LogFAQs > #963597217

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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