LogFAQs > #963440685

49nd
Game: Driving Emotion Type-S
Title: Best Tone
Composer: Ayako Saso
Nominator: @JONALEON1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zcz7Eb1e9s

ok WHAT the fuse (fusion), i had this song in my head earlier today and had no idea what it was. i was listneing to another jazz fusion song and i was expecting it to do that cool rapid abrupt modulation thing this song does at like :22/:36/etc (but it didn't do that. btw the song in question was the first track on this if you are curious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gljhu6u44g

if you like Driving Emotion Type-S - Best Tone. you will probably like this song i have just linked too)

the top comment on Best Tone compares it to "Dimension" and i'd say i make that comparison too, of the various bright happy poppy japanese jazz fusion bands, dimension is the one that integrates the most intricacy into their compositions (stuff like :22/:36, but also like...there's like, SO many moments in this track i could point to that are just constant rapid successions of tonal center changes every 3 seconds and stuff, in that sorta 'mathematical' way that Dimension does. now that i think about it, "Dimension" is a good name for a band that does "mathy things" a lot...)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYiyWgXaHIw

(i'm pretty sure i linked that exact song earlier in this topic). i've been trying to listen to all of dimension's music but they have like 27 albums so it's taking a long time @_@

anyway the R3AL composer here is Ayako Saso! She is very good at jazz fuse; one great example of ayako saso jazzfusion is "Ayako Saso - Blood vessel of city" from the non-video game 2197
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftSJgd4NnAc

i always feel like i have to be such on the 'defense' here; because i'm so used to being attacked for approaching music from a vantage point that others misinterpret as very "detached theoretical nonsense" or others even under a wrong impression that i somehow think i'm better than everyone else just because i openly describe my favorite stuff as "complex" or whatever. (in reality i feel very alienated and insecure about my own music taste being what it naturally is. and i think that everyone who disagrees with me is out to get me and i have the delusion that everyone who likes simple conventional music and berates weird prog or 'complex jazz fusion' or whatever is part of a secret underground organization that is plotting to murder me specifically and i tend to react accordingly).

but imo 'mathematical' is a feeling, it's why 'angular' is an overused word in reviews about the type of music i like. because it's a visual way to describe how stuff like this sounds. i'm inclined to say things in terms of a bunch of theory jargon because it's just the words i think in easiest (and a lot of the things that impact me the most, are very easy things to point out in that sort of language, as they're largely about subversion of tradition that work kinda in a math puzzly way). but that doesn't mean my response to such things is anything other than what it is to anyone else: it's a "feeling" that i like that i think is "cool". jazz fusion in this vein does "angular"things that are the same things that excited me when i was an 8 year old and didn't know anything about music.

'angular' stuff visualizes industry pretty well, maybe that's another reason for the jazz fusion=racing trope. car engines and machine parts and stuff. Racing tracks are curvy but they're still clearly artificial; and on a hard surface. maybe that in-between artificial and organic (shape) is why jazz fusion works so well. Organic instruments and solo style, improvisatory-adjacent nature (the shape of the courses), but hard jagged mathematical composition style in structure otherwise (hard surface of asphalt.,,,,Cars that are MACHINES and all the grids of lines that are yellow on top of the tracks. ) GEOMETRIC

i'm,,,,nearly certain i have linked this, maybe even in a recent writeup that i also linked dimension in, but i can't help but think of it again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apVtO6Vv1yE

this spy fox song, was something I first head in "Spy Fox Cheese Chase" (even if it originated in the dry cereal game), and it is one of the first things to awaken my love for vibraphone as an instrument, but also this modern frantic cityscape category of it. but................this means i can say i actually got into jazz fusion from racing game music....well a game about cars...well, sort of, you're on like, a motor cycle thing chasing the bad guy cars on CITY STREETS it feels like racing game ok. given that jazz in general took over my life in my early adulthood for a very large number of years, i suppose

anyway BEST TONE that's a pretty good name it sounds like ayako saso thought she was a genius and has come up with the best tonality for a song to have in it. i mean, it's not far off from my perspective on it...