Lurker > Toxtricity

thanks so much for archiving that all, this whole span of many years! glad you found a new service to host it on

also for everyone's information: as i said a few places, i'm largely leaving this community temporarily. but i DO plan to do the rerank, and when it's ready i'll probably dump it all at once in here. i won't be paying attention to gamefaqs very much so i would appreciate it if others can keep this topic bumped for me still (hopefully i finish before this hits 500 lol, we'll see.)

THE END

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/3/6/AAefu7AADL9s.jpg

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/3/7/AAefu7AADL9t.png

I CANT BELIEVE I AM DONE WITH THIS THING

well

i'm not, because i definitely want to do the rerank.

and i also would like to do like "various stats" (i'd started on a lot of those)

and i did toy with the idea of making like mini remixes or at least like "improvising on piano over" a number of the songs i felt really passionate about

i also said i might do a thing that's like "if you had nomianted this song you were thinking about instead but scrapped, here's where it would fit in the ranking(23.5th place) " or whatever

so i might do all that if/when i can, but i'm quite busy right now. and am also about to start co-running vgmc in less than 24 hours so...well. we'll see when i have time to get to all these things! but this topic is not QUITE done but the core thing i made an obligation to have done before this vgmc is anyways!!!

FINALLY I CAN NOMINATE THESE songs i have wanted to nominate for vgmc since 2018...

i'm excited to compare how 2022 self compares to 2018 and all the other stuff i said, but i also have a lot on my plate right now so i might be slow again

i have no idea if i'll do another topic like this any time soon (after vgmc ends, i'll be mostly offline for quite a while, so 2023 at the earliest). and if i do do something like this again, i will not be able to put even close to this much effort again---i'm refusing to let myself take this long again hahahaha (even if this did have the cool appeal of being like a "time capsule" or something, which i do think was a neat artifact of how long i took!)

thank you for sticking with me on this thing since 2018 for anyone who's been paying attention this whole time

thank you to EVERYONE for SHARING MUSIC TOGETHer; because doing that. that's the important part. that's the thing that makes b8's vgm circle one of the most important communities to me. even the stuff i didn't rank high, i still willingly listened to it regularly. This was a wonderful set of 278 songs i almost treated like an lengthy game ost that i could go back to at any time...deeper analyze how these songs relate to each other, why i liked what i liked, never really got tired of listening to this full set!

if you nominated something for this, you helped build part of one of the soundtracks that's been a soundtrack to my life for the past 5 years. and it was a hugely beneficial experience.

thank you EVERYONE!

ELIMINATION THIRTY-NINE

Ranking by average placement:
1) kaonashi1 (Average placement: 31.375)
2) hotdogturtle(Average placement: 48)
3) Place (Average placement: 59)
4) UF8 (Average placement: 60.625)
5) DoctorJimmy133 (Average placement: 92.75)
6) Haste_2 (Average placement: 95.33333333)
7) DireKrow (Average placement: 99.625)
8) GameBopAdv (Average placement: 107.2)
9) Zyxyz0 (Average placement: 109.75)
10) Mr Lasastryke (Average placement: 110.5)
11) NFUN (Average placement: 110.75)
12) Glacier (Average placement: 111.375)
13) azuarc (Average placement: 116.625)
14) rwlh (Average placement: 118)
15) JONALEON1 (Average placement: 122.5)
16) deogenerate (Average placement: 123.5)
17) Zigzagoon (Average placement: 135.25)
18) xp1337 (Average placement: 139.3333333)
19) Janus5k (Average placement: 139.5)
20) hombad46 (Average placement: 141.75)
21) Shonen_Bat (Average placement: 143.875)
22) Prody Parrot (Average placement: 144.875)
23) FL81 (Average placement: 145.625)
24) Simoun (Average placement: 149.375)
25) AndywoodCubeGmr (Average placement: 156.8333333)
26) NowItsAngeTime (Average placement: 157.4
27) jcgamer107 (Average placement: 159.125)
28) Haunter12O (Average placement: 161.375)
29) Raetsel_Lapin (Average placement: 164.3333333)
30) Snake5555555555 (Average placement: 167)
31) tazzyboyishere (Average placement: 182.875)
32) pyresword (Average placement: 187.75)
33) OrangeCrush980 (Average placement: 190.5)
34) dowolf (Average placement:190.875)
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)

PLace has won Third PLACE';HAHA "place". but succeeded at being the last to lose all their tracks!

well place. you have managed to introduce me to a song that was my favorite song out of 278 songs at the time i'd made this topic.

even if i admitted that something else is higher if i were to do a rerank to my current tastes (which i will), that doesn't de-value your achievement. You sent me exactly what I was looking for at the time i'd made this topic!

and of course feelings are going to change after 5 years (but in reality...even after 5 years. it's still roughly a top 50-100ish favorite song ever to me, it's actually GROWN on me probably, the same way yggdrasil has)

i don't want to make this post feel too preferential toward people i'm closer to but like.....you're a close enough friend that you literally moved to live in my house for a period of time. Obviously you're an incredibly important person to me, but one thing i find sorta interesting is that i think exactly what i like about your personality shows in the music you share too??

you have a VERY open mind, and are all about elevating what you feel may be underappreciated, and trying to see the good in things others might dismiss for whatever reason (obscurity, weirdness, etc). you try to find the good in music just like you try to find the good in...everything!

and you like to learn. you like to dig as deep as you possibly can for the unfamiliar, and try to test norms---something off-limits by many standards isn't off-limits to you (a good example of these sorts of things was your desire to try to learn as much as you could for the museum list, and explored consoles and eras most people just skip over)

i think those sorts of values are something i hold at my own core, and i interpret them pretty similarly too---this is definitely a big reason i click with you both in music taste and more broadly as a friend. I never really fear you won't at least try to understand and explore everything that you can.

my life has been deeply enriched by knowing you, and you've helped me get through a lot. (and also i've listened to shadoubt shaps hundreds of times.....!)

thank you for being one of the most important people to my life i have ever met.

1th
Game: Lightfield
Title: Shadoubt Shaps
Composer: Zanshin
Nominator: @Place
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFypko3_tS8

{{{{ALERT: I AM NOMINATING THIS SONG FOR VGMC16.}}}}

{{{{ALERT: I AM NOMINATING THIS SONG FOR VGMC16.}}}}

{{{{ALERT: I AM NOMINATING THIS SONG FOR VGMC16.}}}}

the piercing lazer beams of this one are a real pleasure to start out with. THIS was the "[THIS INFORMATION HAS BEEN REMOVED TO PREVENT TEMPORAL ANOMALIES. PLEASE BE PATIENT]" track I was referring to on ridicule. It's some of the closest I've ever heard anything get to the stuff I like about ilkae or bunbleman that isn't ilkae or bunbleman. The best part about it to me is the fact that it's a kinda swingy-shuffle feel, but it's a totally deconstructed and forcibly computerized way of that. what could be a bouncy funky groove gets surgically spliced apart by other layers enforcing this as even-spaced-triplets rather than the bouncy swingy/shuffly feel it'd have otherwise

i thought i would have to make some sort of visual to describe this, but i think it's not too hard to tell what I mean?

anyways at the time i made this topic, this was so perfect to what i was looking for at that exact time it was nearly overwhelming; no question that this would wind up at the #1 slot (and even now; when i've admitted the real #1 by my 2022 taste is yggdrasil...this is still like, not that far behind it. it didn't make my top50 vgmgg list but i would consider it to be an unsaid honourable mention there, it's likely my favorite thing in the "music that sounds like ilkae" zone [nothing by ilkae made that list either, despite considering him one of my favorite artists. the cluster where that style starts is like "55th place" or something so it just barely didn't make the cut. and i didn't want to spoil that this was my #1 of this topic by placing it into the honorable mentions list of that vgmgg])

but really i was overwhelmed how perfect this was because i was DESPERATE for more "rhythmically complex idm" (why this and ridicule particularly nailed so high placements). was /desparate/ for more _Houndoom stuff. but i also maybe even moreso was desperate for _Zorua stuff, which is harder to find because it's largely about...very precise forms of dissonance, managing to be funky and complex at once without cancelling itself out. there's not even many artists who can consistently be that other than zzzv. but this track is like, honestly EXTREMELY zzzv; just the more idm/ilkae leaning manner of such. it was the perfect merge of the two types of music i was most lacking awareness of at the time and i'm so thankful to have now been exposed to it

I posted spider by bunbleman earlier which is the most similar track i can think of to this;
https://inpuj.bandcamp.com/track/spider

i guess maybe something like this is comparable?
https://inpuj.bandcamp.com/track/colt-cabana

there's some autechre stuff kiiinda in the zone too?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBkP9OfQLhE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuOrxEByTUE&t=193s

oh wait i guess BISK has some equivalent stuff too (this is actually probably the most similar exact track to shadoubt shaps i can think of):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zYrhAnf9Wo

anyway i t's honestly extremely hard to be "funky" and "mathematical" at the same time and not really cancel each others' energy out in this way. when i first heard it, i was really,...really not expecting it to be this impossibly attained balance! I was just expecting it to either become entirely one or the other quickly; but it wasn't even just alternating. it was /simultaneously/ funky groovy cool guy music and precisely mathematically erraticly gridded.

this is something that has definitely become a core facet of what i look for---i LOVE "progressive rock" and so naturally can understand the appeal of long suites with lots of varied styles and sections wildly different from each other. and often combining contrasting styles in rapid alternation (people like jordan rudess and shnabubula are very good at this; see "the song i ranked #2 in this topic"). BUT what's even more impressive is when the complexity and simplicity---the funk and the anti-funk---the weird and the normal---. When these are simultaneous, it doesn't even become monotonous, because the track will have to be so precisely balanced with so much going on that there's no way i can feel it as anything other than stimulating. every listen i can decide to fixate on a different element or style

Shadoubt Shaps is really one tempo all the way through, but it feels organic and moving, and all it takes is one layer showing up, or disappearing, to change the context of everything around. like going thru it, it starts off very "bouncy", but around :25 some layers question that, and turn it more gridded. and by :43 that synth bass has taken over and made this into a COMPUTER WORLD instead of a funky alleyway. by 1:09 it's a bit more organic again, but then 1:29 brings back the synth bass and it's suddenly far more discombobulated a groove. which gets even more extreme when that higher layer's removed by 1:49...This isn't even exactly "obvious" though, like when i'm listening i'm hearing this all as SEAMLESS. I'm hearing totally different ways of interpreting the same note/rhythm sequences at different timestamps in the song, but it's not even obvious where the divisions are when it starts to feel different, because all it really takes is the presence/absence of certain layers (though there are some obvious more striking moments of change here).

~4:20 is a pretty fascinating departure from the rest because it's probably the most tonally conventional the track gets (it's dissonant, but in a way more adjacent to traditional classical ways of that sorta thing), and i guess it works very well as a climax and finale for that reason

i've barely even talked about the sound design here, it's INSANE. ridiculously metallic and electronic. and DENSE. there's always so so sooo much going on at once. there's like, a wall of noise behind whatever the actual focus of the track is, and it really pays off to sell this specific artificial and dark atmosphere. feels like you're in the DARK MACHINE

ELIMINATION THIRTY-EIGHT

?) NFUN (Average placement: 110.75)

when i first met you and i was making vapid descriptors of everyone's taste i described yours as "funny jolke person" which.....that's not rwong (Especially with what some of your noms were). i mean evven the EPIC PROG of this shnabubula dancing mad arrange is literally a siiva rip that does goofy things sometimes inside of it

but when it comes to the actual like, serious deep core of what you like? that is actually not too far off from where i look these days, and i'm very thankful for it. i know you've changed a lot over the past many years but god. you uploaded PSO2 AND Caravan Stories osts?! like, the biggest convenience for my "1st favorite game ost" and "5th favorite (probably) game ost" listening. that is a MAJOR IMPACT on me in itself!

i'd say you made these noms before your current VERY aligned-with-me identity was quite solidified, but there's still some cool stuff here. prog with l ots of wacky rhythm stuff; and even things like "thousand year door" weird electronic song. Good stuff all around!

2th
Game: Final Fantasy VI *Remix
Title: Dancing Mad (PAL)
Composer: Nobou Uematsu, Shnabubula [SiIvaGunner Rip]
Nominator: @NFUN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZypvxG0vJiA

shnabubula is one of my VERY favorite musicians, and also a very important person to me in general. he is going through a very difficult time at the moment and i can only wish for the best outcome...there are a lot of bad possible outcomes at this time. he has been on my mind far more than any other person has, this past month, so it's kinda bizarre to just be like...talking about this song right now candidly like any other song in the topic. i thought about not mentioning anything, but it felt wrong to not. he's in the hospital due to a...variety of severe issues; and i've been crying a lot...this happens once every few years to him, but this might be the worst it's ever been. thank you for being alive. every word of this post has been made with the best wishes i could possibly give to a person through "text on a message board" SIGNALS to [HEALING HUMAN LIFE AND MINDS ACROSS THE EARTH]

i've always loved Dancing Mad, one of my favorite tracks by Uematsu---uematsu has always been hit-or-miss to me but this particular track is a HIT hit. it didn't seem like the sorta song that even "needed" to be improved, but this song somehow managed to make something I already love even better to me? I don't even know where to begin, but as someone who liked Dancing Mad enough to nom/support it or at least push for it numerous times in the past...this arrangement appeals SIGNIFICANTLY more. so you're pushing it up to the highest of the 9.9s here really.

i suppose, i should point out, that far-and-away my favorite part of dancing mad is part 4, which these days, is especially for the quartal lines in the organ (though i love all parts more than you might expect me to at this point), SO, for the gimmick of this re-arrangement to be like..."part 1 in the style of part 4" and "part 4 in the style of part 1", well. It means i get DOUBLE the elements about this piece of music that I already loved most! Stuff like 2:04 where it's merging my favorite part of the original song with a backing that i already love (i love the mood of that part of part 1 as well)...it's just perfect. Something you can only get in this version

I also think it's to its benefit as a suite in general...it feels far more cohesive and interconnected to have these part 4 referenced in part 1 / part 1 elements referenced in part 4. The feel very CLIMACTIC and stuff, because the ideas from each other are referencing each other at the endcap portions of the song, so it just makes the structure of "ideas" waaaay more powerful to me than the original version of the track where it's really 4 separate songs to me. this is ONE song to me.

not going to write out the whole thing, but here's two of the big mixed meter sections. The timesigs AND timestamps here are based on what I can make out from this particular YT upload that has a piano roll with barlines:
https://youtu.be/EunT1LHCEd8?t=481

(8:02 - 8:10) 4/4, 4/4, 4/4, 4/4, 5/8
(8:10 - 8:28) 4 bars of 15/8, 2 bars of 13/16
(8:28 - 8:37) 9/8, 2/4, 12/16, 12/16, 4/4, 4/4
(8:37 - 8:53) 9/4, 4/4, 7/8, 9/8, 9/8, 15/8, 4/4, 4/4
(8:53 - 9:21) 8 bars of 15/8
(9:21 - 9:47) 13/8, 9/8, 2/4, 6 bars of 13/8, 2 bars of 4/4
(9:47 - 10:12) 6/4, 19/16, 6/4, 5/8, 9/8, 6/4, 9/8, 4/4, 17/16, 12/16, 4/4, 4/4, 2/4
...
(11:37 - 12:28) 4 bars of 4/4, 18 bars of 11/8
(12:28 - 13:12) 7 bars of 6/8, 1 bar of 11/16, 24 bars of 6/8
(13:12 - 13:23) 4 bars of 4/4
(13:23 - 13:33) 6 bars of 6/8, 5/8, 5/8, 6/8
(13:33 - 13:42) 9/16, 5 bars of 6/8
(13:42 - 13:45) 4 bars of 10/16?*
(13:45 - 14:12) 20 bars of 4/4
(14:12 - end) 4/4, 4/4, 4/4, 7/8, 10/8, all 4/4 to the end after that

*[this part is a polyrhythm that wouldn't translate to something easily understandable in midi/sonar/daw limitations without doing some sort of trick, which is probably why the tempo totally changes, so i'm not exactly sure what he wrote this bit like. I'm calling it 4 bars of 10/16. but it might be written in 4/4 with quintuplets or something bizarre like that...especially knowing that this is shnabubula of all people/based on what that sounds like. ]

those numbers don't...at all, indicate how rhythmically complex this is. and THIS ALREADY LOOKS intimidaing just from those numbers!!! The main thing that complexifies the stuff that already has a bunch of jumpy barline lengths is (of course) polymeter. Tons of layers don't line up with the barlines at all, and have their own barlines they're affixed to (or even an entire other grid/tempo in many cases, given all the polyrhythmic-y stuff in this)

there's so many good examples of this in the song like...oh my god when 12:34 hits and i'm hearing the chords from the original dancing mad's phase 1, but with these rapid proggy organ lines in the style of phase 4...I get some of the deepest chills i can think of ever having gotten while listening to music tbh. the simultaneous merging of "emotionally profound moment"(familiar dramatic theme reference) and "overstimulating numbers" it's like the biggest chemical rush you can get in a song like this.

even simply 8:10 is the same way, hearing a super proggy version of the phase 1 i'm very familiar with makes this feel very "YOURE AT THE END" in a way the original song never felt and it's SO Cool!!!!!

and then what the FUSE is this ending at like 13:58. It's like 3-4 different layers of different melodic threads you'd heard earlier AT THE SAME TIME but they're all on different grids from each other, yet they all intersect! Some stuff is being treated where each note is one "5/16th" beat length, while other stuff is more tethered to the 16th or 8th. Stuff that reaaally brings out "5 16ths" spaces is just...the most unashamedly "prog sounding" thing you can do really, but this does it in a way where each group of 5 is treated like a "1" since it's playing out a melody line from earlier and gaaah it is just so cOOL. What a finale.

a lot of predicted this to be #1, and honestly it is pretty close. i have no actual criticism of the track but my PURE OBSESSION is largely still around movement 1&4, so i think that's the only reason it didn't wind up there, this has the highest highs of nearly anything in the topic; but they're specific sections or moments of a VERY long track. basically everything shnabubula did to this was perfect and makes it significantly better to me, but no matter what, i'm going to have an unbalanced preference for certain bits of this over all else in it because of how the original was structured

this really needs to be the "2nd to last song" anyways, it fits that slot so perfectly in FINAL BOSS style. tho i wish first place felt more "credits-y" than the actual first place

(if you're smart, you might be able to figure out what the one remaining song left is!!!!)

((also yggdrasil is kinda heroic credits-y, but it being moved to first in the rerank wouldn't actually fix this 'problem' because #1 would just become #2 making this one become #3 probably))

(((though i guess it could almost be like.........dancing mad remix is "phases 1-4" of the final boss, and then [ranking topic spoilers] is an extremely trippy and surreal phase 5 of the final boss ala giygas. and then yggdrasil is the credits. that's my canon imagined way the rerank "video game track order" works out now)))

new zealand testers...i tell ya. they try so many crazy things. have so many crazy ideas. including things that no one would think make any sense to try........... and sometimes ....they are the best things you could possibly try. (shout out to sergio; because without him, this song would not actually exist)

ELIMINATION THIRTY-SEVEN

?) azuarc (Average placement: 116.625)

after your very early drop, can you believe you had a nom get THIRD?! You had the biggest range of any participant. Simoun's spanned 261 but yours spanned 271

we're known to often disagree (to the point you hired me to help out with vgmc in the past over the fact that we have "opposite taste" hahaha); but we've known each other long enough that well...it's pretty clear you remembered and knew exactly where the overlaps were to conjure a set of vgm that i was pretty deeply in love with!!

the dissonant darkness of compression of time; imposing seriousness of braid; fairly interesting chiptunes with neat sounds like the project s11 and turrican one. a bastion song witH REALLY COOL sound design. and of course,like the outright prog of "secret of mana arranged by someone from basiscape" and "SAKURABA"

it was a great set, you had one outlier that didn't click (and honestly that fact gives you a "cool statistic" anyway) but everything else was a hit, so thank you! i'm glad you remember what i like well enough to assemble a set of music i find so cool, of a lot of our shared interests!

3th
Game: Secret of Mana (2018)
Title: Steel and Snare
Composer: Hiroki Kikuta, Noriyuki Kamikura
Nominator: @azuarc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W33hy40gkWE

GOOD LUCK LINK; (ill advised trying to secretly upload a square song with no existent yt video up to my knowledge)

well i know that you knew this one was going to be high because i already nominated it for a past vgmc. but yeah, my feelings on this are as high as THIRD PLACe (at least in 2018 mood). anyway, it's probably not hard to understand why.

this honestly filled a void i'd always had, as the whole original som soundtrack is something i've always loved, and "steel and snare" always among my favorites---but as you know it's way too short. no one else could share the love with me! everyone would be like "well it's cool but why doesn't it have anything in it" , but what if this song kept going?! what if it added more stuff above?! i mean, well here it is!

the original had such a cool atmosphere as-is, that fit the context too. this distant windy echoy drone sound throughout the whole thing like you're on an airplane or something, that alone gave it a distinct open and expansive flavor. but once you add the funky bass, drilling double kicks in the drums (honestly one of my favorite examples of double kick drum pedal use in a song i can think of. even in the fakest incarnation of it), extremely engaging instrumental layers from everything (and of course, mixed meter of the original even further emphasized). well it's no surprise i was in love. but even someone like me---VERY willing to be obsessed with short loops, i wanted more.

this track broke beyond my wildest expectations. like the first thing i did when i found out about this remake ost was jump to see what this remix sounded like, but i /assumed/ i would be disappointed simply because it's easy to not live up to the things i'd like about the original of something. but no it's actually overwhelmingly perfect. clearly it's a jazz fusion approach which...of course makes sense, the original is like "jazz fusion funky bass solo" basically, but i wasn't /sure/, what if they decided to make it like "badly produced hip hop" or "60s hippie song idont care about" .but THEY GOT THE RIGHT nail that i always heard the original as anyways!! these exact electric piano sounds are super chick corea(hitomi sato); and i couldn't be happier with that constant 16ths synth layer permeating every corner of my vision with glowing tiny lights in the bakcground

honestly i'm super thankful i could love this so much---although i've gotten in arguments with you over me liking this remade ost way more than you; i honestly was disappointed with a lot of choices about the 2018 som remake ost in hindsight. This song is like, one of the few songs in the remade ost that i honestly can wholeheartedly say did exactly what i wanted with no reservations from me at all; very thankful it was this song of all songs that /got it right/ to me. to the point of being something i'd been WAITING FOR for to hear as a song since forever, finally fulfilled.

it's funny that prior to this topic---while i always loved basiscape, i didn't realize how obsessed with them i was as a while until this topic really (thanks kao with the caravan stories nom), before that i'd basically just known i like random kimihiro abe songs and of course manabu namiki shmup stuff, but really i otherwise barely payed attention to who did what there or who was even in the sound team. so i also hadn't totally comprehended until like maybe even a couple years after noms that Noriyuki Kamikura is someone i should've recognized as a name instantly: for even having done a lot of my long time favs from opoona/muramasa/etc and all that! well knowing that now, it all makes sense!

that PITCH BEND right before 1:51 is so good (i love...love slow background pitch bends, as i mentioned a lot in my top-50-songs guessing game)

ok yeah i should type the numbesr; they're actually not that "crazy" but this is probablyt the 'correct' way (or at least one of the correct ways), sounds more complex than it is:
(0:00 - 0:36) all 4/4
(0:36 - 1:07) [4/4, 5/4]x6, 1 bar of 3/4
(1:07 - 1:36) [4/4, 5/4]x6, 1 bar of 3/4
(1:36 - 1:51) 8 bars of 3/4,
(1:51 - 2:05) 5 bars of 4/4, 1 bar of 5/4
(2:05 - 2:34) all 4/4

oh cool! someone already made an oscilloscope visual of the original so i don't have to!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGgz5R6PWS4

it's kinda fun to look at, to see that a lot of the channels are taken up by being duplicated to make a neat echo effect and stuff. and just watching the superfast drilling notes in some cases. but obviously this is a pretty short and plain song in the original compared to most; as much as i love it, i'm thankful this track was remade in a way that could extend it to something i enjoy even more

ELIMINATION THIRTY-SIX

?) Glacier (Average placement: 111.375)

when you first showed up in this community i was pretty struck by how much you latched on to the exact same very very obscure tracks that i had latched onto when i was younger; and had first got into genesis music and all that sorta stuff. like, that's NOT a likely thing to happen, these are very uncommonly praised tunes. we went for the same ones?! where did that come from?

We've both changed a lot, even in the past 5 years. you are CATHODE now , and stuff. and the period where i was fixating on battle mania daiganjou was like 14 years ago at this point. BUT i think the thread of why we had that mutual fixation remains. We would scour obscurities looking for what we'd see as gems for a reason. and choosing to look into old soundchips and the exact, rough and imperfect way that makes things sound, for a reason. we wanted to hear a distinct edge you can only get from stuff like that, and knew that somewhere deep in the unexplored, there'd be brilliant gems. and we found them. the same ones. and even if we may have moved onto searching for new gems of different types, in very different areas now, that thread of enthusiasm for these distinct sectors of work that can only exist if you dive into scouring obscurities remains with us to this day

that definitely showed in your noms of course; like....literally both of the songs that wound up in the top 10 were like...long-time favorites of mine, that are relatively obscure and in uncommon soundchip formats!

thanks for not shying away from the hidden gems, and giving me some cool stuff to listen to, or reminisce on!

4nd
Game: Fighting Layer
Title: Capriccio
Composer: Ayako Saso
Nominator: @Flamander
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kt1AYIRLFXQ

I don't remember when I first heard this, but I've been a long time fan of this track from day 1

You've often described your taste as "rough and bumpy" and i would say that this song exemplifies that idea pretty well! Bouncy swing/shuffle feel is part of that, even the fact that its largely in 7/8 makes it only more lopsided and like you're tumbling down a rough rocky mountain unpredictably. And of course the fake and sampled instrumentation of it all!

Maybe this comparison won't make sense to anyone but this track always reminds me of this track which I heard a lot as a kid because I really liked this "lost luggage" minigame
https://youtu.be/O1hve_tUFWs

I think its basically the "fake jazz/swing done in such a way that feels BROKEN" OR something. Especially those weird notes in the bass, the almost "wrong" feeling of a lot of the layers of cappricuo is one of my favorite parts of the whole design of the song. And that was always I think what I liked about that lost luggage tune too. i'm CERTAIN there's another song i like that is very similar but can't figure out what i'm thinking of, maybe it'll come to me.

oh, this isn't actually the song i was thinking of somehow but this track from Mystic Ark is VERY similar haha. love it just as well for similar reasons!:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkFpxhzaCks

I'm amazed how weird so much Japanese arcade music winds up being allowed to be, even compared to other stuff these same composers and developers would put out on other platforms. I guess a lot of it is that by nature---you want music that really stands out and is audible in the environment of a potentially hectic arcade where the music has to compete with 50 other sounds playing simultaneously.

I remember some composers talking about making the punchiest fm synth bass sounds they could fathom and then writing tracks that were like 90% that sound so that it'd be impossible to ignore in the arcade. That's one approach, but another approach is tracks as weird as this fighting layer one. In a sea of 40 songs playing at once, if I was near enough to this one to make it out, I'd be like "wtf is this!?" and jump over to see what's going on. It is very DISTINCT and hard to ignore.

The sad reality is often at arcades you can't hear the music at all. One opened up locally here with a lot of games from this era i like the music to and I kept trying to play them to hear the music but you really had to force it to hear them half the time

I'm glad that nowadays, the gift of emulation, game preservation and more widespread enthusiasm for retro stuff has allowed this music to be heard with more spotlight. Getting the recognition that work this unique to the world deserves

Ayako Saso is a very fascinating composer to me. She tends to be treated like "less famous clone of shinji hosoe" and not as acknowledged. But now that I know more about the sound teams she's been on and what she did for them, I definitely think she brings a lot of very unique-to-her stuff to the table. I guess I'd just say she feels more "limitless". Not afraid to be dissonant or hard-to-follow? More than anyone else she tends to work with. an adequate example of that might be the pure chaos of this track:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddyjGMGOS0k

oh yeah; here's a CHANNEL VISUAL^443wt3aergs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vQuf8IkeR0

i really like making these things; i think they serve a pretty legit use in learning about these songs. For one, i always assumed that most/all the drums in this song were just like, drum loops sampled, but there's actually lots of individual hi-hat/etc all manually individually playing their own notes. the drums in this track are VERY DENSE and full, which is important for something with such a lopsided groove i guess.

23 channels (out of the 32 this arcade board's soundchip has) is...well it's a lot, and i didn't even realize this had that many. A lot of sounds i thought were one sample, are actually like 5 samples spread across 5 channels here, because this game could actually afford to do something like that! It's definitely better for it. the echoy and dense layered feeling adds well to the rough bumpy skin that defines this track

very _Zorua playlist music, thinking about it; 'bouncy' + 'weird notes' is a good summary of at least one style that fits into that, and that's what this is!

I'm motioned to think about how much i love that synth lead...how angry it gets when it morphs as its held out, it's so cool...

ELIMINATION THIRTY-FIVE

?) hotdogturtle (Average placement: 48)

i haven't known you for very long but my impression of you has always been that you really appreciate the very fringe and quirky side of the stuff i like, the most of all. That extreme zone of strange composition AND strange sounds. That can be the most difficult thing to find someone to share an enthusiasm for, so i'm thankful you nominated for this topic! (and similarly thankful you supported a lot of the more unusual picks in vgmc/etc that otherwise wouldn't have gotten any energy without your impetus)

again, my experience in this community really would cause me to feel a lot more alone and unwanted if it weren't for the brightness of absurdity you bring to the table. i know you curated your exact picks more precisely toward stuff you thought i'd like, but i mean you can't get much more on target than...any of these three!

All in different ways too! Frantic Aspic had the more aggressive rhythmic insanity and impossibly strange harsh sounds. Red Chasm was more about tonal weirdness, and just...really cool rubbery sounds and stuff, a more smooth incarnation of these things. and the other pikmin one was a cool exploration of minimalist layered rhythm stuff and a super unsettling clashing emotional tone.

All totally different ways of appealing to my tastes, but they all worked, and also all felt very "hotdogturtle", at the same time. and I'm glad i could see that. thanks for being here!

and thanks for introducing me to how amazingly perfect to my interests pikimin/hajime wakai/etc is because oh man that stuff is all taking over a huge chunk of my listening now!!!

5rd
Game: Splatoon 2
Title: Frantic Aspic
Composer: Ryo Nagamatsu (-3)
Nominator: @-hotdogturtle--
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xq1WQxcroY

for convenient use of this topic; here's someone playing through the rhythm game version of this song (you can see the barlines and rhythm placement of everything in general there, so it makes this very slightly easier to understand):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nrqo0h2fNVM

[timestamps, and transcription based on the rhythm game video here]:
(0:01 - 0:04) 2 bars of 7/8
(0:04 - 0:13) 4 bars of 5/4, 1 bar of 5/8
(0:13 - 0:59) 21 bars of 5/4, 1 bar of 5/8
(0:59 - ) 10 bars of 5/4, 1 bar of 5/8

it's mostly numerically not super insane. just 5s and 7s. but those only have the purpose of being "containers", because the rhythms that exist within those containers...stretched tuplets, totally challenging-to-follow over-the-barline stuff all over the place. I think this takes the cake for the most Rhythmically Challenging song nominated for my topic! Given that this was a status it's obvious a lot of people were trying to hit, you should feel proud of that.

another one of my favorite things about this is how that 7/8 bit at the intro; it's repeated throughout the song, but in ways that are not 7/8 at all, totally deconstructing and reconstructing the rhythm layered atop everything else in precise and distorted fascinating ways. some of the coolest "polymeter" I've ever heard in a vgm track tbh

honestly those "containers" are fairly meaningless when it comes to a song this complex. the bars of "5/4" start off with a ton of stuff that feels more like half that length---5/8 inside of them. The REALLY weird rhythms like ~0:17ish are mostly the cause of immediate unwarned sporadic alternating between the triplet grid and the 16ths grid. This is honestly nearly impossible to follow and I can not imagine playing this in a rhythm game and i'm saying that as someone who was hired as an instrumentalist for oddball experimental performances specifically because i specialize in complex rhythms that no one but me could read that they knew... I mean I CAN read this if i tried probably, and it's one of my favorite types of music, but at this moment, even after having known this track since it came out, I still can't naturally parse it at a precise "knowing which exact 16th beat or triplet beat this note lands on" way. I only know it by "feel" which is /more/ useful in some ways?...but there's no way i'd succeed at playing this in the rhythm game hahaha, i wouldn't mind trying someday tho. or just trying to perform this live if i could find a group willing to tackle something like this...

I found this sheet music transcription which is pretty useful for reference, though I haven't carefully crosschecked it for accuracy. but i'm finding it really fun to follow the score here:
https://flat.io/score/5f3c5efb5bf9f4067f7254fe-frantic-aspic-salmon-run-w-3-unfinished

so yeah I know i kept talking about that rio/avant-prog subgenre of music...really it's incredibly diverse in terms of how it can sound but. THIS song is probably teh song out of my entire topic that feels the most similar to what i look for in that category. Here's some examples:

Yugen - Cinically Correct
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce-gWYI5NIQ

Yugen - Corale metallurgico
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAvNXP61ylc

Birdsongs of the Mesozoic - Petrophonics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e43KCiLAyk

- really i should be clear. the whole imaginary band omega-3...whether or not it was intentional, is /literally/ a rock-in-opposition /avant-prog band. it has like every trait. "totally absurd instrumentation" (typmani instead of 'drums'. cello. and some guy who does a bunch of random electronic effects [patricia dalilio?! is that you?].) this is literally like, three-person version of Art Zoyd or Birdsongs of the Mesozoic or whateve

their description of the electronics member:
"With a considerably rough temperament, he's an individual that seems to take an attitude in opposition to most else. ", even using that word OPPOSITION Hahahahaa/ iI DONT KNOW IF IT WAS INTENTIONALLY SUPPOSed to specifically be a reference to this very small subgenre of music that not even many prog fans care about that much. but i'm happy that it's at least taken a convergent evolution to being the same things I love about all these weirdass bands.

i thought it was possible that "Frantic Aspic" was a reference to "Larks Tongues in Aspic" by king crimson, but the japanese title was completely different, so if it was considered---it wasn't the original composer making that reference anyway. given that i have mentioned king crimson i might as well link a song that is loosely comparable(not really)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQDEm-iXlIo

anyways, thank you for this absolutely ridiculous trio of noms!

@Mr_Lasastryke
hey check this out hahaha
https://twitter.com/AntonMCorazza/status/1518494766610235398

ELIMINATION THIRTY-FOUR

?) kaonashi1 (Average placement: 31.375)

your run was ABSURD; i mean i expected you to do well...and at this point our "compatibility" is quite the well known thing around here. but i really didn't expect anyone to get even close to this consistently nailing it as even people multiple ranks lower than you so, really was a welcome surprise to be bombarded with this much cool tightly curated music to my tastes!

I actually do NOT think you will rise in the 2022 rerank, contrary to what i've pointed out to many others (but yggdrasil will definitely be the #1), so it'll be like...a tradeoff. not as consistently high, but suddenly also having the highest scoring pick we'll have to wait and see i guess!

thank you so much for introducing me to...so many songs, some of which basically turned my list of favorite artists/soundtracks/etc upside down single-handedly.

honestly it's been a deeply important thing to my life to have met you, because as i've made clear with how i talk, i'm used to feeling very alone, and am a lot more damaged by the alienation that i feel than i may even come across. so anything that can help me feel like i'm just a little bit less isolated for liking the things i do---or even genuinely is naturally quite into the stuff i am! that's important for my sanity really, and i'd gone a long time not feeling that at all (especially as in the past we weren't nearly as similar as now)

i've legit gotten through very difficult times where i felt i couldn't relate to anyone, too alone to feel i deserved friends, but then i thought about "i can't wait to show my friend kaonashi1 this cool song!" and stuff like that. it brightens up my day. you're probably a lot of why i've stuck around on board 8 long enough to see it get a bit better for me eventually

the same is true for others i've said similar things about like uf8 and friends.

but honestly like; any scenario in which we celebrate overlaps. even with the people i'm least similar to here, there's a fun celebration and excitement in situations where mutual enthusiasm will come up! i think that's the beauty of this community is like, even when you're shooting obscure darts at the screen and usually getting misses...there's totally obscure stuff i'd have never found without being here. we can talk about gust music here to a degree that's difficult to find anywhere else. even things like how everyone here knows what "GOSU" is

and stuff like that, it's an important part of my life

the songs we discover from the people here, those are the soundtracks to someone's LIFE. when you actually think about this impact, the music to someone's commute or study time was informed by others here. that's just...SO COOL! WOW! the power of FRIENDSHIP and THE INTERNET

i totally lost track of what i was trying to say...

these songs made me happy, thank you for being so nice to me! thank you for being here! thank you for not being afraid to talk about weird theory stuff to your ability, thank you for digging into the deep obscure. and even just reminding me to check out more from osts i already knew! my life is better for it

6st
Game: Mary Skelter 2
Title: Shissou
Composer: Yoh Ohyama
Nominator: @kaonashi1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7nqAFwOVr4

so i actually originally had tried transcribing a great deal of this one out (like chords, every indiv instrument and note in the song, not just timesigs) but never quite finished. that was definitely a challenge, with how overwhelming the constant modulations are and simply how much is always going on in the song and all that! very much my kinda deal with loving unexpected chord changes but melody lines threading them together, Yoh Ohyama/Astruais is good at that. in my notes i have "sounds like yoh ohyama, one of the most bluntly mixed metere yoh ohyama songs i know, lot sof x/16", and, yeah, that's definitely a good way to put it. (although it's a lot less "mixed meter" than it "sounds"////////so actually it's not a good way to put it; but at the very least, even more than a lot of stuff by them, there's no shying away from angular rhythms in favor of smoothed out simpler ones)

As much as I love Asturias/Ohyama, i can't think of almost anything by them that THIS perfectly addresses what I want out of prog. I'm not sure it's specifically my favorite track by them, but if i described "what kind of song i want them to make" it would basically turn out to be exactly what this song is. it's packed to a point where every section has at least one thing i find "interesting": unusual sequence of chords during the normal 4/4 parts; and the overt odd time not shying away from segmenting itself into single bars of x/16 as a level of destruction of the grid. there's always something going on to catch my attention

(0:00 - 0:08) 4/4, 3/4, 4/4, 4/4
(0:08 - 0:49) 22 bars of 4/4
(0:49 - 1:10) [5/8, 5/8, 5/8, 7/16]x4, 2 bars of 4/4
(1:10 - 1:24) 8 bars of 4/4
(1:24 - 1:31) 4/4, 3/4, 4/4, 4/4
(1:31 - end) 6 bars of 4/4

there's a lot of presence of rhythms that "feel like odd time" or "feel like polymeter" that aren't exactly...essentially, they're assertions of "rhythm lengths" of 5 16th notes, which feels like "5/16", but it's really just an odd loop of a 5+5+6 rhythm that only lasts a single 4/4 bar each time it happens (some examples are :11-:15, 1:35 - end).

another significant deviation is those two bars right before 1:10, it adds up to 2-bars-of-4/4 but in reality it's felt almost more like "5/16 + 11/16" on that first one, which is pretty mindblowing a form of overstimulating, especially coming right after the /actual/ big mixed meter section. and even throughout the song, the same sequences of notes that are explicitly in odd time or fake odd time are still heard in various forms, really cementing this feeling of COMPLEX GEOMETRY or whatever. (this is one of my favorite moments in the song for sure)

even simple stuff like the fact that the beginning makes the subdivisions very clear---the 4th bar of the song is "4/4" but it's like it took that 3+3+3+3 3/4 bar from earlier and added a +4 chunk to segue into the next section. [3+3+3+3]+4 is a very common rhythm, but the exact way this lays that out to you, almost excited to show you that this song is going to feel 'mathy'...at least by my interpretation, that is /not/ common

The SOUND and FEEL of it is more important than the actual numbers tho; because to me, this is undeniably "mathematical feeling" which is what i'm here for, whether or not it's secretly simpler than it comes across.

the harmonies are a similar deal in a few ways; it sounds more complex than it is, mostly just because the fast-paced nature of the tune can make the ideas hard to follow; but that means the big hits of long held out chords are a really shocking and powerful punch of emotion when they do hit. I think one of my favorite bits is the sequence from :09-:12; the melody really enforces that you be aware that the harmonies beneath them totally change, inverting nearly. notes that worked before (particularly F#/G#) would be the most dissonant possible thing against the next chord (featuring G/A), and the violin line really hammers this thing in---and abruptly it totally changes again after that!

This track is just packed full with stuff like that. i wish i found it easier to illustrate or talk about in words, as i wanted to go into that more in Yggdrasil as well, but this exact style of chord-melody line interaction is just the single thing that hits me the hardest (and it's definitely one of the reasons your favorites tend to resonate with me so much; even things as 'normal' to be into as like morishita fire emblem, or like "heavyhanded key change in heaven's divide" hahaha. but stuff like this or yggdrasil is the more extreme example of that and i'm very happy you're able to share this very specific energy with me)

and oh yeah of course, i like 70s prog instrumentation, a very _Jolteon thing that this track exudes in spades. I was saying on the sakuraba writeup (and when talking about dream theater) that dt/sakuraba tend to be "MORE timesiggy than actual prog bands in the 70s". this particular asturias song is a good example of that zone as well, it's exactly the instrumentation that could be heard in a prog band from the 70s; but most actual 70s prog bands probably wouldn't wind up doing something like the :49-1:10 section here, or even the overall density of information in the track. so it makes me happy that this aesthetic<->composition style void can be merged seamlessly in a track like this.

I think there's reasons you're able to hear stuff like that more often in modern prog (access to recording equipment being easier---so not having to record things under limited time in only one session. easier ability to practice/record. stuff not always being as centric around having to be a thing played by a live band touring. ability to splice things more all throughout for studio versions. the list goes on. but all these things make it so there's a lot less hangups about forcing stuff like this into modern prog, even if you keep the aesethetic of the old)

whatever the reason, i'm thankful songs exactly like this are more able to exist now. i LOVE asturias/yoh ohyama, and you have introduced me to what is unquestionably one of my favorite songs by them. i can't believe it packs this much fascinating material into such a short runtime...

oh by the way at this point. everyone only has one song left. Who's going to go out first?! you'll never guess

7nd
Game: Phantasy Star Online 2
Title: Yggdrasil
Composer: Mitsuharu Fukuyama
Nominator: @kaonashi1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN7fMkbsjEg

here it is; finally.

{{{{ALERT: I AM NOMINATING THIS SONG FOR VGMC16.}}}}

{{{{ALERT: I AM NOMINATING THIS SONG FOR VGMC16.}}}}

{{{{ALERT: I AM NOMINATING THIS SONG FOR VGMC16.}}}}

so. ok. this is severely underranked as far as my 2018 ranking topic goes. Yes. "7th place", is underranked. it should be 1st place, no, not even that, like -34985734897th place with how powerful it is on me and how often I reference it... i swore i wouldn't change the ranking from what it was in 2018 no matter what though so keeping this at 7th until i do the rerank

I already loved it to begin with, but at this point i'd say it's not only my favorite PSO2 song, not only my favorite song nominated for this topic, but among my top 5 or so favorite songs of all time!!! One of the main incentives for doing a 2022-self rerank of this topic, is because this is undeniably my 1st place at this point!

it's not too hard to see why; i've shown this to people who don';t even know i have basically an in-joke of comparing everything i like to Pat Metheny Group. and they're like WHOA THIS IS PATH METHENY GROUP; so it's definitely not even nearly a shallow comparison here. this is VERY pat metheny/lyle mays chord progression style. complete with dreamy acoustic guitar melodies, ethereal layers of worldly elements that are "not jazz things", constantly changing the tonal center to a degree that makes id~purpose look simple...

iirc, one time after a vgmgg, shortly after I had made this ranking topic, you and i were like the only people left in the voice call. so I just started playing keyboard over random songs, and eventually went through all the songs you nommed for me for this topic (no indication of "how much I liked them" as a spoiler; since it was like. you were there. so you could've assumed i was just playing them because it was you on the other end). Anyways when I got to YGGDRASIL i was amazed at how hard it was to play along to!! It sounds so beautiful and potentially even simple and normal at a distance, but when you're actually trying to follow these chord changes, oh my goodness. It's near impossible to keep track---it NEVER sounds "wrong", but it's always an adventure. It's perhaps the epitome of those lines I always say "it makes me FLOAT IN THE AIR". "IT MAKES ME FALL OUT OF MY CHAIR", like when i say that stuff about id~purpose or random actual pat metheny group songs for having lots of unanticipated modulations or whatever, this song blows all of those out of the water. This song makes me FLOAT IN THE AIR, and FALL OUT OF MY CHAIR. more than any other song I have ever heard in my life. Period. the only songs ranked higher than this (in both "2018 taste of ranking topic" and "top 50 songs ever" lists) are higher up because they maximize other categories of balance elements out in other categories.

Yggdrasil is the MAXIMUM PERFECT "pat metheny group energy" song I have ever heard. and I clearly reference that group a lot...and I've been sitting on saying this for like 5 years; this isn't a hyperbole or shallow statement of blind praise for no reason. I can not think of a single piece of music that more powerfully represents exactly what this does to the area of my taste that makes me like pmg (and pmd).

The other reason it's perfect in this sense is all the electronic injections. A major factor in what I look for is a nice balance of electronic<->natural elements. This feels like a TREE SONG, it feels like a FUTURE SPACE song, at the same time. You have the synths and fancy electronic drums and futuristic electronic effects all over this production. You also have beautiful acoustic guitar and piano and orchestra backing it all. They're merged pretty seamless, in a way that's not commonly attained. When I hear this, I don't THINK "wow cool it is a perfect balance of electronic and acoustic", rather, when I'm looking for one or the other, I get what I'm looking for, and the other half that i wasn't looking for---it's a perfect supplement that everything feels absolutely perfected in representation of what i'm looking for.

right now i've been trying to form some groups to play live instruments in jazz fusion-y music with, for the first time in a while. One thing I've been noticing is how much of an interest I tend to have in constant 8th or 16th lines that are very COMPUTER when deciding what stuff I want to play (if there's multiple keyboardists, which layers are the ones that i'll tackle in the arrangement? I find I'll repeatedly go back to these electronic and rigid computer grid layers.). this song is drenched with these synthetic grids and i LOVE it so much, its not at the forefront, but it wouldn't have quite the same imagery or atmosphere if it weren't for these looping synth sequences.

It goes back to some of the stuff I was saying on the DBZ song uf8 nommed about why I loved Yack so much. The earliest two roots of my taste in music are "edm" and "jazz", broadly. They had taken a long time in their isolated pockets of my interest before I finally got to feel them converged seamlessly once I was exposed to yasuhisa watanabe. The funny thing is, Hideaki Kobayashi (i know this song isn't him but he obviously defined pso's sound)---well, there's a few funny things about him:

[1] hideaki kobayashi was rejeted from zuntata (during while yack was prominent there), before he got hired by sega......this means, he literally "wanted to be with yack", which is crazy to me///to realize the yack connection is more than just a personal comparison i've made in my head.

[2] he has stated that his goal with this sound was to take the compositional elements he liked about jazz, but put them in the instrumentation and production styles of electronic music. this is EXACTLY what i was saying i loved about yack! I'm really lead to believe he liked yack for very similar reasons to me, and once rejected from zuntata and eventually at sega, decided he'd be his own version of yack, on his own terms. I can't say I'm disappointed!

the others he brought onto the team (including Fukuyama) definitely have a visible sharing of the same mindset. I was on one of fukuyama's profiles and the whole thing was just linking a bunch of jazz musicians, including some of wild obscurity. but his music itself is always incredibly electronic, even outside of pso. It's inspiring to me because it was something I had been seeking deeply for such a long time in my youth. Once I finally found it with yack I was overjoyed. jazz+"synths" wasn't unheard of, but the sorts of stuff yack or the PSO2 team will do where they take clearly jazz fusion inspired progressions and harmonies, but place them in like "a dubstep song". or the most grating piercing sonic forces supersaws ever. That's where my desire was finally attained and I'm thankful to have discovered it. It's honestly not unreasonable to imagine that I could've never discovered pso2 or yack and would be wanting this style but never hearing it.

this is my favorite Pat Metheny Group song.

rwlh posted...

(though I am a little disappointed ridicule didn't have an ALERT I AM NOMINATING THIS SONG FOR VGMC lol)

oh, to be clear anything that hasn't been in before in the top 12-20 or so (or even further tbh) would almost definitely a high, high consideration. it just wasn't on my initial planned noms list but if you go for this, i will support if i have room (actually the main problem was that i wanted to try psy-chorus this year >_>)

ELIMINATION THIRTY-THREE

?) rwlh (Average placement: 118)

i'm very thankful for your presence in this/these communities...you clearly explore a lot of stuff that isn't easy to find people willing to touch.

your taste is fairly difficult for others to grasp exactly what constitutes it, but i think it's largely that you just value the ability for music to make you feel very powerful emotions (any type of emotion) above all else. and since emotions are such a subjective quality compared to things like composition/instrumentation preferences, it can be difficult for a lot of people to understand. Personally I do think I "get" it, and even relate to it quite a bit! You hit EXTREMES and you certainly shared a number of those with me.

ridicule was the most extreme extreme, and the one that aligned with my preference best. but I got to hear x-TREME CHILLNESS with stuff like nidhogg and fantavision. I got to hear EXTREME PAIN with parallax (and ridicule). I got to hear EXTREME CONFUSION with ridicule and the gradius one. you did a great job and really every track offered something different and unique to me---i guess that was kind of the goal with the prompt i gave you in the first place. I'd say you succeeded in fulfilling that given prompt.

thank you for sharing with me so many cool songs! thank you for being so nice to me...

8rd
Game: Umineko no Naku Koro ni Chiru
Title: ridicule
Composer: zts
Nominator: @rwlh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi3eAjB_LcA

here we go into the depths of some of the most extreme horrific hellscape _houndoom atmosphere of this topic! but it has the bonus of being incredibly rhythmically fascinating as well. This isn't a common combination to find, one of the only things I can compare it to is maybe ilkae/bunbleman
https://inpuj.bandcamp.com/track/spider

but ridicule gets a lot darker than that.

I guess there's a bit of autechre that gets this dark while simultaneously being this level of rhythmically strange; but for the most part---despite IDM being associated with rhythmic complexity in a lot of people's minds, it's actually quite difficult to find things in the genre at this level of outright rhythmic strangeness, especially this specific type of it. Usually rhythmic strangeness is more about erratic jumpy rhythms, rather than this more multilayered "sounds totally different from different vantage point" perception-testing vantage point shifting stuff i love SO much. I guess there is one other idm song i can think of like that....it's called-----[THIS INFORMATION HAS BEEN REMOVED TO PREVENT TEMPORAL ANOMALIES. PLEASE BE PATIENT]

I guess part of what happens is that this initializes itself as empty enough to where the only thing to latch onto is these repeating echoes...those echoes become THE rhythm, THE pulse that you hear, even as they fade out. It initializes one tempo........but is it the "real" tempo?!?!? Later different elements come in with their own tempos, their own rates of echoing out, and you get these wonderfully funky comparisons between the two layered. It doesn't feel overstimulating, it feels deliberate and funky and cool~!

To illustrate exactly what I mean, I've rendered this song with a kick drum playing at a couple different tempos:

the first one; the tempo is at the rate of that first metallic hit you hear. (making the song at ~135bpm, in 6/4 [or i guess 6-bar-phrased 4/4 if you want...])
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDBtPF_KM0A

this second one; the tempo is at the rate of like...everything else in the song...(making the song at 90bpm, and in normal 4 bar phrased 4/4)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtjwcJ-5S_8

I actually think that the SECOND video, is the "real tempo". this makes it so that the whole song is in 4/4, and if you kinda filter out that first echoy hit you hear in the song. the song actually becomes incredibly rhythmically normal!!!! the echoy hit the song starts with is echoing at a rate that's triplets...so when you hear its pulse as "the tempo", it's a FAKE TEMPO that only applies to that one layer really, and this is the most likely way someone would percieve the track, which is a really cool rhythmic trick that i adore...

this track is much like rhythm-changer, the name should be changed to ridi-cule, because it really reminds me of the sorts of things xaki does (though zts is no stranger to rhythmic oddities either...even in his super popular epic trance songs i have used the word "polymetric" in like every writeup. and stuff like deadangle also explores rhythms similar to this, albeit in a much less horrifying and abrasive way)

THIS SONG IS INSIDE OF A METALLIC PIPE (i have stolen these words from "place")

I know you were stressing about not being able to find a song for this category, since i had given you a prompt to try to find one track that'd fit into each of the 8 (at the time) pokemon playlists on my yt channel. and the one category you couldn't find a song for was _Mewtwo (described as like...looping sequences, especially layered intersecting 'mathematical' feeling ones...basically, songs with polymeter or polyrhythms in a repetitive way (steve reich but cyberpunk or something)) ---in the end this winds up being slightly more of a _Houndoom song because of just how furiously DARK it is. but honestly? the WAY that it's "mewtwo" was pretty profoundly unique, and it wonderfully slots itself into both those playlists. I couldn't be more thankful that after all your stressing on the hardest category to attain, it wound up being my favorite song out of your entire set! You really nailed what I was looking for here, and while I'm familiar with umineko music I've so far only listened to ep1-4; and so the chiru stuff i didn't know and this WAS new, genuinely. GREAT JOB. i will have to listen to all of chiru sometime soon.

this is genuinely one of the darkest, most evil, most horrifying pieces of music i can think of off the top of my head. very little else fills me with this much dread. but other songs i can think of with that effect aren't nearly this "interesting" to listen to at the same time. so this is a very welcome tune that i want to add to the experience of sounds in my ears! I wish i had more words to say about it, in terms of imagery, etc. I suppose i can mention that the uncertainty and difficulty to comprehend the rhythms only adds to how dark it feels...it's kinda what i said in snake's "The Evil Within" nom:

These hits and their pulsating reverb trail kinda create the illusion of various different rhythmic spaces (sometimes i hear closer to 7/8ish at one tempo, other times something totally different), but none of the things i hear will line up with those drums, which makes this 2nd half of the track put me in multiple temporal locations at once. It's the audio equivalent of the existential torture of the separation of instinct from thought, when you are in danger............! one interpretation is "reality", but you are not allowed to perceive that because you are going to be killed so you have to interpret "approximation of reality", instead. this doesn't change what reality is, but you're feeling both at once all the same with different parts of your mind...at least, i am

now...honestly, if you just stretch a 4/4 click to line up with the space each of those hits starting at 1:49 is (bumping it up to ~130bpm), it lines up nicely, including those weird drum bits each just being normal 16th notes, but i find it almost impossible to naturally hear it that way! the change in tempo is so sudden it's impossible to escape the ~108bpm feeling from earlier, so into this rhythmically ambiguous hellscape of uncertain anxiety we go. and honestly, that's the perfect zone for a piece of music like this

i don't just like that sorta mathy thing because i like numbers, even if i self-reductively act like i do, and speak from the vantage point as if timesig stuff or whatever is all i care about a lot. but in the context of horror game, those sorta effects are the exact things that generate even the exact instinctual forms of uncertainty that you absolutely need to convey the scenario. not knowing exactly what the tempo or bar length is, even if there is clearly some sort of pulse, and multiple things pulling me in different directions---that's harder to process, in the same way being chased down corridors of an unfamiliar abandoned building you dont know how to navigate is harder to process. i like that!

this track is just like THAT, and I LOVE that!!!!!!! THANK YOU

9st
Game: C-Wars
Title: Belly Crawl
Composer: tenfour
Nominator: @kaonashi1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-0PcU19UL0

i guess this is another instance of me being more tolerant of blues scale stuff than i would usually be because it's presented as "edgy" enough. the injection of subtly overstimulating complex harmonic stuff throughout the rest of the track only helps! ESPECIALLY those sharp synth stabs, they're so funky in presentation and so piercing in their punch (i love when they transpose around...or when those stabs PITCH BEND. and stuff like that). Those sorts of chord stabs are one of my favorite things to hear in this type of music.

Similarly (as in, another "anomaly" on how well this appeals to my taste despite my typical response to something), i usually have mixed reaction to when chords change up and down by an entire tritone (the "banjo kazooie chord progression") but...I LOVE it here, even though it's done in an almost cheesy cartoon ghost way, I think the edge and seriousness of everything else around makes me able to take it seriously (and general...well produced and compositionally all around explorative. IT's not the condescending manner other things i've heard have taken it.)

I find myself regularly inclined to noodle around improvisations over this (or even when this isn't playing; based around this) on keyboard a lot. It's just the sorta thing that's fun to extrapolate from. The number of ideas in the track isn't actually all that high, but it gives a lot of room for stuff to play with from them. This exact track is just one recording of its couple of ideas, but I can play around with the bassline, play around with those stabby synths, figuring out what other possible things work with some of these strange passages of weird chord changes with spooky diminished chords and all that.

Really though, the reason I come back to this one so much is something I often have a hard time admitting I can enjoy (because I often don't), but I find this super catchy! Its exact brand of funk, these infectious bass bits, funky syncopations, they "feel like a cool thing". It gets in my head and it's the sort of song that is FUN to get in my head, and it inspires me a lot and makes me feel like playing it a lot.

If i remember correctly (dont quote me on this), this soundtrack admits that it's inspired by Vince DiCola, and it's not hard to see how. a good example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq4YkFn4ego
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3c4WdzztiFY

Vince DiCola's someone where he's openly said that specifically the reason he is so "quartal focused" IS because of Keith Emerson, and not just me assuming that for everything. but this is sorta funny, because while I can immediately point to Vince DiCola with this C-Wars track, it's actually not very quartal harmony-ish at all. Instead it's achieving a lot of the same feelings dicola/emerson/etc do through sus chords (which i guess, contain the same notes), but also just, the raw ENERGY and FURY that "prog battle themes" often have. Great Job At Ensnaring My EARS

maybe i'm wrong on the dicola inspiration descriptio nbecause elsewhere it's describing itself like "inspired by gritty 90s game osts like starcraft; and classic prog" which is like; on targeT? anyways WHO CARES it sounds COOL

I'm not sure if this is actually my favorite song in the game, but this is literally /9th/ in this topic; how much better would other tracks do? I'm not sure, honestly a huge number of them would wind up around this range, but I'd have to relisten to decide my favorite. the two I listen to most are High Tech Facilities and Belly Crawl which is...funny given that you nommed high tech facilities for rwlh. that might be part of why i kept coming to that one as well as this one? I can't really remember, they both get in my head all the time tho so then i listen to them and go YEAH

i know this is kind of an arbitrary thing that a lot of people think is toxic tribalism to fixate on; but it makes me feel very happy and validated that this was made with Renoise. At the time I discovered this soundtrack (when it came out) that wasn't even the main daw i used; but i thought it was cool that it was made with a "sorta uncommon daw". but not too long after, I had a CRISIS and realized that my workflow was not suited for the type of stuff I did anymore; so i went on a QUEST to find the PERFECT DAW FOR ME (i tried demos of like every single daw). I wanted to find what would work best, just for me, what did exactly the things I wanted most? It turned out to be Renoise, esoteric tracker-interface oddball. anyway, when I listen to this ost these days, and realize it was made probably quite similarly to how I work (simply on the basis that it's using an obscure-ish daw that works in an idiosyncratic way), it feels cool. This guy's experience making this ost is probably quite similar to my own experience when I make music and that's pretty neat to think about.

[...continued]

really this way of understanding scales/notes/chords, it's all about the FREEDOM of possibilities. And what that means is you can have any emotion catalyzed from the restructuring of these same sequences of notes. quintals become major (CGDAE = loosely a major scale when reorganized), quartals can be come minor (C/F/Bb/Eb/Ab/etc will become loosely a minor scale when reorganized). Somehow I'm still always attracted to these categories of note sequences whether it's in a consonant context (moonman's fandango) or super dissonant context (tarkus/etc). I'm not sure how much of that is like some abstract "attraction to a particular freedom to jump angularly between wildly different spots across a grid, or how much of it is just coincidence, but i like these notes. they can be used i nso many ways and they're the ones i like. I associate them with INSIDE A COMPUTER settings like Tron 1982 and MegaMan Battle Network series (both things that feature these note sequences or chord types in their composition). Maybe it's fitting that the game system this game came out on is the VIRTUAL boy; a very VIRTUAL sound. and it honestly fits the setting and look of the game better than anything could've.

I always liked these types of chords, types of note sequences, before i really knew anything about the theory behind them or payed attention to what notes they were. when i first heard this song i think i was like ITS THE MEGAMAN BATTLE NETWORK NOTES. but now i know, i like notes that are "stacks of 7 keys away from each other on the piano" or "stacks of 5 keys away from each other on the piano" and the various ways those stacks (or arpeggiations of) will sound. they can fit anywhere, and will usually be my favorite part. a song like THIS, is entirely BUILT around them, and it creates the best virtual reality of wireframe geometric shapes and flickering static i could imagine myself immersed in

10st
Game: Galactic Pinball
Title: MOONMAN's Fandango
Composer: Kenji Yamamoto, Masaru Tajima, Minako Hamano
Nominator: @Flamander
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5_ab7dX7_s

note: apparently it's been recently learned that Minako Hamano secretly wrote music for this game but... as always ...nintendo credits are weird. no indication on exactly what she did, but I've added her into the composer list as a result. I think this song is likely Masaru Tajima's work specifically, of these 3 (See: Trajectile/Reflect Missile); however Minako Hamano has some comparable sounding stuff as well (See: Brain Age). I highly doubt this is yamamoto given how much it sounds like stuff by the other two while he has nothing like it---tajima especially seems the most likely. [[also technically this game randomly has the same music team as metroid prime 3 which is funny to think about. in 2007 they'd be a trio again]]

[Trajectile/Reflect Missile OST]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC68gCks50I

ANYWAYS I'm a long time fan of this one. i remember getting so mad at people who thought that this song was only in vgmc as "a joke" just because they didn't understand why someone c ould be so obsessed with it...all the people pushing it were people like me/nee/jona, people really into THAT fusiony INSIDE A COMPUTER mood. but that style was not big here yet in those days

The start of this song is quite trippy and even creepy; but it's a really great gradual increase in intensity before the reward of COOL COMPUTER CHORDS come in around :19. but that intro...the morse code beeps, and i love that weird layered 5/8 sequence from :08-:12 or so, the sounds produced there are incredibly cool too. the song is just normal 4/4 but you get polymeter with layered 4/4-5/8 which is something i always like, but it's subtle about that.

oh right here is the VISUALIZER (note: i couldn't find any version that was exactly like what was nominated, as the gamerips have moonman's fandango split up between different tracks, with slight differences and it not entirely clear exactly where to splice them together to re-create moonman's fandango. so this visualizer doesn't have the cool intro/etc. what you're seeing in the video below here is "Credits" which is the bulk of it anyways):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFaIPSffqJQ

i never actually remembered how many channels the virtual boy had; but it's only 6?! I can't believe this, this song sounds so much fuller than that. I would've sworn you're hearing like 16 notes playing at once. These chords sound like they have more than 6 notes in them on their own...not even considering that there's drums/bass/melody line and other accompaniement all on !top!

in this case, I think the reason the chords sound like they have more notes in them than they do is some cleverness like...how if you look at the 3rd channel or 5th channel, they're both alternating between two notes rapidly; not in a chiptune arpeggio way, but in a way timed with the music. You do concretely hear that, but I don't really think about it when listening, it feels almost more like the equivalent of a warbling effect in a synth pad, if it were to imagine this as full production instead of chiptune. The other factor is the most commonly talked about thing---"implied harmonies", there's notes that aren't ever played, but you "imagine" them being there. This track is just very precisely composed in a way to make itself feel a lot fuller than it is, it's not even doing that much technically impressive chip usage or anything, just very carefully harmonized, very careful about which exact notes are being played and when, to ensure it always feels expansive and BIG and INSIDE A COMPUTEr. ON TOP OF THAT you have arpeggios of course, but i'm hearing those more like sprinkles on top of the thick chocolate fudge i'm already hearing beneath

that brings me to the next topic...........!

I keep going on about how much i love "quartal/quintal harmony" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartal_and_quintal_harmony) throughout this topic, but neglecting to explain what that means with clarity. So I'm going to do so now as clear as I possibly can, because this song illustrates the things I love about it well:

Quartals are a sequence/stack of notes that are evenly spaced apart, with exactly 5 pitches from one to the next (so C->F->Bb->Eb->etc). They sound like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-eqIbQCs6A

Quintals are a sequence/stack of notes that are evenly spaced apart, with exactly 7 pitches from one to the next (C to G to D to A to E, etc). They sound like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhvH5A57jRE

quintals and quartals are 100% related to each other. since...a quartal backwards, is like...the same pitch classes as a quintal. the same notes but in different octaves. going up a quartal chord you get C F Bb Eb Ab; and going DOWN a quintal chord, you get the same notes, just...the F BELOW the C (instead of the F above the C that you get with a quartal, etc). For this reason the two types of chords/etc are very entangled and interchangable in meaning.

the videos I just linked though don't do justice to the variety of ways these sequences of notes can sound. especially once you consider all the variety of ways you can alter or layer them to be not /exactly/ all event spaced, or other ways of implying these notes are "the notes" in a section through different cool synth sounds or implied harmony or whatever

They can sound AGGRESSIVE (emerson lake and palmer - tarkus / pokemon mystery dungeon 2 - monster house):
https://youtu.be/WKNOlDtZluU?t=32
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nn8bU7CWJc

they can sound ETHEREAL (tokyo xanadu - eclipse / metroid prime 3 - gfs olympus [a really quartal-centric song in prime 3, the one metroid game with masaru tajima on it...when little else in the series sounds like that...is another thing that makes me think MOONMAN'S FANDANGO is masaru tajima])
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq-_OHhi0bo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTOx4E4dpZ8

they can sound INSIDE A COMPUTER (megaman battle network 2 - castlecomp / super mario odyssey - ice)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aKPd5AHjM0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42v5g_9L1Oc

one thing that's important to me about MOONMAN'S FANDANGO though---this track is a completely opposite approach to this sort of thing from other examples I've given for loving the sound earlier in this topic. Not always, but largely i was bringing up my enthusiasm when i was excited about the more in-your-face dissonant examples. but ironically this exact interval moonman's fandango contains so much of (perfect fifth; C to G to D etc. quintals), it's like. the most harmonious sound POSSIBLE. technically. and that's part of why it's so versatile. you can do anything with it while being able to sound as chill, or as tense as you'd like... rapid sliding the chord up and down or arpeggiations too fast to process could be computery or aggressive; but filling the space with these harmonies instead makes it become THE BEAUTIFUL INFINITE PLANE OF INFORMATION CYBERSPACE

[continued...]

Mr Lasastryke posted...

also interesting how your comparison point for moonlight museum was actually allan holdsworth rather than metheny. i guess i associate the calmness and soothing sound with PMG but yeah, the holdsworth comparison also makes a lot of sense.

i ALMOST SAID pmg honestly; the comparison is obvious since it has that bendy airy sine wave synth that sounds like that sound lyle mays always uses. I think I mostly said allan holdsworth here because the harmonies remind me of those big open guitar chords he'll have, and the high degree of electronic-ness as well

Mr Lasastryke posted...

i actually predicted that this would be #1 of my noms.

i don't remember where or why, but i am near certain you did a prediction at one point with this in last place >_>. i wouldn't have put words in your mouth saying you suspected this low otherwise. but maybe i'm remembering wrong

although maybe you'd meant something more like "i can't decide if klonoa will be at the top because i know you like klonoa, or if you'll hate it for how happy it is" or something like that. pretty certain that at some point you definitely pointed out how it was at odds with my usual interests at least.

also that's an extremely cool personal story with klonoa 2! I didn't know that about you, but honestly, what a fitting soundtrack to be one of your earliest experiences with vgm-out-of-context, or even active attentiveness to music in that exact way! the idea of submissions to this sort of thing being "personal" is really cool. and it can create some neat intersections with ones relationship with another person when you start to take a look at things like this. I'd have never known that an ost so important to me was also deeply important to you, but in a completely different way!

this means we are at the TOP TEN by the way; here are the remaining songs

C-Wars Belly Crawl
Fighting Layer Capriccio
Final Fantasy VI *Remix Dancing Mad (PAL)
Galactic Pinball MOONMAN's Fandango
Lightfield Shadoubt Shaps
Mary Skelter 2 Shissou
Phantasy Star Online 2 Yggdrasil
Secret of Mana (2018) Steel and Snare
Splatoon 2 Frantic Aspic
Umineko no Naku Koro ni Chiru ridicule

kaonashi1 has 3 noms left
Glacier has 2
Place / hotdogturtle / NFUN / azuarc / rwlh all hanging on with 1!

WHAT WILL HAPPEN.

imagery
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/0/4/AAefu7AADJ4Y.jpg

ELIMINATION THIRTY-TWO

?) Mr_Lasastryke (Average placement: 110.5)

you went quite across the board from low-to-high here, but with enough heavy hitters to still have a pretty high average.

we have always gotten along music-wise fairly well since we've known each other in this community, which has been since pretty early. BUT that was usually for broader reasons like non-vgm genres we mutually enjoy like fusion and prog and all that.

when it comes to our actual VGM tastes specifically, it's actually a bit different, since we look for different things in that category to a degree. and you also openly said that you didn't actually try to tailor toward my tastes as particularly as you could've. given that you weren't actually aiming high, it's neat that there's still enough underlying overlap in what we look for that you could manage this high up. in some ways that you weren't even expecting!!

there are obvious parallels of course;

-Stewart Copeland represents are high prioritization of how much we respect and enjoy the playing (and composing!) styles of specific live drummers.

-klonoa tune honestly sounds like if allan holdsworth was trying to write a lullaby

-the kirby pick was your "pat metheny" one

the list goes on, the things we seek in non-vgm DO bleed into the vgm we like as well! not always as directly as things like guitarfreaks trying to directly imitate dave weckl or whatever. but i can still tell that the person who picked these songs is the same person who ran a whole topic series about frank zappa and got in lengthy talks about fusion drummers with me in the past and all that. and also always liked when i nommed jazz fusion rhythm game songs...

thanks for the submissions, i'm glad i could see /you/ in it, when i'm used to thinking of you based on what your non-vgm taste is, your personality and flavor still shined distinctly here!

11st
Game: Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil
Title: Moonlight Museum Ver. 1
Composer: Hiromi Shibano
Nominator: @Mr_Lasastryke
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wqz3TLtehmU

also known as "Maze of Memories"

you suspected this would be low because i "dislike happy music" and its very simple "kindergarten music class" start. you wouldn't be wrong that something like that is /risky/, but this is one of my absolute favorite incarnations of something super happy in a video game i can think of. (Very similar feelings on this one to luwiera's forest, they're both up here for being an anomaly where they're "this particular type of happy that i actually LOVE" )

the appeal to me...basically everything about it

1) the fullness and density of the individual harmonies, the make me think of[insert jazz fusion musician name] and stuff. they're voiced in such open ways, and have just enough emphasis on these chord hits, interesting timing of their injection into your ears......it makes me feel like i am in a dream. or like the softness of klonoa's "fluffy ears"

2) the fact that it's rhythmically centered around important elements not coming in on beat 1 as you might expect them to (particularly the chords). and in fact a lot of the distinct feel of the groove to this being that it's very easy to---if you're fixating on particular layers---get completely turned around on where beat 1 is. it's much like your spyro nom in a way! in that way: I'll get turned around and perceive beat 1 as being in a completely different place depending on what layer i'm fixating on

3) the sound design which is so cool like that...yeah "90s synths" or whatever (a couple of my favorite jv1080 patches show up here, i believe. the same exact ones you can hear in some other very happy game soundtracks i enjoy such as "opoona" and "rolled out" and "everything by yasuhisa watanabe"). [[see 0:17 of the opoona song below]]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glhluEt32q0

i like the era of synth sound design still being in the early 90s in 2004 of course, and sound direction the klonoa series was chosen to have. but also the production here is extremely full and nice! all these synth pads vibrate and morph; the synth leads are super organic. the plucked string bass has a neat quirky filter; flanged drums. the sound design is honestly rather strange, but it still manages to conjure stained glass and "artwork" and the serene decision to remain at a position of indecision eternally because you want to relive your memories for eternity (also Ver 2 has even weirder sound design, easily...)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XITov1R0Z8

Hiromi Shibano is a very strange composer, almost all of their music to the Klonoa series is really strange atonal and minimal stuff that sounds something like this. weird bendy synths, odd time, and dissonant scales being primary choices:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1aADI-G6uU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GIoJsAcRzU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3cVQOdBRqU

and even outside of klonoa this is pretty much their angle. Getting bendy sounds out of the genesis, odd timesigs, weird tension stuff;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb0zslcIZ0E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYoQyykOl4I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs0jBP1cMbU

they're like THE "atonal tension song person" in the klonoa soundtracks, which is a role i of all people will deeply respect... but Moonlight Museum is BEAUTIFUL by contrast. it's one of the brightest and most crystalline and happiest tunes in the whole series! (which is saying something, given how those traits are very prominent overall in the klonoa series)

but something that tops this all off, to make this all even stranger, is that Moonlight Museum was originally a Wonderswan Chiptune! and this klonoa 2: lunatea's veil version is a cover of that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0dRqYCF4Vk

i definitely prefer the full production of the lunatea's veil version, and so much of why i like it is the layers and layers of intersecting separate ideas, which can't really be conveyed in only the 4 channels of the wonderswan. but it's really beautiful to see the transformation

Moonlight Museum is absolutely the least weird song by this composer; their one really beautiful, fully produced and happy and pretty piece. and you know? i think it's probably my favorite by them in the end. you'd expect me to lean toward their weirdest, but this has a similar appeal to me that like "yes going pop in the 80s" does. you can /tell/ it's a composer who's typically more weird, with inclinations towards the complex and unconventional. but all the injections of those off-kilter elements are subtle, if not somehow managed to be presented in a way that evokes the simultaneous beauty AND dark-beneath-the-surface mazelike awe and wonder of the context of this place in-game

(the story behind this level, and the people residing there, is one of my favorite aspects of the series. the idea is fascinating...people who never go outside, and are secluded from most of reality really, and instead spend their lives reliving the past, their favorite memories, over and over, never looking away from the visions of their pasts they have chosen to trap themselves in forever. it takes the idea of "nostalgia" to extremes, and the 90s-ness of this song...while it probably wasn't intended at the time...VERY MUCH means something powerful now to convey the context. Maze of Memories indeed)

it's cute; but it's a type of cute that's not simple. it has an initially simple exterior, but everything other than the first couple notes is honestly pretty delicately balanced subtle intricacy. the chords are not simple, the rhythms other than that initial ostinato aren't simple, the sound design is not simple, and there's a ton going on at once!!! i think sometimes it's easy to get the misleading impression that i dislike simplicity in itself; but like...i constantly talk about how much i like steve reich. steve reich is DEFINED around how simple and minimal he is. this track appeals to me for a lot of the same reasons i like steve reich too; repeating layers that are simple, but interacting with each other in ways that still take an effort to comprehend all of. i think it it were tonally more like sus/quartal/whatever-y instead of major "how to play a scale"-y, it'd be VERY reich.

my brother and i have a very large spherical plush that we named "Hiromi Shibano" because it is just like those things in Klonoa that are called "Moos" that are like that too that you can step on
<img src="https://i.pinimg.com/736x/92/e6/bf/92e6bfd3c0a0cbeda7752a73ff2acd8a.jpg">
(it's not this exact variant but it looks quite similar)

<img src="https://c.tenor.com/In5cX2mFHDYAAAAC/klonoa-klonoa2.gif">

oh yeah i know about this song/band; chz showed it to me once and i have it on one of my cd mixes that i will listen to when i am in a place with a cd player

ELIMINATION THIRTY-ONE

?) UF8 (Average placement: 60.625)

your nomination set completely blew my mind to the point i was seriously convinced that you had intricate flowchart diagrams and 40 pages of notes on how to construct the most perfect possible song that i could hear...really. I couldn't believe ANYONE would nail it this well. There's a few others in this thin range of super high averages of course who haven't gone out yet, but the approach you took wound up with some seriously obscure stuff that was somehow absolutely perfect that i'd never have guessed could be as cool as it was to me ever. and i almost felt bombarded with perfection even in songs with a short loop point that were practically jokes, they were just...so good.

when you consider how sloppily you considered your nom set to even be? well it's a very strong indicator of a very aligned mindset and musical interest. or maybe it was dumb luck? who knows. i think it's just innate POWER OF THE INTERCONNECTED SOULS that have intersected your thought beams with mine across the planet and compelling you to pick this perfect sounds for me to hear

i have fond memories of your presence in this community going back fairly early. I think especially as in those days it was way harder to find people willing to be nice to me at all, and no one understood why I was enthusiastic about such oddball things. but you did, you GOT it. you got me into "flixmix" and would push all sorts of quirky and obscure and electronic things that no one else would take quite as seriously at that time; and i felt a BOND OF INVISIBLE FUTURE EMOTIONAL TORCH AND GIANT FRIEND_CYCLE forming which would traverse throughout universal tunnel with green lines and all those ropes. You'll never fail to disappoint with a friendly smile or an enthusiastic barrage of 400 links that I forget to listen to but then I finally listen to them one day and every single one of them is the most perfect thing I ever heard and i feel so bad that i forgot to click on them the first time and remember how much of a blessing UF8 is to this community. A brilliant mind of obsessive passion and going to great lengths to spend money on ridiculously obscure soundtracks to host listening parties with the handful who stuck around in your land of those glowing trees and stuff. where everything turns the opposite direction when you put water in it

i am so thankful for your "." "." menacing reminders and I am very excited to listen to amazing music with you in 1 minute from now. thank you for being my friend, thank you for being a part of this community. I treasure your life and presence on this earth which is match by no other person in how distinct the set of patterns your interactions with me can be......you are one of those new zealand testers...you try so many crazy things including things that no one would think make any sense to try........... and sometimes ....they are the best things you could possibly try)

12st
Game: Murasaki Tsurugi
Title: Healthy Unicorn Girl
Composer: watson
Nominator: @UF8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq9mBei8XVo

watson(gym lea_

{{{{ALERT: I AM NOMINATING THIS SONG FOR VGMC16.}}}}

{{{{ALERT: I AM NOMINATING THIS SONG FOR VGMC16.}}}}

{{{{ALERT: I AM NOMINATING THIS SONG FOR VGMC16.}}}}

I am so thankful I can finally confidently say this after ...so many years of wanting to but not being able to. KEEP IN MIND: only 5 songs in the top 12 were new discoveries, and this was one of those. So even if the number here is 12. The "real number" in terms of nom consideration priority here is...5...I like that number (it's also likely this would raise in a re-rank...which is almost petty of a difference to consider about a song that's already this high up). but the 9.9 zone starts here. everything from 12 to 1 is pretty much as good as you can get, and i favored stuff i was familiar with at the time, so if you managed to get this high up with something /new/, that's astounding. congratulations on nomming one of THREE songs that are confidently in my planned noms list for this year!

in hindsight, this song is even more my thing than i was thinking from the start. Like the fact that so early in (like at :11 and lasting for quite a while), you have an arpeggio synth going in 5/4 over the 4/4 everything else, sounds very...Wataru Ishibashi (even...axis pillar, specifically! BOTH 4/4-against-5/4 tunes and doing so in nearly exactly the same way...so cool). Overall this song sounds like ishibashi tho in a ton of ways, but i've made the ishibashi-watson comparison before, i'm just hearing it way more strongly on this song because this is THE watson song that made my ears perk up and realize i needed to listen to "watson"

i guess extended chords alternating between the major and minor version of themselves as a prominent aspect of the progression is a trope i like a lot; so what a great way to start. especially in this particular choir sound and these keyboards and all that.

then there's the axis pillar part and THAT part solidifies transposition-based chord changes, something i almost always love. that incredibly harsh synth doing like "bluesy solos" is such an odd mismatching contrast between the types oof notes being played ("oof" was a typo of "of" but i kept it because of "oofeight")

:46 transposing up a minor third with sus chords over and over is a very good prog trope (i don't know why i am calling this a "trope" because it is extremely weird and i can not even think of any other song that does it...it just seems like there would be a lot of songs that do it)

THEN there's the all out atonal bit at 1:06 which is great and very "keith emerson(mccoy tyner)" ((i have been bullied into saying mccoy tyner instead of keith emerson for stuff like this by Norio Nakagata who is subtweeting me in his song title for the album "FM Vertex II", i swear, if my premonition is right and the power of CHz brings Hideaki Kobayashi to FM Vertex III......the power will be so great, it will compel me to generate my darkest quartal chords out of my mouth))
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l7KvvZTKFw

one time, my brother (who has very similar music taste to me) heard me listening to this song from a distance. walls between us, we were in different rooms in the same building, and instantly PM'd me with like "WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO" when that piano bit at 1:06 happened, saying it was "based" or something like that i think...

1:56 is some very CREEPY atonal piano; it's sorta quartaly, but a lot more dissonances added in to make it so that it makes "Thermosphere" from Einhander's intro sound "cute" by comparison

the total random cut out of the guitar and cut in of the harsh synth at 2:43-2:45 is one of the strangest moments in a song in this topic to me. i can't even think of any time I've heard a production choice like that in a song that seemed like it was intentional; there's some like...70s stuff, that has moments like that by accident-ish due to limitations. but this is like...what? Why did he do that? I dont KNOW. I dont CARE because it is VERY COOL. it's a very uncommonly seen form of "glitchy distance from reality" that's pretty simple, yet i can't really think of any places i've heard this total random out-of-nowhere cut out like that. ar tonelico production is all about these precisely timed things like that, but this is just totally slapped in at an amazingly imprecise time for a serious cut out like that...i guess overall. this song is "messy" in a norio hanzawa way which i talked about in like 40 writeups as a thing i think is cool. but it's again, a strength of this to me. The mismatch of "live feeling playing" but very plastic and mechanical heavy machine-like actual synthetic sounds is great.

this song really pulls out all the stops in terms of intensity and weirdness and it keeps unveiling newer ideas i hadn't thought of as possibilities for ways of ramping up that intensity as it goes. the drums and overstimulating bombardment of this whole section late is golden

I'm really fascinated by how late the section at 2:56 comes in, it's one of the most emotionally..conventional and like...MORE "melodic and catchy" than even a more normal-exterior watson tune?! It's a perfect climax, and maybe the inverse of what some people might approach the idea of "climax" of a song with, where you have the most chaotic bits built up to. here the chaos is pretty much everything up until then, and that's the HEROIC REPRIEVE where you know that you can never abandon your friends who you will fight for to your last breath

ELIMINATION THIRTY

?) Prody Parrot (Average placement: 144.875)

I remember you first from some early-ish vgmcs; where you showed up out of nowhere toward the end of noms to support a bunch of proggy rhythm game songs that I had nommed. which sometimes even had an impact on them just barely getting in. Given that people weren't familiar with you at that time, iirc some people suspected you were an alt of me and i was just supporting my own noms to push them in.

Anyway, that initial impression lasted over time, you being "cool rhythm game song" guy; there's a mix of range of success you had here, but I could definitely tell these tracks were nominated by YOU and no one else. Unabashed extremes of intensity, no shying away from complexity just for the sake of having fun with it. From the hardest edm to the most challenging prog, this set of noms was never afraid to go out of bounds, refused to consider anything "too much". Thank you!

13nd
Game: MUSECA 1+1/2
Title: Metamorphobia
Composer: winddrums
Nominator: @Prody_Parrot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YacY_GKYRRQ

0:00-0:15: 4/4 x7 + 2/4 + 4/4 x3
0:15-0:41: 4/4 x14 + 3/4 + 5/8 x3
0:41-0:48: 5/8 x8
0:48-1:00: 4/4 x8
1:00-1:05: (6/8 + 7/8) x2
1:05-1:17: 5/8 x5 + 4/4 x5
1:17-1:28: 6/8 x8 + 4/4
1:28-end: 4/4 x18

definitely the most "overtly complex sounding" rhythm game nominated for this topic, and that's long been a favorite category for me, so here this is up this high! another good example on how the numbers you type don't really do justice to explaining anything about how proggy something actually sounds. there's all sorts of rhythmic hiccups and erraticness here that sounds more like jagged barline placements, but really if you follow it it's just like syncopation within something more normal.

not too long ago i was reading a thing about lyle mays' (of pat metheny group) composition style, and tracks or parts of tracks he wrote--one of the most common factors was that the song would just be in 3/4 or 4/4, but that was just like a floaty container for the other stuff to jump around like a crazy sound voltex beam behind. because when it came to the /rhythms/ rather than the "container", they were far far more like a bunch of scrambled up lincoln logs. one example given is this bit at 6:09 here:
https://youtu.be/xSlCSUxLJyk?t=369

and i'd compare that a lot to how metamorphobia feels, like that tiny section of this (otherwise very calm) pmg song. it's kinda an illustration with that hi hat consistently going but little else following it

why is atonal piano so cool....and why is it even more cool when it is FAKE SOUNDING. i honestly wonder what even popularized that. i wanna say Tomosuke, but who knows...maybe they're all imitating some japanese pop musician

all this stuff said about how this sounds more odd time than it is. i deeply respect 1:05 for how in-your-face that ridiculous 5 5 5 5 5 555 5 is. i think FAST 5, is one of the most jumpy sounding things you can even do, because unlike slow 5, or like...any other timesig. it's too short for your mind to parse potential divisions, and unlike 2/3/4 which we're all used to as divisions, it's not normal, so it really is the most BOOM%^--30940-34 -[you are in the chaos machine now

i wonder what kinda stuff winddrums is even inspired by anyway. its easy to assume prog/fusion, but maybe he just likes 'weird classical music' or something LETS FIND OUT(research time )

wtf winddrums is very close to my age, only 4 DAYS YOUNGER than me. that is so crazy?! makes me think "what am i doing with my life" if someone who is almost exactly the same age as me has played the drums. anyways"He was exposed to rock, fusion, and jazz music from an early age" yeah ok, but WAIT; he performed with DIMENSION?!! man, these connections sometimes totally astound me. I'm so used to this complete separation of "vgm" and "non-vgm" That gets enforced upon you by those nay-sayers who think they are so cool because they listen to non-vgm like "dimension" and sat hat viodeo game music is not real music, but what if i told them....that those musicians were in mario cart......and bemani games!

this guy looks so much younger than me from his glamorous photos, even though he is only 4 days younger than me, maybe that's all it takes. but i feel like i am an old man now that there's a 3 at the start of how many years old i am and various other things that make me look so much older than him. oh well...appaerance is not as important as "life dreams" and he has been so inspiring, i am going to play the piano while listening to his crazy drums now.

i'm so glad that his music sounds like music that someone is a drummer would make, and i think it's very cute that his alias has the word "drums" in it and that he also plays the drums, i think that is so funny

14rd
Game: Caravan Stories
Title: Luwiera's Forest
Composer: Azusa Chiba
Nominator: @kaonashi1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzzP8MZQEF0

the song that made me realize i need to pay attention to basiscape way more than i had been..........like this technically turned my entire taste in music upside down. i'd been a long time fan of kimihiro abe (and since, realized i liked him even more than i thought), as well as namiki and sakimoto to a degree. but your introduction of this ost to me made me decide to re-pay attention to everything and now the most of the sound team takes up a third of my top 30 favorite composers or something.....well. anyways. azusa chiba is one of the ones i like a lot, but this vol 5 is definitely a standout for her. you can tell there was a very carefully defined mathematical steve reich-y sound they decided to give these "elf people" probably because "Those elfs are so smart", this one sounds a lot less like that than some of the others actually, mostly because it's so pretty and HAPPY explicitly, like a FOREST BREEZE as opposed to the more neutral urban gridded tone minimalist music in this vein can have (which i love still, but for different reasons).

rhythmically, this is probably actually a lot weirder than it sounds. It's "9/4", which doesn't really have any explicit way to break it down that's best, but tbh it wouldn't be wrong to just think of this as 3/4, with 3 bar phrasing either. but I'm not sure that it'd be the best way to write it. ON TOP OF THAT The drums are in a typical "4/4" (looping after "2/4" i guess) groove over this "9" so really...no matter how you frame it, it's polymetric, but the degree of which is subjective. this means it actually takes "18/4" before the "9/4" lines up with the "2/4" again. (because 9x2 is 18, in case you didn't know).

one song this reminds me of very heavily is "Freddi Fish and Luther's Water Worries Music: Levels 31-40", which I know I've spoken about with you before
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWIJRCePiXU

One of the most similar things I can really think of to this specific caravan stories track is the soule freddi fish osts. The barline ambiguity of 1:09 - 1:58 in the freddi fish track is very on target with luwiera's forest, it's like luwiera's coral reef (and also kinda like Lugia's Coral Reef?)
https://cryptovolans.bandcamp.com/track/lugias-coral-reef-lugia-and-ho-ohs-position

there's actually other humongous entertainment songs I thought of as similar in feel to luwiera's forest, for different reasons from each other. some for the syncopated piano, some for the repeating sequences and mathematical nature. i'll just link one more but i could do it endlessly so i'll limit it to just this one to avoid "spamming with links(since when have I cared about that bef"ore?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0Gq45kgdG4

anyways....back to luweria's forestHAHA THERE'S A HARP that means it is like "NeoToky"o, just like BJORK. uh, I mean. Sorry my thoughts are such a convoluted mess with this track. I honestly thought it was the sort I would have to make an entire video to explain (i may or may not do this for some future posts in this topic, but don't get your hopes up). or at least a detailed image breaking the rhythms down. but while that would help illustrate some of the numbers this song has inside of it, really it's not that complicated, it sounds more convoluted than it is, but really it's fairly...symmetrical?

[18]
[2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2]
[9][9]
[3][3][3] | [3][3][3]

actually those 3s get broken down into 1.5s in some of the cool offbeat harp layers at the rate i'm counting (3/8 rather than 3/4) but WAT EVER it's still all subsets of 3. which is in no way any less cool. It actually sorta perfectly represents the setting, 3-ish-ness has a few common meanings evoked to me. it can be a few things. they either remind me of "rotating" and "mechanical" (see the writeup for 15th place [EDIT: I don't know why i said this, since that naissance track is all 4/4 hahaha]; also the guardian theme in botw [this comparison actually makes sense to talk about "3" with]). Or they can be "organic", living things, life, flowers, trees, maybe partially associated with the liveliness and celebration of a "waltz" (dance), the freedom and human asymmetry and organic rounded shapes associated.

one thing I really get out of this kind of music, is it gives you options. you can hear these piano lines as a bunch of mathematical 16ths and the mosaics, grids, [insert some shallow THE MATHEMATICAL BEAUTY OF NATURE image with the golden spiral and fibbionaci sequence numbers here] or you can hear the singing birds and village where there is a peaceful tree that talks to you and gives you directions to the "elf knowledge library" where you can read books about music theory

on the "options" topic, it's not quite as much like this as some other things i've talked about it with, but there's multiple different positions you can hear beat 1 as too. Partly because of the polymeter, and partly because of the /syncopation/. it's easy for me to fixate on one layer and start to instinctively feel an entirely new pulse, that shifts the vantage point of the entire rest of the song, and not even because of it being polymetric, but because of it being like a funky groove where the accent is on an offbeat and now everything feels all funky and "cool"

this song is so FLUFFY . kao, you really should listn to the klonoa osts; it has a lot of fluffy music that is so fluffy just like klonoa's ears, the whimsical wistful floating clouds of magical numbers.....

i know you know this one...this song reminds me of this one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6KxNNH10FY

this song is so happy and makes me : ) smile

ELIMINATION TWENTY-NINE

?) Simoun (Average placement: 149.375)

well, you're with azuarc in the boat of absurdly big range, all the way from the lowest of the low to highest of the high. congratulations! (this is legitimately impressive that you managed to send me tracks I had such a diverse response to)

honestly even the ones that didn't hit the mark, i could tell you were /trying/ and you're not even someone who even knew me coming into the topic, so i was pretty impressed at even those. but you clearly read what i was into, looked for what you knew that fit, and shared with me things i'd have never have come into contact with otherwise. I'm grateful for that. and i'll never forget these higher ranked ones, that's for sure.

thanks for the adventure, and i'm excited what you have in store next time, if you ever decide to come along for the ride if i do a music topic again!

[...continued]

i'm considering playing this game, or just watching someone play it, but i'm afraid to watch someone play it because i'm afraid if i do there will be all these comments like "this music is so bad and messed up what the fuck" and that will make me so sad and angry and want to not have any more friends. when i was looking it up i quickly saw a comment that said "music" in quotation marks, to imply that the music was not deserving of being called 'music' () i do not agree with that interpretation of this piece of music. I Think it is beautiful, clearly musical, and deserves so much love. it is the pinnacle of what makes me happy. sourced from a mindset of standing in opposition to the face of pressure to be more normal. and challenging what the concept of music is, what the concept of sound manipulation is. all these non-musical sounds are turned musical, all these things that might've been initially incidental are turned into deliberate rhythms. and most of all, it's put together with a structure that's fundamentally POWERFUL to me in terms of emotion. It evokes a bleak industrial and surreal (broken reality) hellscape as i've mentioned an attraction to, but it also does just enough with itself to not make it completely cold. there's elements of hope, elements of life, and a showcase of even funkiness.

so much about it makes me very curious where all the involved samples actually originate. some are obvious, but others i'm curious if they're from a synth, or if they're from like "sliding doors at an airport" or something

this actually is probably less sonically harsh than dujanah-art gallery, but the ethos is clearly similar. but in this case, i'm hearing a lot more re-contextualization of familiar sounds or pseudo-familiar sounds, which is pretty cool. and in a vague subjective qualifier this track is more "immersive" to me for whatever reason. the fact that it somehow conjured the exact imagery of the area it plays in-game before me knowing what it looked like (and it not even having been written for the game) is pretty profound hahaha

I can't believe patricia dallio music is in a video game...and something THIS good at that. THIS SONG. the depth of emotion it makes me feel is matched by very little else in this topic. thank you so much for this one. even if i was familiar with the artist---i didn't know this song at all. and i had no clue what this game was, and would've never in my life guessed it had music by her. and it might be my favorite thing art zoyd affiliated other than sleep no more, at this point

15st
Game: NaissancE
Title: Les Louves
Composer: Patricia Dallio
Nominator: @Simoun
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dILdZbKkCVM

so i've alluded to this "rio/avant-prog" (rock in opposition) category of music in which i am so fond of, very particular odd category of prog that i am quite attached to. i will talk a bit more about that here and why that is important to me:

often times, there is this frustrating artificial divide created which works from the assumption that prog is the opposite of punk, and that the two things are entirely incompatible---i see this as very false, and the whole 'rock in opposition' subgenre of prog is a big part of why.

rio largely started when a bunch of people got rejected by record labels because their music was too weird and so they all banded together to say "fuck you; we do what we want aint no one gona tell us what 2 do" and they made music that just kept getting weirder and weirder on purpose (and very coupled with punk-like messages, and a more grotty raw diy energy than typical prog). and no one could tell them no because they all had each other and they beat up everyone who said that they should be more normal. had crazy concerts and stuff. (this isn't actually what happened but it's largely the basis of the movement...and then it turned into like 5 other things depending on who you ask and half the people don't like the name of it and don't want to be associated with it

the POINT is "rio/avant-prog" is when your method of saying "fuck you authority" is done thru furious pissing in the face of musical rules by amplifying your complexity and strangeness to abnormal extremes. it's the opposite approach of getting to the same place that punk sends the same message with (which usually avoids perceived 'complexity' at all costs). but imo they are two sides of the same coin, that treat each other as enemies for no reason. "mainstream" position does not want either of these things, they want something that either conventionally impresses, or exudes a polished aura, or whatever. the extreme diy end and extreme technical end don't have to be enemies, as they both share the same enemy: people who don't want them because they are the embodiment of some form of strange extreme from their vantage point. both can reject mainstream polished conventionally appealing virtuosity together

there is actually a lot of post-punk crossover with rio/avant-prog [great examples are This Heat or Cardiacs]. but to me it makes the entire divide of these two 'opposites' one of the most irritating battles, because imo they're one in the same in this area, and imo they are maybe even /best/ to me when they're working together as partners spitting in the face of everyone in this way)

I'm especially passionate about this topic because it makes me so sad that my favorite category of music (prog) is treated as the enemy to something I identify with so strongly ideologically (punk)---as in. "fuck virtuoisity, i'm going to make pointlessly incomprehensibly complex stuff that impresses no one, on purpose" is about as punk as you can get in many senses. as far as musical representation of opposition, i find it to moreso work for that for me than the more wide-appealing digestibility of normal punk. and that's what RIO is!!! but with the broad strokes people speak in, it winds up instead as "oh, prog. the bad thing for people who think they are too smart. the opposite of rebellion" FUCK off. nothing is more rebellions than rio. PRONK forever (to be clear, i like normal punk rock a lot more than i used to too; which only makes me more passionate about the frustration these two things are made out as in conflict with one another)

---

anyway.... this song has barely anything to do with that (tho i will bring this category up again...later so i thought i'd say it on something as direct as this scenario BECAUSE): Patricia Dallio. PATRICIA DALLIO. i literally never thought in my life i would see that name on a "vgm song" (i was VERY shocked when i realized who the composer was here). she's a member of one of the formative bands of the rock in opposition scene (Art Zoyd), which i always felt stood out within RIO because it had a lot of strange electronic effects injected into their stuff. sometimes art zoyd is considered to double as an experimental electronic band, and they just happen to also make weird rock music, or "experimental electronic music" or BOTH at once. one of my favorites by them's this one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS7Sn_gycd8

i...could go on about why i like "Sleep no more" so much...i love it so much. but just using it as an example here to explain---THIS is what i associate patricia dallio with.

it's kind of funny with her, she actually got rejected from one group because she was so insistent on wanting to play acoustic piano rather than any electronic keyboard...but the irony is NOW she is MORE THNA ANYTHINg probably known for bringing electronic elements to Art Zoyd and her solo work! well...this NaissancE track is certainly an example of her solo work! as far as i understand it wasn't really even written for this game, but originates from one of her albums, from 2003? it's not a track by her that i was familiar with beforehand (honestly i'm not nearly as familiar with her solo work as i should be)

I definitely very specifically enjoy it, maybe even more than average for her stuff. it's hard to talk about ,because i mean this is the sorta music that's so abstract that there's not even words for it, but one of the big things i like is that it conjures imagery of a cycling machine for me. I see these rotating fans and gears and computer circuit electricity patterns cycling in a loop.. What's AMAZING to me, is i actually looked up footage of this game out of curiosity for the context, and that actually isn't far off? this plays in some area with a bunch of like rotating fans? iirc? wow. well i can see why they chose this track to represent the exact thing in the game they did!

once this amazing rotating groove of that looping sequence and bouncy mechanical click has settled itself; i can focus a bit more on other aspects of the sound design. the vocal manipulation is one of the highlights for sure, i've realized on this current listen that i actually don't pay enough attention to that layer. The really short bits getting cut out and repeated are some of the best, and sharp totally unnatural cuts to the voice are just really great... I guess a lot of why vocal manipulation is powerful is because it's the most often heard "instrument" technically, you hear voices all the time, they're one of the most natural things you can hear, so when it gets manipulated in strange glitchy ways, it's such a contrast of elements that it creates a totally new universe of possibilities

OH MY GOD i love those voice chords at like 3:04, it's where i start to lose ability to tell the difference between the voice manipulation and whether it's potentially some other instrument or not. and then the strings start to come in and it gets a lot of the same emotional power as that "sleep no more" song i linked above. This track could be a totally structureless experimental track and i would still respect and love it just great. but a big strength of this is the structure, exact space and timing of transitions between these sections, being so repetitive makes new ideas powerful. especially when those new ideas are things like "Actually having normal notes in the song sort of", i get chills when actual tonal strings come in at 3:16.

[continued...]

place has GENEROUSLY uploaded a higher quality video of
Game: Mega Man 9 *Remix
Title: Tornadoman Stage [Integer Spin Mix]
Composer: Ippo Yamada, Jake Kaufman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zs2e9l5bLKI

thank you for doing that

16nd
Game: Mega Man 9 *Remix
Title: Tornadoman Stage [Integer Spin Mix]
Composer: Ippo Yamada, Jake Kaufman
Nominator: @Place
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubU-Iq4PKn0

REMEMBER TO SAY "info from place: oh virt's gone on record saying that his favorite thing that he's ever made is the chiptuned rockman cover of tornado man's stage". i also remember you saying something like that virt claimed that he was struggling half asleep one night and woke up and then suddenly this song just seemed to exist out of thin air with almost no (if any) memory of making it. I relate to this experience a lot: it's EXACTLY how my creative process is in almost anything i do. and i basically can't function in any category of work that requires you to do something that's other than something you build up by habit/practice---like i wouldn't be able to play instruments or write music, if i didn't have this "comnpletely detached from my own body but then music magically appears somehow and i have no memory of writing it" disassociative way of experiencing a creative process. so i find it kinda validating to know that someone as big as virt has similar experience, because i don't hear that sort of thing talked about very often and i often feel alienated by not really knowing about anyone who experiences this,, since it can actually be very limiting on "which categories of things i'm able to attain skills in" and can and has catalyzed social ostricization in my experiences with others. when i can't do things that they can because they can actually do things with their body and consciousness attached to the things they are doing. so i am very glad that virt is a crazy person just like me(he is relatable to me in a number of ways other than just this, and i've always found him an inspiration in that sense)

this song was hard to place in a few ways; for one, i'm actually not a fan of the original tornadoman stage at all (tho loving this remix may have helped me retroactively find a bit more appreciation for it). but...i think if you're going for this exact style of "taking a random song and then half the song is random manic prog stuff that has nothing to do with the original song" it doesn't really matter what the original track being remixed sounds like hahaha. and it almost creates,,,,,honestly the same thing you've talked about with animorphs or that duelin' firemen medley; it's like an ai generated picture where i can't tell where the parts that "tornadoman stage" or "integer spin mix" start or end, but it extremely obviously contains the plain original, and totally wild extremes that have absolutely nothing to do with it, in these weird dreamlike stream-of-consciousness seamless morphing ways.

i could go on about "music theory things" i like here or "good use of the soundchip" things i like here, they're plentiful! the most obvious is a word you probably hear me say a lot way too often in these high ranking songs (this will continue)---QUARTALS. that is a thing virt likes to do a lot, heard all over the contra 4 ost especially:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdI1POJGGPI

I LOVE THOSE SORTS OF NOTEs; i mean there's all sorts of ways to be atonal, but quartals have a particular quality to them that i think makes them versatile and deeply integrated with my ideal sense of tonality in a way other forms of post-tonal stuff are not......like. compare and contrast the following things:
- whole tone scale; you are STUCK in these SIX NOTES only C D E F# G# A# lol WHY would you do that; imagine trying to write an entire song using only those 6 notes, that would be ridiculous.
- augmented (C / E / G#) in 12edo this sounds wayyy too fucking dissonant as an interval and not even in a fun way; i can think of songs where i like it, but it's still a trap, if you go thru this cycle of notes, you get right back where you start after only 3 pitch classes have played. even worse than only having 6 notes to work with
- and diminished (C Eb F# A) basically same shit as augmented; stuck in a loop of 4 notes unless you transpose

but QUARTALS' QUARTALS ARE PERFECT. when you go thru a loop of THAT interval, you get C F Bb Eb Ab Db F# B E A D G C F B---- wait; this just loopse INFINITELY. you get EVERY note in 12 edo if you go up in this interval?!!??! WTF/ THATS CHEATING. that means, that if you do ANYTHING in a quartal arpeggio, that EVERY NOTE IS INSTANTLY FAIR GAME IN A WAY THAT CAN EASILYT SOUND COSONANT; HOLY FUCVKY%a. This is the most crazy "open" experience you can get . like you can see why Wendy Carlos Tron and MegaMan Battle Network are so fuill of this interval loop. It's like the inside a computer notes. You are in the VAST INFINITE POSSIBILITY OF CYBER SPACE; you are in INFINITE possibilities. other types of atonal...serialism and aug/dim-heavy impressionist stuff can be pretty great. and i love whole tone scale (trust me, you would never imagine how much i love whole tone scale. you could even say i'm a whole tone ambassador), but those things are great more in a "i like pain" way. quartals are way different

there's a reason i overuse this word (quartal). It's my favorite notes a song can be drowning in, and like OH MY GOD you have no idea how obsessed i am with the idea of drowning in quartals. I memorized every location in sonic shuffle where you can drown in quartals in the music;(tails drowning2)/ i hope that when i die that it is through "drowning in quartal s'

this song honestly sounds like you are drowning because it like "breaks" so many times, it sounds like water; glitches, reality distortion, you are not in kansas anymore because your house got picked up by a tornado. something like that. the world is different now that you have been swept up in an involuntary experience that has upended your life through a scenario of unanticipatable outcome . 2:59 is so funny; it's like a video game joke, but it's part of a synth solo. I love that idea, jake kaufman is a genius. of whirlwind

these constant 16ths quartal spams are just so much like the inside of a computer...i can't follow them, i just feel these furious punches of electricity zapping me and i'm trying to powert throug how much that hurts while i am going through the futuristic wire tube filled with lightning (That's not how electricity works)

17nd
Game: Super Dragon Ball Z
Title: Kami's Lookout
Composer: Shinji Hosoe, Ayako Saso, Yousuke Yasui, Masashi Yano, Yasuhisa Watanabe, Hiroto Saitoh, Takayuki Aihara, Wataru Ishibashi
Nominator: @UF8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f5bKiPua6s

"obviously yasuhisa wataanbe AAAAHHH choir but also middle eastern sitar randomly in the middle of the song, random dissonant bells low etc"

THIS SONG. So I had a pretty immediate reaction the first time I heard this that it sounded exactly like Yasuhisa Watanabe. But I wasn't able to figure out the composers this game even had yet, but once I found the list and saw that Yasuhisa Watanabe was in it well...I smiled.

Its not technically confirmed to be him and there's like 8 composers. I know some people are really convinced this is Wataru Ishibashi but I don't buy that (mostly because this...literally just sounds like yack. And even if ishibashi can be similar he never goes for quiiite this type of sound realm) ((there are OTHER songs in this game where i'd call it ishibashi's work no question. but this track feels unquestionably yasuhisa watanabe to me...i apologize if if somehow winds up not being him and i'm speaking as if it's him the entire time, but i am pretty confident here...))

Really this takes me back to 2009 and all the positive feelings of filling my music player with senko no ronde after gamevop had introduced me to yack from puchi carat. Really one of the most influential musicians on my taste to come in so many ways---never before had i heard modern jazz composition sensibilities merged together so seamlessly with TRANCE music.

At the time I discovered him I probably would've legit said my two favorite genres were trance and jazz fusion. . .but like those two things always felt at odds with each other. When I was in jazz bands and I had a more modern tune I could play synth in rather than piano/vibraphone....even if I could play a variety of synth sounds I never felt "allowed" to specifically do trancey supersaws or futuristic delay echo drenched synth bells or whatever. Why couldn't I play chord comping to others solos on gated trance loops!?!? It didn't feel allowed even when it probably would've been something that could fly, but I still wrote this all off as completely separate things. Jazz and trance couldn't mix even though I desperately wanted to hear them mixed

But then yack came along and let me know that no---jazz mixed with trance IS allowed. You can totally have a trance song with improvised TECNO STAB 5 solos. There's nothing in the way of merging this sorta harmony and structure but with a "ARMIN VAN BUUREN - COMMUNICATION" aesthetic.

God...this is so yack like some of these chords and chord changes are exactly the same as certain senko no ronde tunes im pretty certain

I can't name exactly which ones I'm thinking of but the song it reminds me the most of in at least an loose "the same feel" way is probably Senko no Ronde DUO - Raven Candle:

https://youtu.be/96uhflcAGG8

I finally got to play senko no ronde recently, because a friend of mine (uf8) convinced me to do so with him and I found it pretty fun despite the janky net play. So much of it is just the atmosphere of this beautiful futuristic synth realm. But all that also just matches the setting really well, and it was cool to see that in action

the actual structure of kami's looking is very fulfilling to me. it starts as expansive pads/strings, immersive bongos and all that. adding layers like the choir and that almost militaristic snare drum? you know i never thought about it, but yack's approach to breakbeat-y stuff is actually kinda more like a CHOPPED ELECTRONIC LOOPS version of live solo snare drum patterns or something

EXAMPLE (senko no ronde - assemble):
https://youtu.be/HZWXaw9ZSwg&t=27

anyway kami's lookout adds elements in a very very GOOD way of doing that to me, it's an initial LOOKOUT VIEW, like that's so cool, you can see as far as the eye can see...which is so far. but then you're getting more closed sections of calm a bit later to set different tones (more expression of natural instruments, etc). it expresses it's chord progression with lots of shifts between major/minor and tonal center changes and all that that i always love and it makes a big deal thru other layers about when the "scales that work" change which ones they are an highlight the NEWLY ALLOWED NOTES in very cool ways. i'm always appreciative of that as a thing

something about the kick at :15 when it comes in at the same time as these swelling brass...and choir. (EDIT: I just realized this could be interpreted as talking about assemble...i was talkinga bout kami's lookout but a similar thing happens at :15 in assemble too!)

it's just powerful and beautiful!!! i feel like i am in the heavenly chamber,. . there's so many layers that fill the space and i feel my body instinctively /relax/ in the same way you do when you feel like it's really cool looking at very distant positions on the horizon from a vantage point where it looks cool when you do that (like a "lookout") . both the production and composition centered around these dense chords really envelop my soul in a soothing way that is so important

i think it's interesting that i can say that while the track IS still energetic, and i can imagine it in a fighting game. but energy doesn't have to be separated from serenity. you can beat someone up while you are in a semitransparent dome filled with flowers; and you can have a aerial fight in the explosions the sky blows up but you see a lot of clouds up high and that's pretty and that's what ace combat is all about like that

UF8 posted...

so out of curiosity, what did you think of the remix of it from the "soundtrack"

(for reference for anyone reading) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJqi2gVv0jY

i forgot about this, it's cool and i like the glitchy nature, but honestly one of the biggest plusses about the original to me is how minimal it is tho. so this is cool in a like "act 2" way, but in my mind it's a very different song to the point i can't really rank it on the same plane of existence. the things i like about it are very different things entirely. other than the obvious fact that it has the same cool synth chord pad sounds

it would've probably gotten in the 8 tier rather than the 9 tier like your actual nom did, but maybe it'll grow on me! it's obviously cool, but it also has a less dark mood so that's another thing against it for me i think

one of my favorite things about this remix is the fact that the drums are changing tempo alongside the background chords as the whole thing gets pitched upward haha. makes it more rhythmically ..the kinda things i like !

---

realizing that you acquired your noms the way you did does make me understand why you saw your success in this topic as dumb luck i guess. i legit thought they were like, seriously carefully curated because, obviously you're doing well and i can't believe you'd found so many things that were so perfect to me!

it's also cool to know that a lot of these were in some ways simultaneously both new discoveries for you, as well as for me, at the same time!

drakengard1/pso1/rhythm game stuff/cave stuff/flixmix would've all placed pretty well almost certainly (and other than drakengard---i know them all way less well than i should). but i respect how your picks wound up being instead truly things totally new and foreign to me too!

ALSO I JUST REALIZED how perfect the title -Beginning of the E.N.D.- is, since as i said. 18th place is about where "i'm considering nomming this" starts. and was also in fact the first writeup i made in the final wave of writeups i'm doing right now, which happened after a long delay relative to 19th and earlier. so it's really the start of final FINAL realFINAL section. Top of the 9s here!

18rd
Game: Device Reign
Title: Theme of the E.N.D. -Beginning of the E.N.D.-
Composer: Katsuhiro Hayashi
Nominator: @UF8
https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm16596141

i honestly hadn't realized that this was a [sample based chiptune] when it was nommed thru this crunched upload with this visual. Had no idea it was sequenced ps1 music like...it sounds like it could be once I know it of course. But mostly I was hearing it as just cool chord-sample-centered weird Japanese electronic music like early Joe hisaishi or osamu sato or something

Anyways since that IS wat is going on here I can post a visualizer so I can point to cool things about how it is sequenced

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RmZWZvGoKg

a big thing i notice is how sequence-wise...it's /extremely/ simple and plain. the bulk of the feeling of this song comes from choices like so many of these samples being big chord samples, or that angry guitar screech sample. it's sonically immersive and with a lot of depth, but presented to you through a pretty small set of commands of note instruction going into the computer for the song. that's so cool, it's the power of TIMING and "cool sounds" all in on this one. The parts with like "everything moves down a whole step" feel as profound as when you come to a realization that all of the love and positive emotion in the universe is sourced from toby

I know you like. . . .joked about this song as if it was absurd it was this high. Honestly I feel if anything I UNDERRANKED this one. Would almost consider this nom-worthy( ....which starts tbh around here in the ranking list) if I didn't know its the sorta thing that'd be instantly doomed even more than typical for stuff i am attracted to; just for the short length and minimalism. but unironically i would consider 18th a "low" estimate for how positively i feel about this one. it just hits all the right spots!!!!! and i never really needed something to be long or varied, if it conjured what i wanted even with a short runtime and an unvaried exterior, that may even be the exact thing i want most!

Its just the exact right atmosphere to me I guess. When I was freaking not all that long ago about that "young nobleman of the mist" song from legend of legagia or even just talking about how much I love g darius music. It neatly falls into that category to me. I love that compressed chord pad sound. Its super amiga, but eventually has come to exist in so many different flavors as time has gone by on this earth which we love with all of our hearts

0_o one strength to me is rhythmically. Its just 3 or 6 or 12 or whatever you wanna call it but mixhae jadksoncdekdvumr kfeie

But the beat doesn't actually call attention to itself. Its loose and sorta forms itself after all the elements have been collected and integrated and interact with each other. But no individual layer asserts the beat, you just feel it thru these sporadic combinations of drips into your ears and I think that this is such a cool factor of earth

This track i just realize reminds me a ton of this track from yu gi oh forbidden memories

Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories Soundtrack - Inside The Puzzle (320 Kbps) {Download Link}
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDw2bC8bHR0

(i think fl81 mentioned almost nominating that for me? or for vgmc? or something? ...it's a really good song..very similar instrumentation too .it's like the mood of this devicereign song but without drums)

i don't really recall the first time i heard something that sounded like these songs (the ones i linked. or like "realmz - shop theme"). come to think of it i have no idea. i grew up with dos and pc games above all else, but i didn't really play almost anything that used tracker music until long after the stuff was relevant. was always midi or opl2/opl3 stuff or compressed wavs/aifs/etc for me (though that still works, compressed baked in 11025hz wav music with these types of chords in its atmosphere can definitely be the same mood). actually it was probably literally like...some humongous entertainment thing lmao. something like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RmZWZvGoKg

ok i dunno if you know what i mean by that i just meant like IMMERSIVE SYNTH CHORD PADS (in low quality specifically); that song is obviously NOT THE RIGHT mood it is too happy (there's probably some way better example i'm neglecting to think of)

this is more on target to the emotion of this device reign song and it is a big hitter in influence on my taste and is probably a big reason i like this devicereign song so much:

megaman battle network 1-internet theme
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai3Lr-Sgyuw

i swear I meant to point out that you had exactly average average when i noticed that (years ago) but i guess i forgot!

i can't remember you mentioning that you played in jazz bands, but obviously i relate a lot to that post. even in that what you're describing liking about this is something i had always felt a void in in rhythm game difficulty styles, and wished for more of too!

Mr Lasastryke posted...

dave weckl is one of my favorite drummers!!

one of only a handful of my favorite drummers that i had a chance to see live (as the drummer for mike stern).

that's awesome! he's one of my favorites too. i got to see him live in the recent chick corea elektric band reunion tours in like 2017, thankfully those could happen before chick died, and i'm thankful i could attend!

ELIMINATION TWENTY-EIGHT

?) Janus5k (Average placement: 139.5)

you're pretty similar to fl81 as far as your relation to me goes i think, so a lot of what i said up there applies to your selection as well. except our intersections are less centric around the weird and more...explicitly like "melodic prog or fusion" most of the time i think (stuff like aiming for the future or proggy falcom boss themes are decent examples (and you did pick stuff like that!!)). or like certain types of rhythm game stuff; i guess waza technically qualifies there!

anyway, thanks for the submissions i really need to relisten/full listen to Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon someday...

19nd
Game: DrumMania
Title: Waza
Composer: Jimmy Weckl
Nominator: @Janus5k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtlE0VdAoyE

I JUST had a funny moment of realization. Im not entirely sure if this intentional or not but.. The drum solo/fill at :04 (or maybe even some of the others) is reminding me very hard of chick corea elektric band to the point I think it may even be exactly the same as a drum bit in an actual chick corea elektric band song (but I haven't been able to figure out exactly which chick corea elektric band song I'm thinking of).

This is significant because well...what's the name of Chick Corea Elektric Band's drummer? Dave WECKL. And Jimmy weckl as an alias is obviously a reference to him. But despite always having considered the name reference obvious, I never really thought much about in exactly which ways jimmy weckl sounded like Dave weckl beyond "both jazz fusion" until just now! they always seemed pretty distinct from each other to me, despite the obvious influence. but now I wonder if there actually really are a bunch of CCEB references in his stuff

i think my first exposure to chick corea elektric band specifically was possibly this exact youtube video?:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH12eN8tCzw

and that video is so funny.,...it is in japan, maybe there is a possibility that Harumi "Jimmy Weckl" Ueko is actually one of the audience members of that video?! i wonder if you can see his blurry body... anyways i have linked tghat video because it shows Dave Weckl acting so crazy in those drums, so you might get what i mean, a bit. another example, for your use:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyglNYoXw6M

dave weckl in the 80s and 90s. man that guy was so cool. i am so mad that some old guy told him he was too cool and made him stop having those dense machine rhythms for a while; but now he is cool again now that he has not been thwarted by evil old people who don't like music that sounds like rhythm game fake fusion

i remember a pretty distinct moment my taste majorly shifted that started with b8, one that might be a bit surprising:

- I've long described myself as a fan of jazz fusion, and was in jazz bands since I was quite young and as i said it was one of the most prominent elements of most of my life. But despite that, my exposure to particularly harmonically unusual jazz fusion was very limited initially. In my head "fusion" was mostly like...metheny, and some smoother or more "modern sounding" stuff but nothing tonally particularly crazy. at least not overtly, the fusion i'd heard was /complex/ but very subtle about its complexities, etc

- Then "Jimmy wekcl icicles " from jubeat got nominated for vgmc and I basically exploded. It was soooo0 off-the-wall harmonically ridiculous like...any individual layer of it would sound like totally "wrong" random notes. But every element together created something somehow cohesive even if overstimulating. i was obsessed with the song and could not stop drowning myself in its material

- Now like. Thats my baseline for what "jazz fusion" means when I say I like it and want it. It opened up my world pretty profoundly. I was already familiar with chick corea so the weckl connection was obvious, but I hadn't heard much that took this stuff /that/ far in the direction of chaotic rhythms and challenging chords

- It solidified jazz fusion as a more specifically favorite category to me. Rather than broadly "jazz" that i described myself as aligned with before. I wanted this crazy stuff and never really looked back !!

i know a lot more fusion these days and could list endless icicles-esque examples, but it really shook up my perception of what jazz and fusion could be. i actually probably underestimate how profound an influence jimmy weckl was on me as a result.

WAZA relative to other jimmy weckl is, hmm. well nothing's ever been able to compete with icicles for me for some reason, but it's pretty great. i have a hard time talking about it specifically (why this writeup is "talking about [the genre] or artist" but) BUIT it's good. i like how you can't latch on to what exact tempo the track is from the way it starts, but then it eventually settles into it's adventurous chaos. i think it exemplifies a lot of the stuff i like about fusion in general...the way it keeps these excessively high levels of intricacy to a point it's some of the most difficult stuff most people could attempt to analyze BUT it never actually sounds like it's doing that for the sa ke of it. i mean some people might say this is "complexity for the sake of complexity" and they wouldn't be wrong...(and i think of complexity-for-the-sake-of-complexity as a GOOD thing) but, there's a lot of elements here, where they don't even sound complex at all! they sound "groovy" and they sound "smooth" and whatever. but when you actually try to pick apart what's happening it's fucking wild and bizarre. it's kinda like what i alluded to about icicles, any individual layer in isolation sounds like basically random notes, but when mixed together it makes the whole thing together make way more sense. this song is full of stuff that is WAaaay weirder than it sounds. it's also full of stuff that sounds way weirder than it is (like the fact that the whole thing is just 'weird 4/4' haha)

great tune that reminds me of why this guy is one of the most influential musicians on my tastes

ELIMINATION TWENTY-SEVEN

?) DoctorJimmy133 (Average placement: 92.75)

well you juicy doctor; you have done such a great job. i am not entirely sure to what extent it was deliberate and to what extent it is just your own taste---but i get the sense that the stuff you nommed was stuff you picked with care trying to find things i would like based on what i described i liked way back in 2018. like hombad i'm pretty sure you didn't really know me too well before this topic, unless i misremember. so it's impressive you hit the mark so well! whether or not this is just your own natural taste, or catering to what you could ascertain mine to be: i was impressed. thank you for presenting me with so much joy!

from fun kirby jazz, to the quirky pikmin tune, to playing with meters in that mashup (or even this kirby remix), you were hitting the mark pretty on target. and this kirby remix was new to me, so a very welcome new discovery that i now listen to all the time! (well and alongside hotdogturtle, you helped awaken me to thE PERFECTION that is the pikmin osts)

20rd
Game: Kirby's Dream Land 3 *Remix
Title: Iceberg
Composer: Jun Ishikawa, Retro Remix Revue
Nominator: @DoctorJimmy133
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FgsHRAUj9c

of course as I've said a bunch of times in this topic that considered myself a fan of kirby music. But despite that, I actually never noticed how cool this particular song was before until hearing this remix of it for this topic. I say that a lot of why I like kirby music is how much it reminds me of jazz fusion...but the original of this i never comprehended just how jazz fusiony it was until this remix alerted to me to exactly how well it can fit within that style!

i think part of what obfuscates how well it aligns with my jazz fusion tastes in the original;;;;is that it exudes a very "cartoony" exterior in the original there, and now that IS something i like about kirby. but like when i hear the transposy chord clusters in the original i'm thinkin GOOFY CARTOON as opposed to in THIS instrumentation, where instead i think "ITS JUST LIKE ONE OF MY FAVORITE BANDS TRIBAL TECH"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xOT2nINfcE

my favorite bit of this iceberg remix is probably just the start, this cool synth chord transposing around. it's done in a particular way where i find it hard to tell the difference between individual notes in the chord and like "overtones" or whatever, like i find myself unconsciously thinkin "is this just the timbre? or a deliberate Note" and i think that FEELINg is cool, it's actually not that easy to achieve, usually something will solidify itself as one thing or the other to me. but yeah transposing chords around is one of the quickest way to make me like something, especially if the imagery it creates to me winds up being like "cluster of synthetic object teleporting between positions in reality" which this does.

there's so m any fucking cool sounds in this all around. elements i can't tell whether they are a synth or an acoustic instrument all over the place.

a lot of times in this type of rhythmically erratic fusion, i accidentally filter out a lot of bits that'd actually be the coolest parts to me if i were paying attention. here that synth solo in the middle has some CRAZY interactions with the drumss. deliberate shifts to the focus of the music being centered around a completely different grid and stuff like that. they'll be a looping sequence the synth player plays and the drums will follow it in a playful mathematical way that can ALSO on a glance be filtered and interpreted as "smooth and loose". the full circle between [rigid and mathematical]<->[smooth and loose] i think is something i like about this area of jaz fusion. or even "live played 'complex stuff' " as a whole maybe

oh yeah this song goes into odd time for some short blips and that is so fun

so i decided to look up who Retro Remix Revue even was, and i have found out that they are "Blaine McGurty" and have worked on Skullgirls? well that does explain a bit, having a reference point to some of the other material they have been entangled with

wait...WHAT?! WHAT THE FUCK. THE GUITARIST ON THIS SONG IS ........Alex Machacek !?!! HOW

in case you do not know (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Machacek) Alex Machacek has played with Planet X/Virgil Donati, Marco Minnemann, and also Eddie Jobson of UK, and uhhh. I saw him live at an Allan Holdsworth tribute concert (he was one of the "replacement guitarists" after it became a "tribute to allan holdsworth" concert instead of an "allan holdsworth" concert since allan holdsworth died between the tour date announcement and the concert itself) all sorts of other people he has played with who are names i namedrop as musicians that i like all the time. fucking wild.

I actually consider alex machacek one of my favorite guitaritsts, but i had no fucking clue this was him until typing this part of this writeup around the midnight that happens between apr6th and 7th. how in the world have i been listening to th is track because of this topic for 5 years and didn't even realize it contained one of my favorite guitar players here. thank you for the informative information vgmdb

here is a track featuring alex machacek that i like a lot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VGqeDQT5I0

i still can't believe this...

anyways i was going to comment about how i liked the guitar parts of iceberg (especially how all the guitar volume sweepy distant echoy effects reminded me of "chill parts of planet x songs" (haha)) but then i found THAT out and now i am out of words. my brain has exploded that i did not know this for so long. no idea how they even managed to get someone from the "real jazz fusion / prog metal" world like alex on this humble vgm cover, but i am certainly glad that it is a thing that exists.

(actually all the guest musicians involved on this retro remix revue track are people i'm like "WTF how did they get this guy", bassist toured with chick corea and hiromi and stuff. but i'm particularly fixating on Alex_Machacek because i do legit consider him among my favorite guitarists...now that allan holdsworth is dead, at this time possibly my favorite living guitarist i can think of besides pat metheny...)

oh i meant to post this earlier, but here are the current STATS, going in2o the top 20!
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/1/0/AAefu7AADHzq.jpg

ELIMINATION TWENTY-SIX

?) FL81 (Average placement: 145.625)

given how enthusiastic about the songs or aspects-of-songs i was of your picks, i'm surprised you wind up with an avg that low. like even the lowest (the Seihou Banshiryuu one) i think about all the time for how fascinatingly specific it's sound was.

i used to think of you as being an opposite to me back when you first joined this community. but i've since learned that's not true at all. we do both have some stuff we like/dislike in pretty much polar opposite positions from each other, but when our tastes line up it's usually pretty tight! prog metal being the most obvious. and totally fucked up monstrosities like evergrace being another angle. chill dnb GAMECUBE stuff like custom robo or super monkey ball being yet another overlap area!

you'll probably rise a ton mainly because of the Super Valis IV pick, that one in particular grew on me quite a lot. i really tightly entangle it with imperium...i like it for similar reasons despite them being very different songs with very opposite exuded moods. but they're both 'intricate composition on kinda gritty snes songs' i guess, so i associate them strongly with each other these days. but I OBVIOUSLY liked the imperium one, anyway those were probably my Actual Two favorites of your noms, or at least the ones that stuck with me most after these 5 years. maybe nitroid rose too? we'll see.

great and memorable picks, thank you for all of them!