LogFAQs > #936903683

AI[UE]OON
Suite Photoconductivity ~Third Tune: Bolt and Sword~
Strike the Earth

AI[UE]OON is my 148th favorite in the contest! I love accordions! I love bagpipes! and I like cool electronic sounds in the mix! if i was judging this based on solely instrumentation this would be a track I'm very excited about, but composition-wise I think I have a similar issue here to what I have with some of the mozell stuff. it just lingers too much on only pentatonic scale notes, like the most "neutral" feeling ones, uses them all too often/quickly for any exploration within that limitation to really be effective in any way to me past the first 2 seconds. like you might as well replace every single note in the song with the same exact note on the keyboard and it would feel about the same to me. Lots of "soloistic" layers don't feel imaginative or impactful at all, and honestly feel extremely cheesy because it keeps returning to the same 5 notes that have already played 900 times in the song already. So yeah i like the general style of this song but it does nothing for me in terms of composition.

Blooming Villain is my 177th favorite in the contest! I was expecting to like this more when I first heard it. I tend to at least slightly like persona music and this starts off in a very "edgy shadow the hedgehog" way which i also appreciate but, it just has too many large areas of emptiness for me to get into it. The first :56 has little dips into chromatic deviations from the tonic/4th/octave plainness to make it juust edgy enough to feel like an edgy song and i like that. but just man if some of these parts had more than one thing going on i could be very into the tone this sets, but the emptiness just leaves me wanting more. Like the contrast between :56-1:10's emptiness to the very melodic portion that shows up right after IS powerful, but i'd rather the contrast to be like...not whatever's happening at :56 and be some other thing. When the melodic section comes in finally though after a whole track of very neutral/tense/empty stuff, it's very striking and I do appreciate that about it.

Don't really feel very strongly here but my preference is pretty clear. Don't actually dislike either, but neither stand out to me. two tracks that feel very "neutral" that i'd love if they just did sliiightly different things than they do.

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Kanata no Rafflesia is my 86th favorite in the contest! Rhythm game music continues to be awesome, as usual! The happy part is that this track's already a really nice tune, but it's improved a ton by exciting staccato elements because "ALL"\\\\\\\3\\ this song makes me so happy : ) all of the alternating between major/minor/etc makes this one pretty effective emotionally for me. This is pretty contrasting with my complaints about AI[UE]OON because it's changing what scales are used in the song like every 2 seconds and the melodic line highlights every single one of those changes. It's the same sorta reason I'm so obsessed with G-O-S-U and many of my other favorites, though less extreme about it since the tonal center remains the same the whole time. It never feels like it's failing to explore options and I value it for how 'dynamic' that makes the melody and chords and everything else backing this, never feels like it's 'trapped' in a limited range and explores from its center just enough to feel alive and for every note to have a chance to feel effective. Paints a picture in my head of the environment in the background art in the youtube video and that's a pretty environment so I am happy that it paints that imagery to me. All around solid, only complaint is i find the way it ends with that triplet stuff really cheesy but luckily that is only like 2 seconds out of the entire thing

Suite Photoconductivity ~Third Tune: Bolt and Sword~ is my 39th favorite in the contest!!! This reminds me a lot of Neotokyo, particularly the elements I like most...has the same mix of artificial and organic instrumentation and very similar pace&flow. I love the echoy rhodes keyboard sound I LOVE DELaY ECHOES and rhodes keyboard is an instrument I usually like, I also really appreciate the impact the delay echoes have on tonality...they make normally consonant sets of note dissonant because of the previous note overlapping with one that's like a 2nd away from another, things like that. I like the sound of that a LOT, and as a result my favorite portion is definitely the first 2 minutes. The gradual oscillation between "tense dissonance" and "chill lounge chords" all in this echoy spacey setting really touches a bunch of my strongest areas of interest. Overall, throughout, the breakbeat stuff's neat and the choir enhances a ton for me too. I'm basically just "listing the elements in this song" because I like them all lol. It's hard to talk about this one because it's so easy to just get lost in it, so much of the appeal is abstract broad large-scale things rather than specific moments and i find it harder to talk about that kind of thing. the big brass BRWWWaahs are powerful even if they're pretty cyclical and simple just walls of sound recurring on the downbeat every few bars. The hypnoticness of those repetitive sections is undeniable because I find it hard to actually "pay attention" to them. Yet sometimes they DO imply actual chord changes, and are intense once they do so, but because of how much i've been lost in a mental abyss by the parts prior to them, they're actually not even like conscious? It's like i can't even think about "wow emotionally intense progression" it just happens. These looping choir parts are really mesmerizing. man this even has these long sustained violin notes held out just like neotoIMBRIUMkyo...during when all the breakbeat chaos is happening too. Dissonant repeating organ chords like 5:23 are amazing and remind me of N Decisive Battle from pokemon b/w. Actually in a lot of ways this track feels like a "polished" version of much of the stuff Junichi Masuda tends to go for, but realized in a much more full way. I LOVE stuttery drilling sounds in BREAKBEAT STUFf dariusburst has a sound i consistently like and this is no exception.

auuueoeoeou

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Innocence and Emptiness is my 37th/56 favorite ToC entrant!! Oh yeah I have actually ranked all these now so now they'll have a ranking number. Kind feel the way I do about this that I do about blooming villain and aeiueoon, i like the "style" it is but it's too musically plain to actually interest me beyond like "oh i like the kind of song that it is", and in this case it's not doing it any favors that it is 7 minutes long that doesn't really feel like it pays off for me. I don't feel like talking about any details about this one really because I've done it