, anyone who pushed gust or anything gust-like on early board 8 (which /obviously/ you were a major part of), really had a pretty positive impact on the types of music i seeked out and came to love in the future. so a huge thanks to anyone who did that! I'm glad the feeling is mutual during the areas of overlap that are apparent!

ELIMINATION NINETEEN

?) xp1337 (Average placement: 139.3333333)

well, you /technically/ weren't wrong about the idea that your top pick would be a gust. or both your top 2 picks being a gust! i mean, we were like THE duo who 'nommed' ar tonelico ii for bost the year it won. we as a pair kinda predate the more well-known enthusiasm about gust music on the board at the time in some ways. and you definitely made it clear you loved these really beautiful synthetic-natural merged instrumental examples, that really define what that means to me.

ever since i first interacted with you in ~2009 my taste has, honestly, probably been profoundly influenced by the sorts of songs you've shared. which is a big deal! the last 13 years of my life have been enriched with songs and soundtracks i definitely got into at least in part because of you. so thank you!

I usually have a lot of fun seeing what you have to share, everything from .hack to the gust stuff has always impressed me when you've shared the music you enjoy on this board. thank you for doing so for my topic as well!!

38st
Game: Blue Reflection
Title: Qualia
Composer: Hayato Asano
Nominator: @xp1337
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsOKTUHM5nQ

This portion of the ranking topic is definitely the zone of songs with lots of layers on top of each other doing rhythmically misaligned things from each other in some way. Which is one of my favorite things of course! Of course I rank stuff like this high but its shocking to myself that I'm mentioning it back-to-back in all these cases

Hayato Asano actually wowed me regarding that type of thing a long time ago, with his unused Ciel Nosurge songs, long before blue reflection. My favorite track by him overall might be this one:

Ciel nosurge - niizhtana
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rcNMyzKggs

But its a core element of his style. Even in the mega popular epic hits like the ones named after science words in all caps like "tiger" or "dnf" or wat ever, he sneaks polymeter in there. I think he's just someone where he's made it an 'option' and casually treats the idea of polymeter just like its another color for him to use. No use limiting the idea of an ostinato to something that lines up with the barline when you can make it have its Own barline.. if he wants to add a sequence of even 8th notes there's no reason it has to be a loop of 8 8th notes, he will make it a loop of 9 instead! even if nothing else in the song is 9

I definitely get the most of a kick out of the more subdued Hayato Asano songs. This is not a diss on the louder ones at all, but simply that i think with a quieter serene mood--despite what is typical for people to do--he does not make the composition any simpler or the sound design any less a focus. So its actually kinda this rare wonderful world where serene music can actually be very complex and have really crazy production! It's the opposite of the in-your-face sound i associate with blue reflection, but its one of the most important styles that make the soundtrack even shine to me. Because usually this merging of intricate and calm seem to be at odds. I also just think he sounds nicest and most clean when at this pace

niizhtana is pretty similar to qualia in a few ways
-lots of polymeter
-a quieter approach from asano
-i totally filter layers out because it's so smoothly presented
-it has pretty synth sounds!!!!

To count the actual mathy elements in qualia (i so badly want to do it with niizhtana too but that's not the song i'm supposed 2 be talkin about here...)

1) initial piano ostinato: actually this isn't "in" anything, it's just like, noodling around like a weasel (I LOVE WEASELS), after 4 4/4 bars it loops, but it's very hard to pin the downbeats at all because it is so cool
2) the quiet plucked layer right at the start (this disappears pretty fast): 7+7+6+6+6????(it disappears too fast)
3) the fast bendy sine (this is like really fast 3, groups of 6 sixteenths layered on all the stuff that is not 3)
4) the bendy sine that is slower than the other one (this one is just 4/4, but it feels odder because the pattern has numbers like "5" (that can't even be further broken down) in the grouping early in: 4+5+3+4)
?) there's probably other layers i forgot...it's really easy to miss stuff with how smoothly this segues things into and out of reality, and how much is going on (despite how calm it somehow still feels)

finally actually bothering to break this down, i suppose calling this super polymetric is almost a misnomer. there's technically layers doing some polymeter thingys like that. but it /feels/ more polymetric than songs that are way more centric around the idea, just because this plays so much with groupings of notes that aren't exactly normal. but in the end, most things even out to normal phrased 4/4, but it's very hard to latch onto that without actively trying, and i like that! sorry if this is getting too 'technical' i just like talkin about the rhythm numbers in songs with lots of them in it

OH MY GOD I LOVE That chord hit at :58 and stuff, that exact mallet-like synthesized timbre is just so perfect for what it plays and when it plays. It reminds me a great deal of my favorite moment of the "Lightbringer: The Next Giant Leap for Mankind" (also known as "Cydonia: Mars - The First Manned Mission") soundtrack

(i don't think anyone would make this comparison but me but here it is, my favorite moment of the ost of this random myst-clone soundtrack that i do not expect anyone to care about but me...
https://youtu.be/wDhDh1KyW2Y?t=353

the rest of the ost i would not compare to qualia in the slightest it is just that ONE sound that hits at 5:53 in this cydonia/lightbringer ost video that i have secretly uploaded, also 6:26 / 6:43 / 6:54 / 7:04 / etc. I never really thought of hayato asano as being "90s" at all, he has cool sound design but from completely different reasons from what i like 90s sound design. but that moment at :58 in qualia, the fact that i instantly think of this lightbringer song, it's that crystalline synthetic DREAM that i love being taken into that world)

anyways i love gust; this song represents why a lot better than the majority of the blue reflection ost; it's very tightly what i look for from hayato asano, and very similar to what's probably my favorite track from him, so naturally this gets up there!~ thank you for alerting me to it! (I've heard it before, but didn't remember it being this cool until you nommed it, so might as well call it a discovery in some way)

39nd
Game: Proteus
Title: Proteus Suite II 2
Composer: David Kanaga
Nominator: @Place
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6C5JHjONhA

This song is pretty contrasting from the previous David kanaga (basically opposite intensity level and environment evoked to me), but you can still tell unquestionably that it is the same composer

This one is a lot looser, there's polyrhythms here too but they feel way less deliberate...or maybe better stated: deliberately incomprehensible. Like a musical representation of all of the motion of the various different branches of trees moving at different rates or all of the droplets of water plunking into the ocean. Every Raindrop on the roof of my house. It sounds like when it is windy and the recently dislodged spinny thing on the top of my house gets extremely loud and blasts me with asymmetrical rhythm of an ancient robot that is made out of tree logs.

Some concrete examples of what I'm badly trying to describe here are like: those birds chirping toward the beginning!? You hear rhythmic patterns very similar to them in the beepy sine wave, juxtaposed to be right after. But I don't even really notice this unless I'm going out of my way to pay attention because well, this song is Incredibly ORGANIC (NATURE)

Every instrument choice here is very cool. But the ones I tend to get giddy about the most are the percussive ones, they feel so full...actually they feel the opposite they felt like HOLLOW LOGS and like, man they're doing the coolest elements of the song too. Those log drum type sounds with actual barely perceptibly tuned pitches are the ones most responsible for my favorite aspect of this (I could use buzzwords like "m4tric modulation" or "polyrhythm" but the most accurate thing to call it is VANTAGE POINT SHIFT). HOW You shift between different perspectives of everything surrounding because of different layers being at different tempos. Especially if one element is repetitive, the thing it's repeating will sound very different when a big tree sound starts hitting and at the NEW tempo the older repeating elements have had their rhythmic function entirely inverted

I may be speaking overly technically about something meant to be super loose and probably not analyzed with a serious fixation, but what i get most out of this song is a combo of those two things
1. The cool sounds
2. Perspective shifting between different things because of different layers at different tempos

This reminds me quite a bit of one album I came to appreciate not too long ago:

Ordinary Objects and Other Distractions by Steve MacLean
https://stevemaclean.bandcamp.com/album/ordinary-objects-and-other-distractions

It's a pretty experimental album but that's definitely not a deterrent for someone named "Place". It has a couple tracks that have the same rhythmic vantage point shifting feeling as this David track but a lot darker.

Temperamental Distractions is the big highlight of that album for me, as is the final all midi track. This also relates to this kanaga track in the sense that this album's selling point is kinda that so many of the sound sources came from everyday objects. This is different from proteus suite ii 2's actual exact source,s of souind. but i make the comparison in my head because it's music designed for showing you how the environment around you, in itself, is music.

40rd
Game: DYAD
Title: Jupiter
Composer: David Kanaga
Nominator: @Place
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6lsUXs_91c

90s sounds?!?! metric modulation?!?!?! cool sythms and rhythms. HAS THAT SOUND THAT SOUNDS LIKE THE INSANE TOAD PATROL EPISODE SONG. [[I was referring to this sound in the background at 16:42 here...I
really love the soundtrack to this show:
https://youtu.be/iIJ_JRY-jwE?t=1002
]]

is this polyrhythmic/polymetric? I can't tell but it is definitely rhythmically adventurous with lots of layers on top of each other, i guess polymetric would be the best way to describe this. there's a few parts with loop points that are definitely not 4/4 while everything beneath still remains that way.

At first I thought the polyrhythmic and similar elements might not actually be deliberate, and were rather just a product of the crazy production with reversing sounds. But that weird breakbeat reversing and slowing down just before the triplets come in at :28. Thats definitely there as a deliberate rhythmic lead in to that element. I also like how the ascending triplets aren't lined up to groups of three, so the grid they exist within gets offset in a cool way. This isn't common enough to see i think, it's such an easy thing to do theoretically, but triplets just tends to mean that each group of 3 notes is treated as a separated set of 3 notes over and over. I'm glad this goes into a world i'm used to only seeing in DCI. I guess single track I've heard that does something like that to the most insistent extent is this track "Quadlit" by nmlstyl:

nmlstyl - quadilt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dC5TaAR9IqI

jupiter does the thing that that one Oneohtrix Point Never song does where...one of the most common rhythms (3+3+2) ironically sounds incredibly erratic, basically because its so fast:

Oneohtrix Point Never - I Bite Throught It
https://youtu.be/jt5tRaV3iY0

Another song with a similar property is "Escape from a Lab" from Spriggan Lunar Verse (a track i have a suspicion is uncredited Kota Hoshino of Evergrace fame)

SPRIGGAN LUNAR VERSE - Escape from A Lab
https://youtu.be/MYSdmL8FG50

I suspect the strangeness in all 3 of these cases intentional given who wrote them and the compliment to the general already strange sound. But it is probably something that could incidentally sound way weirder than intended by accident, if these 3+3+2 rhythms in a really normal song using them, got sped way up and now once familiar patterns instead sound like the crazy world. i'm glad though that i can feel as if these tracks are intentionally going for this subversion of familiarity, through what's ironically one of the most familiar rhythms

this honestly kinda feels like what would happen if kota hoshino wrote music for a super monkey ball clone or something. or like a namiki-imitating shmup song. something less mecha dark than armored core, but that style still applied to futuristic dnb or whatever. i love that it just blasts you off with that huge chord and the erratic drums jumpin around right in your face; that full burst of energy i get when i see the rotating stage spinning around when i make it to a new level group in super money ball

man this song paints the imagery on the album art well

41th
Game: Touhou 11 *Remix
Title: Hartmann's Youkai Girl ~ Todestrieb und Lebenstrieb
Composer: ZUN, Demetori
Nominator: @FL81
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNT8cQvmj-M

Oh no!! Another TIME SIGNATURE song. this one's a lot simpler to follow though i think.

(counting at around quarter note = 111, a lot of people would prefer this written at 2x the tempo, which'd change the numbers below (all the /8s becoming /4, and stuff like that), but i have a hard time thinking that way for some reason in general. technically what i have makes more sense if in respect to the original track anyway)

(0:04 - 0:12) 7/8, 7/8, 7/8, 4/4
(0:12 - 0:28) [7/8 + 4/4]x4
(0:28 - 0:37) 4 bars of 4/4
(0:37 - 0:53) [7/8 + 4/4]x4
(0:53 - 1:25) [4/4, 17/16, 4/4, 5/4, 4/4, 13/8]x2, 2/4
(1:25 - 1:43) 8 bars of 4/4
(1:43 - 1:59) [7/8, 4/4, 4/4, 4/4]2
(1:59 - 2:16) 7 bars of 4/4
(2:16 - 2:18) 7/16, 5/16, 5/16, 9/16
(2:18 - 2:25) 4 bars of 7/8
(2:25 - 3:23) 25 bars of 4/4, 1 bar of 5/4
(3:23 - 3:31) [7/8 + 4/4]2
(3:31 - 3:40) 4 bars of 4/4
(3:40 - 3:54) 8 bars of 6/8
(3:54 - 3:59) 6/8, 6/8, 6/8, 2/4
(3:59 - 4:15) 7 bars of 4/4, 1 bar of 7/8
(4:15 - end) 5/16, 5/16, 9/16

ok never mind that was not simpler to follow

my interpretation at :53-1:25 is based off of the 2&4 snare of the drums there. Theres lots of layers at once all with different accent patterns so definitely inteperperatable as polymeric (meaning multiple possible barlines to list). A lot of people say that you should always base transcriptions if ambiguous timesigs off the drums but I think djent---a whole genre centered around the drums stubbornly staying in 4/4 while the rest of the song does entirely different things---that's the last place where I wanna say the drums layer is the right way to feel things.

The other main layer in that section of note is the chuggy guitar highlighting accents in something like a [5+4+6+3+3]/8 pattern, which gets cut off and reset from the start every two bars, but it floats over the barline only adding to this airy multilayered feel I'm deeply in love with

Anyway this section of this track is one of the rhythmically most interesting portions of any song nominated for me in this topic. I'm super attracted to how hard it is to follow and just, obviously I like polymeter with lots layers on top of each other doing different things. And high king crimson esque echo guitar is a good trait too. but most of all it just feels floaty and cool~!

One thing actually typing these numbers out is making me notice, that I wouldn't have noticed on a casual listen, is how every one of the sections where its alternating between 7/8 and 4/4 has a different looping pattern in which their alternation occurs. It was easy for me to just kinda gloss over those sections and assume they were all like the first 7+8 one. But we've got 7+8+8+8 and stuff as well. it's funny that it's all sourced from a pretty simple memorable 7 pattern in the original touhou zun version of the song, this just tears it into various different cool deconstructed directions and that's something i always look for in proggy remixes of songs

A lot of why I like this is simply that it reminds me of other music I like. Prog metal but especially the djent aligned stuff like animals as leaders. The specific band id compare this track to might be Haken, especially because of the glitchy processing effects on the drums at a couple places

Haken - The Endless Knot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVZHNPyMhMo

ELIMINATION EIGHTEEN

?) Raetsel_Lapin (Average placement: 164.3333333)

you probably don't really fit into the concept of rating the performance of each individual who submitted songs, since your set was largely comprised of picks other nominators had abandoned. like a chimera of nominators. but well, i'm glad you picked those up, because some of them were quite my thing! especially this moon over the castle one of course. thank you for submitting, and saving the abandoned picks that others had made too!

42th
Game: Gran Turismo 5 Prologue
Title: Moon Over the Castle
Composer: Vince DiCola, Doug Bossi, Masahiro Andoh
Nominator: @Raetsel_Lapin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6lF2uWvL7o

(0:00 - 0:29) 27 bars of 7/16, 1 bar of 9/16
(0:29 - 0:46) 15 bars of 7/16, 1 bar of 9/16
(0:46 - 2:54) 55 bars of 4/4
(2:54 - 3:03) 2 bars of 6/8, 2 bars of 4/4
(3:03 - 4:33) 39 bars of 4/4
(4:33 - 4:40) 3 bars of 6/8, 1 bar of 4/4
(4:40 - end) 48 bars of 7/16

yeah i've talked about this before; i like mathy numbers. I LOVE vince dicola (transformers 1986 for a very long time was pretty much my favorite movie soundtrack). I never thought much of any version of Moon Over The Castle other than this one back then, but i think being so into this version of this song has made me retroactively nostalgaic for all versions as a whole?

even though you don't have to write it as x/16 (could list the tempo as faster, and write as x/8, or combine bars to make it all work out to less jagged timesigs) I really appreciate that the speed of rhythms in this song at the very least IMPLIES this level of asymmetry. it makes no attempt to "smooth over" the erratic rhythms, and although they're not as insane as things /can/ get, they're in-your-face enough to make it undeniable that "mycroprocessor on board 8 in 2014 or whatever would nominate this for vgmc" which i think did happen. or something (yes, it did).

it's very JOLTEON in that sense. actual rock organ being a big factor in that too. it's undeniable that this is "progressive rock", compared to other versions of the track, it is the version of moon over the castle arranged by the guy who sent Keith Emerson (rip) his music to tell him what a big fan of his music he was and Keith Emerson Told Vince Dicola that Vince DiCola was good! HOW LUCKY. what a lucky man he was

during the period where progressive rock (as in the actual genre and not just me calling everything i like "prog") was my primary musical fixation, one thing i think i was struck by was lots of rapid arpeggiated floursihes. keyboard player playing lots of notes really fast but only for a split second! things like the start of this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeboHGRHlW4&t=2s

this moon over the castle remix has a lot of those, you don't really hear things like that (especially not on keyboard) in mainstream popular music. in 2011, being suddenly exposed to artists like fairly surface level prog bands like Rush and Yes (which---to me were actually pretty alien in 2011 or so, i hadn't heard much like them in my exposure at the time), was a big deal. part of why it was a big deal was because they were /popular/, known for things that aren't even prog at all. but they bridged the gap from the very conventional as a natural segue into way more chaotic and strange work like king crimson and whatever.

2011 really was there year where i was exploring progressive rock specifically, as opposed to "vgm in odd time", or wishing that edm would have odd time signatures in it. i'd known what prog was before but honestly had only minimal exposure (and maybe some of the least 'adventurous' prog exposure i could've possibly had, i didn't even realize the genre was THE place for odd time, despite loving odd time, until my friend had showed me some rush songs with little odd time tidbits...which seem like 'nothing' now relative to what i've become used to, but at the time hearing stuff like that rock music was kinda mindblowing).

anyway i think i discovered Vince DiCola only a year off from that, 2012, and i was pretty psyched! because it was hard to find that style as translated to 80s synths, most prog bands got a lot simpler in the 80s, even if i was more attracted to the heavily produced, shiny plastic sound of that decade than anything before it: this just didn't correlate with composition being what i wanted. Vince DiCola fixed that problem! He didn't exactly keep the same sound in the future, and this track honestly sounds more like it's out of the 70s despite it being so new. but i'm not really complaining there, it's exciting that it makes his influence clear!

i'm a big fan of how some of the later sections here keep the erratic rhythms from the beginning, but the energy level is somehow the calmest of any part of the whole song. the contrast between that and the aggressive intro, is a good show of how even something as forcefully asymmetric as these prime numbered machine gun spasm rhythms, can have just as much variety in intensity and emotion as any other type of music. I like seeing this stuff as simply another option that music can be, rather than even insisting ideas like 'odd time is unsettling, it's good for horror' or whatever, it's good for anything, it can sound like anything. Here it sounds like everything.

this song is so sad. it's pretty emotional, furiously dramatic, much of that is sourced from the original material, but this arrangement's flair highlights it all to me just because by design there's so much constant motion between all the notes and stuff.

I don't think I ever said napalm man was my favorite directly; but i might've implied it was by accident, just thru omission? But i very specifically have said things like this, consistently, over the past many years:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/6/3/AAefu7AADDYH.png https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/6/4/AAefu7AADDYI.png https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/6/5/AAefu7AADDYJ.png https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/6/6/AAefu7AADDYK.png
i kept alluding to my "top 10 classic megaman songs" during para's topic; i guess i can finally say what that list is:

mm5 gravity man
mm&b astroman
mm10 chill man
mm8 frost man
mm8 opening stage
mm5 napalm man
mm5 crystal man
mm7 wily stage 1
mm8 grenade man
mm10 sheep man

(order is not absolute, i've changed the order a bunch of times. but this list of 10 has been consistently the same 10 songs, for at least 5 years. and gravity man has always been the highest of the 3 mm5 picks)

so yeah. i was deliberately not making it clear in your presence what my favorite mm5 song was, but it's always been gravity man. if i said it was napalm man i was probably not thinking or something (and it's always been close, regardless)

there's enough information as-is to figure out certain things. but when you know slots for 1-4th and 6-11th place avg rankings are taken, or something, you'll definitely be able to tell that a remaining song has to show up in a really thin window of positions, since a person with only one song left wouldn't be able to have an average ranking that fits into the non-taken overall placements otherwise. or things like that. i think... and careful analysis of everyone in that way, with enough information, could definitely allow a huge chunk of the remaining order to be almost certain.

this isn't a big deal at 43rd but it'll be more serious when more people have been eliminated and there's way less options. so i'm cutting this information off early to preserve suspense (though people here are persistent and smart at contest analysis...i'm sure people will figure things out anyways)

ELIMINATION SEVENTEEN

?) Haste_2 (Average placement: 95.33333333)

i didn't want to do this but i have decided that i will not post the final ranking position comparison thing for people who go out in the 9.x tier because uhhhh; i realized that if i continue to show that, once i get far enough, people who are so very smart will be able to figure out the order of the remaining songs like a math pujzzle. this would be creating "spoilers", so i will refrain from showing where everyone here wound up until the end. but i'll still post your average placement in a bold text and i'm not getting rid of what's listed on the sheet or anything

well! You are a genius; you did not know me all that well at the start of the topic but it's become pretty clear in these past few years since then that we get along very well in terms of musical interest. we share LOTS of favorites (including gravity man!). and your avg placement / rank is clearly pretty high. i'm not sure how substantially it will change but gravity man is definitely going to be higher by the end, i'm almost embarrased i had it go out this "low" (43rd isn't low by standards of this absurdly well-curated set of noms given to me for this topic).

thanks for your contributions and i can't wait to see what music you have to share with me in the future!

[...continued]

anyway those songs, and the original gravity man, all inject me with this intense feeling i rarely experience from music. i don't know how to describe it exactly, but the moment i heard all of these, i knew i was in love, and thrust to this expansive, universe-sized musical environment i had never been inside of before. it was like every note was now possible, somehow. there were no limits, even with a misleadingly conventional exterior, anything could happen and it would feel profound. there did not have to be a sharp dividing line separating convention from abnormal area; at the flip of a switch your world could turn upside down. And it would mean something, it wouldn't just be writing on a chalk board in a class room with a guy that is telling you what he thinks is cool. You are a kid playing a video game and having so much fun being this blue guy, and when this comes on, for me it's "immersive", i'm "there", how do you do that with just some beeps? this did that, i love you mari yamaguchi. i think this write up makes me sound like a hippie on too many drugs, i am so sorry, i don't know hwhat to say, because i like this song too much ha ha

man we're really getting to the section of this topic where the songs start to forcibly thrash my body about as i float into the air/ / // / this is doing that for me! It's really some of the emotionally i've been moved by an an all-psg chiptune. it's just such a perfect melody and accompaniment to it integrating with each other to make me turn upside down and start standing on the ceiling of my house.

[MAGENTA ZONE]

43th
Game: Mega Man 5
Title: Gravity Man
Composer: Mari Yamaguchi
Nominator: @Haste_2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPiKZ4AZR8A

Now I understand what para meant by some of these amazing mm songs being intimidating to talk about. They're so perfect and just leave me almost speechless because I don't even know where to start. So I've been sorta dreading figuring out how to talk about this one for a long time now

Well ill start with this. Here's a upload with a visualizer for this one (it's useful for making the harmony and stuff easier to understand and point to too):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9kHQtGfutE

This track largely defined and messed with the boundaries and definitions of my rating system. the fact that i define 9.x tier as "songs i consider favorites". I have always thought of this soundtrack as a "favorite" (my favorite nes megaman soundtrack AND favorite 2a03-only nes soundtrack overall), with this being my favorite song from it! In fact i consider this my very favorite track in the classic megaman series, and favorite 2a03-only nes song!? Originally the 9.x magenta tier was only the top 15-ish of this topic, what happened?! I realized i had to extend the tier all the way down to this song and redefine what 9.x meant, just because of it! I now think of the 9.x tier as "songs I think of as favorites---OR songs that I clearly like more than songs I happen to think of as favorites". a lot of stuff that i don't think of as "favorites" definitely felt fitting to rank above this song when i ranked these all, but if i'm just listing songs that have a very serious, deep impact and meaning to me? This is on the same level as the stuff i gave to the top 10 slots to, so it's a weird situation

That said in my current state of being this one would be legit just higher regardless of all this talk. But putting it higher than this didn't make sense with my 2018 taste

A lot of why my response to this track might be so weird is also probably because the original time I heard it was this cover of it by teckworks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggwPXW29o3M

Those pitch bends at the start!~ All these cool full echoes reverberating throughout my skull...just such a perfect set of sounds chosen to represent each element. i could go on about all the amazing things i think this arrangement does but then i would be talking about the wrong song here. It's one of the nicest sounding midis on msgs without really doing anything gimmicky (though it was almost definitely meant for yamaha syxg50; knowing teck...tho this is from 2004, i do not know if he actually used that in 2004)

At the time i made this topic i would have said something like "THAT version would be 39 slots higher!!!" or whatever. THAT version, both then and now, is unquestionably a top 10 by this topic's standards. but now...? well this will jump in the rerank for sure, even if that cover is my favorite version of the song, i'm not sure i consider the original far behind at all anymore (not sure how much exactly, we'll have to see! but the teck remix, both then and now, is top-10-of-this-topic level of good for me, and i consider the original to be a lot closer to it now)

This cover by teck sorta spoiled me in terms of like...how much information is given directly to me, rather than being implied...but ironically one of the original's greatest strengths is how much information is implied despite the soundchip limits! you get ALL these cool chord chords and chord changes and the melodic line weaving these unexpected patterns between each other into something cohesive. you get THAT, something that's hard to comprehend, all given to you on a soundchip that can only play 5 notes at a time?! (and is actually only using 4 of them? only 3 tonal ones?!) Yeah! THat's so cool!

i'll go into some of that. one of my favorite parts of gravity man is :39-1:00 or so; a big part of that is ironically because the melody line there is SO simple it's just like...one note, held out lengthily and repeated. It's the same reason Kimera II spoke to me a bunch i think. When a repeating, very simple layer, changes meaning /significantly/ because of the surrounding material changing around. The chords/chord changes there are pretty weird tensions in context of the rest, and also emotionally profound! but that melody is mostly just playing one note with a few hiccups in a saori kobayashi "holding one note down and then jumping up and down sporadically with one hand on the pitch wheel" way (she does this a lot). this one single consistent note threads these opposing odd chords together in the simplest way...all while feeling super organic and ALIVE...on a NES!? Those subtle fades and aaaaah it's so nice!!!! I also like the fact that the arpeggios to make up the chords somehow feel more like an ethereal spacey (gravity anomaly?!) sound design choice, rather than like "THIS IS A VIDEO GAME SONG"-styled nes arps that i'm more used to. These arpeggios feel natural, and not like you can feel the seams of compensation for limitation. Really i would not even /think/ this song was limited to only 5 polyphony if i didn't know it was nes. because that layer especially just (without even doing anything particularly fancy) feels like it's part of the song! and nothing more, it's beautiful, honestly! One of the most beautiful sections of any nes song

by contrast, the other major section of this song (:12-:40) is actually quite 'smooth' in terms of the way the chords jump between each other, a bit more conventional (even if still 'complex') a progression, but the melody line is moving around quite a bit more! in this case the chords are implied by funky beeps and alternate with longer harmonies for just split seconds and aaagh. beyond how much i love this song compositionally, it's a masterpiece at just sounding like there's way more going on than there actually is, how does mari yamaguchi fit all of this information into 3 notes?! HOOW MUCH JUICE IS IN HER BRAIN i mean, nothing i'm saying here is stuff para didn't already say in their topic where gravity man was spoken as if it was the genius song that was so cool.

the intro? well that certainly sets the tone, i mean i could just list every individual element of the song. every chord, every note, every time something cool happens. I didn't even talk about the crazy chromatic prog stuff from 1:07 until the loop, that's probably the obvious part that sounds like a thing i'd like but i don't know what my favorite part of the song is (it's probably :39-1:00, i mean look at how long that paragraph is compared to the other ones!) but sometimes 1:07 is my favorite part because it's like a computer, and the short plucky notes in triplets is such a cool feeling. how is this in a megaman song?! I don't know!?

It's cool to me that this set the tone for future "gravity" songs in the series i feel. which are consistently among my favorites, some examples:

MegaMan X8 - Gravity Antonion (this might be my favorite megaman x series song? saying this is informed by gravity man might be a stretch but i don't think it's a coincidence entirely. there's some really cool harmonies here and weird dives into the same sorta short jagged triplet elements gravity man has in the 'weird section', and those 16th arpeggios? hmmmm....):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy8g6h3Iwaw

MegaMan Network Transmission - Abnormal Gravity Area (GravityMan's Stage) ((QUARTAL SONG!!!))
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_ij1jJGSJ8

[continued...]

[EXITING PURPLE ZONE]

(apparently i forgot to say that at the end of blue zone; this topic's been going so long i forgot my "formatting pattern")

Current standings as of the end of PURPLE ZONE!

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/3/0/AAefu7AADDAK.jpg

everyone's shown up finally, and about 40% of participants have gone out, as opposed to the 13% at the start of purple zone. purple was a lively tier in that sense. magenta will be even more chaotic given that 23 people need to be eliminated in the span of 43 songs!

ELIMINATION SIXTEEN

Ranking by average placement:
1) ???
...
7) DireKrow (Average placement: 99.625)
...
15) JONALEON1 (Average placement: 122.5)
...
17) Zigazagoon (Average placement: 135.25)
...
25) AndywoodCubeGmr (Average placement: 156.8333333)
26) NowItsAngeTime (Average placement: 157.4)
27) jcgamer107 (Average placement: 159.125)
28) Haunter12O (Average placement: 161.375)
...
30) Snake5555555555 (Average placement: 167)
31) tazzyboyishere (Average placement: 182.875)
32) pyresword (Average placement: 187.75)
33) OrangeCrush980 (Average placement: 190.5)
...
35) SuperNiceDog (Average placement: 211.125)
36) handsomeboy2012 (Average placement: 221)
37) DragonImps (Average placement: 232.5)
38) Se7enthrust (Average placement: 252.625)
39) lordjers (Average placement: 266)

in every way, the best performing person to go out so far by a noticable margin

as i JUST said, i know you picked more based on what you thought i might like that you knew of, rather than what you liked most yourself. but i could still "feel" the 'dire' in these picks, mostly just the general edginess which as you know i of course love. and even just because you're picking from sources like rhythm games and things that feel very "you". but you did a great job particularly with the darker ones nailing the emotional alignment i go for. and with masterpath you somehow nailed the rare anomaly where i absolutely adore something really happy almost specifically for it being such too

you also got me seriously looking at a number of things that prior to this topic I didn't take as seriously (alerted me to more seriously look into frums and feryquitous. and i wasn't aware that MM was my favorite linda ai-cue song, and now have dived even deeper into their work. all that sorta stuff.)

I think certain picks in the re-rank will be higher (mainly masterpath and mm) but i dunno if it'd affect your avg placement or not, we'll have to see i guess! 7th is still, super high, obviously!

thank you for your contribution and your set was certainly very memorable to me. and had overall one of the biggest impacts on the music i've come to listen to since then (given that it got me into or at least more into multiple artists i'd been sleeping on)

44st
Game: Taiko no Tatsujin: V Version
Title: MM
Composer: LindaAI-CUE
Nominator: @DireKrow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddoFtn_EK9A

(picking a much higher quality link than what you gave me, i think this quality level wasn't available easily before, but luckily it is now!)

((Actually i think there's some issues with that one too...neither of these are how this is supposed to sound i'm pretty sure, but here's the original link if you want an alternative to that one anyway))
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b_M2L829Lo

i kno you said you picked your picks more "trying to appeal to me" rather than songs you specifically liked yourself, but you NAILED exactly my aesthetic with this one, and in ways that do overlap with your interests, even if you're not necessarily into this song. It's VERY epic, cataclysmic, dark, oppressively so, and that's an interest i certainly share with you. this is the music that plays when you fight yvetal in the middle of when it does some apocalyptic thing

LindaAI-CUE's style is often recognizable from miles away, it's not just the "wacky crazy complex weird rhythm game song" that defines their stuff, but it's very precise peculiarities about the production. There's a freedom that's not often found in other rhythm game music, honestly it makes sense for "taiko" because it almost feels like a dream (nightmare) translation of the furious energy of real life drumming, but everything you're imagining that could be played at the same time layered on top. Like you're drumming a normal set of drums but then each hit is releasing GLOWING DARKNESS energy (represented by every other sound of the song), and what you hear is this. There's all these strange imprecisions and it's exactly what's attractive to me about this.

for a long time i was saying that i can't really decide my favorite LindaAI-CUE song but it honestly...at this point i'm almost certain it's this? Which i was introduced to because of you, so...congratulations! You showed me my favorite song by a composer i love! The realization this is my favorite one took a while tho, i definitely didn't think it was at the start of this topic. it's less mathematical than other standouts, but that's less important to me these days than the more enveloping concepts like "atmosphere" and how hard it actually is to follow. This song is, despite being all 4/4, far harder to follow than the mixed meter linda songs (partly because linda's style of mixed meter is very much like "making it very obvious that the song is in odd time and having changing timesigs"). There are some others i'd place at a similar level of "hard to follow" but they're more silly than this one so i'm not able to get quite as into them as i am this serious display of the chaos realm. MM has the perfect balance of "serious darkness" and "rhythmic ambiguity/difficulty" and also just productionally probably the one i find the most cool.

despite that i just said linda's style makes odd time obvious when it happens, what he doesn't do is make ANY OTHER rhythmically strange thing obvious---it's only that it's usually clear where the barlines are. but his non-obvious rhythmic choices are more things along the lines of...impossible-to-comprehend polyrhythms (donkama 2000 . . . [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OrXuTysJ_I]),

but at other times (MM) the way the rhythms are non-obvious and extremely hard to follow take the form of just,,,,weird tricks. 1:30 is still in 4/4, but the tempo has been sped up suddenly, with no pulse telling you exactly /how much/ it's been sped up. so these tricky "syncopated within fast 4/4" funky rhythms (which might otherwise not even be that weird on their own) are actually /insane/ feeling rhythms, and it's definitely my favorite bit of the song. i think it helps obfuscate the tempo/rhythm the fact that the rhythms are sorta "bouncy" ones, so before the rapid 4/4 kick comes in, you're potentially hearing it as 6/8, or swing/shuffle/triplets at a completely different tempo (This is USUALLY what happens to me, despite that i know what it "really" is doing there)

one other thing i appreciate is how thick and full the chords are. i was lamenting the other day about how frustrating it is that dark/epic/"tough" things tend to have less dense chords, leaving all that stuff for like "chill jazz fusion" or "cute disco for pink spheres", and that frustrates me because my personal aesethetic is far more aligned with "edgy werewolf dragon of DEATH" or whatever, and i want those cool chords! Why can't i have them?! why is all the edgelord music boring triads : ( well this song isn't like that!! THis song has COOL string chords when those happen. it's actually not that often that it's legible easily in the song, but it makes the bit at 2:22-2:25 especially a cool payoff when it happens, i love the feeling of those chord hits on the strings when they hit

man i love flanged violins...makes me think of...shining wisdom. the other big production element i like here is the how just sliiightly desynced the glitchy sounds are at 1:12 (which actually seems very intentional, looking at some of the rhythm game charts, you're actually expected to precisely time those in at least some of the difficulties?! crazy, reminds me of E.G.G.'s groove coaster insanity, which has similar things in a couple places), that glitchy section in general is surprisingly beautiful too! it's like the absol showing up to warn you about destruction about to come and you are looking at the landscape turn a red shade as the sky starts to become infected by "the dark force" that is going to be bvery mean to you

i always liked linda ai-cue, but since the making of this topic i've dived in deeper largely because of this song. dire has such a good track record this topic of getting me to more seriously look into the work of an artist i'd only had a passive (but positive) familiarity with before.

45nd
Game: Jumpstart 3rd Grade Adventures
Title: Molecular Awe (WGM)
Composer: HaleSong Music Productions, Randy Hale, Big Fish Audio
Nominator: @Zyxyz0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP6OxERlMGM

90s Edutainment VGM OST representative!!! thank you!! (of course it's from you hahaha) i'm a big fan of this soundtrack actually

i had a fascination with this song when younger. generally how weird it was, but also it was a permanent tie-in to me. the idea of being shrunk down to microscopic in size to the point computer generated 3d spheres (molecules) were bigger than you...it's a weird idea! It's a totally, impossible thing to experience with current human technology, so naturally the music follows what that feeling is. in general---in life, i've always had fun imagining places i go about in real life being places they're not (it's funner to go to science class when you imagine that the classroom is inside of a volcano! or whatever), and since i was exposed to this game "in 3rd grade", i was able to have it ingrained pretty early on that one "option" for imagining as an environment was microscopic molecule simulation world, or at least things that felt vaguely like that. This song would start playing when i go to the McDonalds that is inside of a giant DNA strand or whatever

interestingly, the metadata in the midi file for this game, indicates that this track was originally called "Gaseous", and level 2 and 3 being called "Fluidity" and "SolidMan". but knowing that this track was supposed to indicate GAS specifically, that really explains why it avoids having anything to stand on. the music is really cool to me in that symbolic sense, without knowing exactly the context i'd definitely have assumed it was something at the very least "spacey", not solid. so it does a great job at what it's clearly intending to represent

it's not necessarily easy to find very "sound-design"-focused midis, this isn't necesarily limit pushing at all, but midi tends to incentivize "composition-focus" by its very nature. MIDI is all about storing notes, not sounds, composers know it won't even sound the same between sound systems that play back midis with entirely different sounds. So often sound design takes a backseat...but not here! You've got cool delay echoes, cool pitch bends, interesting uncommon use of the specific midi patches it's using. This actually clearly is going out of it's way to sorta turn the sounds it uses into use cases where it won't really matter what you play it back on---it will still sound cool!

here's my cchannel visualizer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeY3bWpMnYg

as u can see from the fact that these tones are held down for very long portions of the songs, and the crazy panning/pitch/vibrato/etc control changes visible on the left. so many layers don't even have any "new notes", but they have so much done to them while held down, vibrato and pitch bends. slowly fading in volume, all that stuff. It means that the function of these sounds is more akin to raw waveforms of like a gb or nes, like they're /not/ that, but they feel more like that, because the exact timbre playing these notes back doesn't matter so much, because the sound gets manipulated through layering and all those sorts of effects anyways. I wish i saw more examples of stuff like this! One game soundtrack I know is full of this kinda thing is "Obsidian", a myst-clone i really love
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySfWqqbpKQU

given that i just said i think Molecular Awe would sound good on alternate soundsets, and standard MSGS is far from my favorite MIDI soundset, here's a few examples of this track played back on other things i've just recorded!

Creative Sound Blaster Live!'s 8mbgmsfx:
- this is likely how i first heard it as a kid, I definitely did not hear the MSGS version you nommed first, because i didn't experience that until i got windows XP in 2002, which was definitely notably after i'd originally played this. but i did havve a computer that would make the song sound like THIS (probably, it actually had multiple modes for how it could sound but this was one of them)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0lpQQxtZe4

OPL3 (the fat man 2op set):
- although, it's also likely i had just heard it on this originally, which was my first MIDI experience on my Win3.1 machine (only recently 'upgraded' to windows 95 at the time). the balance in this thing i've uploaded is a bit off with certain instruments loud-leaning---this is not how this always sounds on opl3, just the particular emulator i recorded from here, but it was better than some other emulators i found with other artifacts. i'm using an opl3 emulator here but i still have that computer from 1995, i could try recording this from it but it'd be a bit of effort (and would likely result in lower quality)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyw80bWHJ30

i guess neither of those examples turned out amazingly (and i've tested the midi on plenty of other things and it sounds nicer than these examplse) BUT i picked them becauUSE that they are the first two ways i heard it (not sure which of the two came first). I was definitely playing this game pre-2002 and the two soundsets i had on the computers in my house at that time were these two (then i'd have heard the version you nommed when i replayed this sometime post-2002 on the xp computer probably).

Zyxyz0 posted...

it's not quite as cool as those soundtracks, but that reminded me that I do know of a VGM track that's literally called "World Beat"...!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VM-hZmDwLM

omg whoa; i don't remember this. i think i might have never checked this particular ost out even though i've listened to most of the series' music. this is definitely cool

one of the first 2 game soundtracks I ever heard (before i ever played a video game) was "the even more incredible machine" (my story with that is the first day i used a computer, before ever playing a game in my life, i listened to every MIDI file on the machine, including those to pre-installed games and the pre-installed games were The Even More Incredible MAchine and Lode Runner: The Legend Returns. So "listening to vgm out of context" has always been in my blood.....)

Simoun posted...

I've always nominated Tor Remix in music topics but always get shafted by a low rank and I was kinda tired of nomming it so I just didn't this time lol. I should've---honestly anything that isn't my terrible 2nd to the last ranker.

EDIT: Sorry I meant the original Tor's theme, not this remix

It probably would've done well! somewhere in this purple tier but not as high as the remix