Board 8 > Mycro ranks the 278 VGM tracks nominated by BOARD EIGHT [rankings] 3 -(TOP_100)-

(+) Yeah! (+)

ELIMINATION TWENTY-FIVE

?) hombad46 (Average placement: 141.75)

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

lol seems like an appropriate time to leave this here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qo3Z7skEOtw

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

Aw, just barely missed having something in the top 20. Oh well it's been fun

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

geez, kao. (And UF8.)

That's probably about the final order, too. Some folks with 1 song left will do some leapfrogging. Glacier probably hops up a bit. UF8 and hotdog switch spots. Anyone who cares enough to do actual match can determine more, but that's no fun.

Fun fact: without that red outlier song, my rating improves to about 96 in the end rather than 118. Okay, maybe a little math is fun.

azuarc posted...

geez, kao. (And UF8.)

That's probably about the final order, too. Some folks with 1 song left will do some leapfrogging. Glacier probably hops up a bit. UF8 and hotdog switch spots. Anyone who cares enough to do actual match can determine more, but that's no fun.

Fun fact: without that red outlier song, my rating improves to about 96 in the end rather than 118. Okay, maybe a little math is fun.

actually have been looking at averages and i'll need luck to get out of 4th at this rate, top 2 for me is nearly out of reach i think

pseudo-negativity aside though i didn't expect to have my noms end up paying off this much... well, one of them i was able to surmise had to be this high since a few months ago given some prior remarks totally not involving said song about every murasaki song being an 8 save for one probably 9.9, but the other two really vastly exceeded my expectations. this probably means kao's done even better and won't have any of those 4 go out until the top 10 or something similarly insane but i'm happy considering how little time i spent deciding on noms for this. i even joked about the devicereign song like a couple of years ago, never expected it'd end this high legitimately

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...)

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)

Wow, I didn't know such a neat track (Iceberg) existed in an SNES Kirby game! Add yet another contender for my third favorite Kirby track ever. That 24 Tales (Alex Machacek) track is awesome, too....

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

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).

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...

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!

An exactly average average, could not have planned that better if I tried. Would be even better if I was 20th too but I Did Math and I think that's impossible oops

I forget if I've mentioned this (though I feel like I must have) but I used to play the saxophone in my school jazz band, so when I discovered that the hidden boss song in DrumMania was actually a jazz track I was quickly drawn to it (and pretty surprised, because I thought rhythm game boss songs were supposed to just be scary and fast) - always really liked how intricate and often unconventional it was (and not even in a "weird" way, it was just "yeah the drum hits aren't on the downbeats DEAL WITH IT").

Glad you liked it! We tend to look for pretty different things in music so it's always neat to find overlap (especially outside "prog rock/metal" which feels safe-ish in that regard). Looking forward to the rest of this.

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!

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

so out of curiosity, what did you think of the remix of it from the "soundtrack" album?https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/3/5/5/AARWb-AADIhr.png
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/3/5/6/AARWb-AADIhs.png

also yeah like, the reason it was wild to me it ended this high was because it was a song i found, like... i'd had a lot of thoughts about songs i'd like to nominate if you ever did a ranking before it started, but when it actually happened i was totally blanking, so i just started playing random albums i had downloaded for ideas instead of actually trying harder to remember the songs i'd actually wanted to pick for this (ultimately the only one i actually remembered was healthy unicorn girl, everything else was definitely not planned prior). not long into them (i wasn't overly impressed by the other stuff i was hearing but) it crossed my mind that if i did pick anything it'd probably need to have an existing upload in remotely acceptable quality, so i just randomly searched game osts for each of them and this came up in the process by chance. my reasoning was like like "this has electronic sounds in it that are probably mycroish and also i guess has odd time but it's also got some fairly basic chord progressions and maybe sounds too much like dbz bgm so *maybe* it'll do well but it'll probably be like a 6 or 7" so in picking it i was banking on this result but i def wasn't actually expecting it, especially with its status as an almost completely random song discovery in a very short search timeframe.

even after all those edits i still phrased that wrong so gj me. what i meant to say before was that my reasoning was like "there are legit good aspects to this but i have no idea if the rest of is actually your thing or not" basically and luckily they were.

thinking about things i probably would've actually nominated if i remembered, i probably would've had some drakengard1 song, some pso1 song, i'm confident there were rhythm game songs that escaped my mind at the time (they still have now), probably something from insert any cavegame here, and... maybe flixmix? that sounds vaguely near correct for me like 4 years ago. tbh i'm not really any closer to remembering what i couldn't remember then

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!

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

I really really regret nominating that bottom AF song lol

Also this whole time I thought my last nom was Existence when it was actually that NaissancE track that I forgot about

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)

Toxtricity posted...

glitches, reality distortion, you are not in kansas anymore because your house got picked up by a tornado.

That's a good one.

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

bosons

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...]

[...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

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!

I am all about this song. Sign me up for more industrial/factory VGM!

Toxtricity posted...

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.

totally agree that this is very false and ignorant. i can see how this idea originated, we all know the story of "prog kind of destroyed itself when yes released tales from topographic oceans and then punk came along and destroyed whatever was left of it." but only a few years later, there was post-punk, which was already a lot more experimental and out there than regular punk. even at the time, people were like "oh the punk bands are now doing the artsy and 'pretentious' stuff they claimed to hate about prog" lol

i'm not a fan of "normal punk rock" for the most part but i love a lot of stuff in punk-adjacent genres: pronk, post-punk, punk jazz etc.

WOW this entire last stretch has been the most incredible ride, but that NaissancE pick really is a cut above. I've always loved the 'look' and 'feel' of this game due to a fascination with oversized [[ empty ]] wonderlands, a common theme in my lucid dreams. Loved your entire set, Simoun--excellent, striking games with excellent, striking music

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

Steve Reich is a composer of minimal music known for repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm, and canons.

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

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!

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-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)

That song could probably pass as a gym leader song, at least that part in the middle. Someone should try to remake it in the gen 3 style.

thank you

alright, you got me, i was mycro's alt this whole time!!!

"prody parrot" definitely has past mycro energy

Toxtricity posted...

anyways"He was exposed to rock, fusion, and jazz music from an early age" yeah ok, but WAIT; he performed with DIMENSION?!!

everyone if you like this song and you like JAZZ FUSION[mario kart 8 ] you should listen to the other music by maoki yamamoto's band DEZOLVE which is very cool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7hQD-QSEPk

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

(i figured you had known about them,but since u didnt mention it i thought it would be cool to show it as an exercise to the readers

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">

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!