December 2023 Line Rider Roundup
Welcome back to Line Rider! But wait - what even is Line Rider? And can we even remember what this medium is after so many weeks without a roundup to tell us? Well, have no fear because I, with the help of scrumptious reviewers September and Bevibel, will gently bombard you with reminders of your favourite stimmy niche Internet fixation and how it could and may already be deeply important to your life! As is usual for the Decembers, it’s been a pretty wild month for Line Rider track releases, so enjoy!
Click here for a playlist of all videos in this roundup (in order). Titles also link to videos individually.
lived - gavinroo538
Review by September:
Over the past couple of months gavinroo538 has been releasing a number of tracks about personal growth, discovering one’s identity, and self-forgiveness. lived, the latest in this line of tracks, feels like a light at the end of the tunnel in comparison to the relative confusion and anguish present in Autogynephilia (on her alt channel Autumn) and Waiting for the End—and what a beautiful and poignant resolution this track offers us.
At the start of lived, we see a burnt-down forest—only ash and the blackened stumps that Bosh tentatively sleds over are left remaining. This moment pulls heavily from imagery elsewhere in gavinroo538’s work—specifically, that of the imagery of the “place”—an Edenic hilltop garden crowned with trees that was first prominently featured in their A Rush of Blood to the Head, and which continued to appear in their subsequent tracks, reconfigured in a variety of forms. From the start, something key to the “place” imagery was its destruction or general unreachability—oftentimes in Autumn’s tracks, the trees would be cut down, or were only something imagined for a far-off future. Since around Give 'em hell. / DEVIL, which ends with Bosh having seemingly reached the place—now recontextualized as a forest—this symbol had fallen out of her work, as it had seemingly reached its artistic conclusion in her work. However, around a year later, gavinroo538 suddenly returned to this symbol. For what reason?
Well, lived is explicitly a response to Give ‘em hell. / DEVIL and its confidence in the neat sort of resolution that its ending proposes. In the description of lived, Autumn states that sometime after releasing that track:
I just felt like I lied to many people about finding myself. I'm not exactly sure if I just found myself temporarily and just lost it again or I was just lying to myself while making "DEVIL" and then lied to others without realizing it myself until later on.
“Finding oneself” is a complicated business. Of course, understanding yourself better is an unquestionably helpful thing—just ask almost any queer person—but the words “finding” and “self” convey more unstable, tricky concepts.
First, the “self” is not a static thing—we grow and change throughout our lives, and there is no real definitive “self” that we can arrive at. Self understanding is not a linear process. In lived, we see the rider stumble, fall, and collapse at various moments. The first time through the chorus, Sleeping at Last sings “wage war on gravity,” and Bosh launches herself upward into the sky, only to fall awkwardly back down onto another line—but the second time around, when we once again “wage war on gravity,” Bosh now hurtles into a series of flings and chains which feel wild, like Bosh might fall off their sled at any moment—and yet, she doesn’t. This time, she does fly up into the air… only to gently fall back down onto the earth. This feels like something closer to actual self understanding and growth after leaving a religious environment. As someone who grew up in a religious environment that deeply harmed me, the urge to cling on to big, climactic moments of “spiritual” revelation is a habit I still have to do conscious work to break; instead, I have to learn how to let those moments not be the end-point for my growth, but the start—and in fact, to recognize, that the real hard work of self-building has now begun.
Because this is the second problem with “finding oneself”—namely, the “finding.” One feature of the “place” was that its existence was never really questioned—it was something out there, in the world, whose current state could either be preserved or destroyed. Because often, when we encounter things in the world that are assumed to be “natural”, we just assume that they kind of always existed. But this is not true—the forest was, by a series of processes, not found or discovered but GROWN by an ever-evolving ecosphere. The self cannot be found because the self is not a findable thing—it can only be made through our actions and values. In the description of lived, Autumn also says the following:
I can't say that I've found myself, but I have been doing things for myself and discovering things about myself over the past year.
We can see here a shift away from being towards doing. Selfhood is something that must be done. lived captures this fact beautifully, in its ending sequence, where Bosh returns to the forest, still-ash covered… but now, we see gavinroo wearing a dress, holding a watering-can, and pouring water onto a small sapling, actively engaging in the process of their own growth and self-fashioning. Slowly, we see the tree grow over time, until it’s just about back to its original size, majestic and grey-green—and Autumn hits us with these written out lyrics, using camera panning and video editing to let the words reach their full effect:
to know and love ourselves and others well
is the most difficult and meaningful
work we'll ever do.
And then, the tree fades back into a bright green, the ash disappears from the ground, and we are surrounded by a lush and living forest. It’s another resolution, but this time it feels earned—like the work has just begun. The forest is no Eden, but who needs Eden when the things we build for ourselves are real?
I would be lying if I said this track didn’t make me sob when I first saw it. I think maybe the question of how to “know and love ourselves and others well” is the question I’ve struggled with the most in my life, because of how cult religious environments predatorily twist up these notions of love and care and devotion and happiness and weaponize them into a kind of ideological poison. lived reminded me of that struggle, saw those faltering attempts to be kind and loving and helpful to other people, and told me that it was okay.
人がいます (There Are People) - Jade / Branches
[cw: descriptions of death, depression, suicide, and racism]
Review by Bevibel:
When Jade released the feature-length Mount Eerie in the spring of 2022, several people (including myself) gave it extremely high praise. This surprised Jade, who spoke about the matter in her interview on this blog.
I didn’t really think that this track - would be, like, that enjoyed? [laughter] I thought maybe two people would like it, and I would be like, “It’s okay - I’m making this really weird, unconventional thing, it’s fine, I’m okay with that,” but a lot of people have really loved it. Some people have called it, “the best Line Rider track,” which is the weirdest fucking thing! [laughter]
It seems that Jade’s response to this, perhaps naturally, was to double down and make something even weirder, even more unconventional, and even more inscrutable. There Are People is a feature-length sequence of tracks set to something of a music playlist, interspersed with little vignettes throughout. There are uncountable references to (often obscure) Line Rider works, ranging from direct quotes to vague homages. There is text in English, Japanese, and Dutch - the vast majority of it untranslated. To compare it to other feature-length Line Rider works, There Are People does not follow a clear narrative like ALL THE THINGS I COULDN’T SAY TO YOU, or even an abstract one like in Mount Eerie, This Will Destroy You, or A Rush of Blood to the Head. It takes long detours into unexpected places. It blazes through dense imagery far too fast to allow for comprehension, and then sits with empty space for uncomfortable lengths of time. There Are People is not easily digestible. This is a track that will wallops you over the head with some of the grandest expressions of love you’ve ever seen in Line Rider and then follow that up with some of the most devastatingly raw portrayals of grief you’ve ever seen in Line Rider. It feels impossible to fully understand, let alone describe, let alone evaluate. I might even go so far as to call it unreviewable. And yet, here I am!
If we zoom out from the dizzying spectacle of intense, messy emotions that is There Are People, one thing does become clear. The track was not made for you, or me, but for Tulips. Members of the Tulip System come up over and over in the imagery, the work is capped off by several minutes of footage shot by Tulips themselves, and at times the work seems like it could only possibly be speaking directly to Tulips. There’s something remarkable about that, especially considering the immense scope of the project.
There Are People remains one of the most powerfully evocative Line Rider tracks I have ever watched. But there are two caveats here. First, my position as someone who has very possibly watched more Line Rider videos than anyone else alive, and almost certainly written more words about Line Rider videos than anyone else alive, puts me in a unique position to clock more reference points in There Are People than the vast majority of viewers. Indeed, every time I’ve talked to others about There Are People, I mention something that I noticed that the other person completely missed. And second… is something that almost kept me from writing this review entirely, which is that There Are People did not have, shall we say, a positive effect on me. I’ve watched it twice all the way through now (once upon release, and once as a judge for the Top 10 Line Rider Tracks of 2023), and both times it imbued upon me a vague, persistent, utterly overwhelming sense of sadness and despair, the sources of which I seem to be entirely unable to pinpoint or understand. In writing this review, I have needed to treat There Are People like a substance that is toxic to me, skimming through to remind myself what is in it while watching as little of it as possible. I certainly hope that I am alone in experiencing this bizarre and inexplicable reaction. However, no Line Rider track has ever affected me this way, or even come close. And what is despair if not one of the most potent emotions? What does it say about the power of There Are People, about the power of Line Rider in general? Well, I have no idea.
Here are some of my various attempts to summarize There Are People and wrap up this review:
I have no idea what it is, but it sure is something! In truth, it’s more of a thing than anything else ever was! It’s so much! It’s impossible! You have to see it to believe it!
Staggeringly beautiful, unrelentingly devastating, unbelievably human.
A work of art that has left me with more questions than answers about the purpose of art and what it means to be an artist.
A uniquely salient work like nothing else, one that seems like it sprung forth fully-formed from a world unbound by conventions of what it is to be a person and what is worth making and doing and expressing.
The most baffling, most absurd Line Rider creation of all time. But in a good way.
The most intense, most terrifying declaration of love for another human that I’ve witnessed in my 31 years of life thus far.
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Review by September:
There Are People is a difficult track to review because the primary arc of its narrative and emotional content is rooted in its own personal obscurity. It’s difficult to analyze There Are People as a singular, coherent narrative or neat message because the track is about a failure of the narrativizing impulse when it comes to understanding our relationships with one another. Joy and pain coexist with each other simultaneously, there are lexical, cultural, and interpersonal gaps in our relationships – and the reality of death lurks in the background, denying the finality of any true sense of “ending” or “closure.” Truly understanding and loving another person is a massive undertaking, full of risks and struggle and pain. We are all, fundamentally, opaque to one another.
And yet, we try anyway. And perhaps mutual opacities are the doorway into genuine love and care.
If Jade’s previous film-length track, Mount Eerie, was about a solitary journey for understanding, There Are People seemingly enlarges the massive space it examines by multiplying our self-understandings with one another. The alchemy it creates from there is instead a wordless, poetic one, operating on an intuitive logic which might not make immediate sense to someone outside of the narrative Jade has constructed (which is, by design, most people)—instead, There Are People emotionally directs itself to its climaxes and anticlimaxes in a way which might hit us with emotions we did not yet realize we were experiencing. It has almost a mystical effect on me, evocative of religion and ritual which operates beyond my capacity to rationalize it—fitting for a track which operates, on so many levels, as a spell trying to bring about a better future for those depicted within it.
Like many of Jade’s projects, There Are People is an instrumentalization of line rider for the purpose of creating personal connections with others. But more than that, it is an examination of that process—what happens after the art is instrumentalized, and the link is actually made? Compared to “Will They or Won’t They” narratives in media and art, there are much fewer works which take up the task of examining love once it has been requited and the complexities it creates, refusing to take “happily ever after” as an easy narrative out. Love leaves us vulnerable and open, exposed to heartbreak and pain and loss, and growing to love and understand another person within the context of a relationship is no simple task. There Are People suggests that perhaps the work of love is being open to that struggle to understand and be understood, to care and be cared for, and to do so in the face of our psychological and existential vulnerability. There Are People feels like one tiny piece of what this act of loving means for Jade.
The result is an entirely unique work of Line Rider art. Go watch it.
disquietude - Rockzz
[cw: bullying, physical assault]
Review by September:
Over the past year, Goose/Rockzz’ output of Line Rider tracks—aside from their continual drip-feed of shitpost track—has steadily grown in ambition and expressiveness. From the grey color of the sky to i think i’m going to be okay to Flora and Barley, Goose has slowly been finding their voice in Line Rider, and the results have been moving and inspiring in a wide variety of ways. This process has reached a new peak with disquietude—which is perhaps Goose’s most polished and thoughtfully-constructed track yet—and offers us a unique and visceral vision of being a teenager within the education system.
disquietude starts off with a lengthy slow burn of an opening, featuring over a full minute of Bosh tentatively sledding past block after block of houses and trees. And like, just in these opening shots, the style that Goose has crafted here is just so much my shit. The color palette—with white and gray with red highlights on a black background—manages to so expressively capture the coldness and loneliness of snowfall in the dead of night, punctuated with moments of burning-red anger and fear. And Goose’s art manages to pull on the greatest strengths of scribbly drawings, allowing their drawings to expressionistically convey their subjects while also giving us a window into the mark-making process and the emotions present in that process of scribbling. The result is a visual delight of a track packed with literal and figurative meanings.
Indeed, this opening sledding sequence reaches a climax as the houses fade away and we come upon a school building standing upon a cliff, its flag and its cross out front blazing-red against the gentle snowfall. It’s an almost gut-wrenching shot. This is how Goose views their own school. And from here, they plunge us headfirst into the meaning of disquietude, that of school and its relationship to bullying, psychological harm, and broader systems of land ownership and civil design. disquietude then quotes a review of Goose’s school from a student who had been bullied for 3 years—and so badly that they decided to leave. The scenery begins to grow in scale, giving a more detailed view of this oppressive space—the school, the surrounding neighborhood… and the bullying. A bully—a silhouette shaded in red—goes up to white silhouette. And then all hell breaks loose—Bosh launches forward as this moment of explosive violence unfolds: the bully pushes the white silhouette over onto the ground, gets on top of them, and starts punching. It’s a brutal and visceral moment—and as “Hiding” by Modern Baseball becomes a thrilling mess of vocals and guitars, Bosh careens through a kaleidoscope of images which reflect the broken relationships between school, neighborhood, and self—pens leaking blood-red ink and grading a flurry of papers transitions smoothly into bulldozers destroying homes and suburban traffic and confusion. The chilling loneliness of this track then explodes into something else—righteous teenage anger and angst, grappling with the reality that the world they’ve grown up in is full of violence, ugliness, and injustice. It’s a common emotional touchstone in art—even in Line Rider!—but the way in which Goose lets this flurry of emotions rush forth after holding back so long is deeply affecting and evocative. The climax of disquietude doesn’t simply feel like a teenager’s vent, but a depiction of a moment of personal and political awakening to the systemic injustice around us. What if we viewed these kinds of outpourings of sincere and reflective anger not simply as “teenage angst”, but something to be listened to, thought about seriously, and actually integrated these feelings into our politics and how we actually treated teenagers? Perhaps we would arrive at something like the end of disquietude, a moment of interpersonal connection where Goose turns to speak directly to us, reflecting on their life as real-life footage of their daily walk to school plays. Maybe this track just hit me particularly hard because I also grew up in a middle-of-nowhere rural environment surrounded by religious zealots and schools that weren’t sure how to handle my neurodivergence—but Goose’s vulnerability and openness spoke to me deeply, and left me reflecting on my own dark nights where I stumbled through my neighborhood a crying wreck and with no particular destination in mind. I’m so glad that disquietude can be an outlet for those feelings, and that Goose felt safe enough to share those feelings with all of us in the Line Rider community—I just wish the rest of the world would listen too.
As the World Caves In - HypersonicPineapple
Review by Bevibel:
What really makes As the World Caves In work for me is the structure. After a fairly standard opening of loosely synced manuals, we are treated to a falling section with animated, claustrophobia-inducing horizontal and vertical lines, before instantly returning to the beginning (clearly signified by the song title) with a 10-point cannon remount and starting the track over from the start for the second verse. For the second chorus, post-production is used to heighten this sense of everything collapsing beyond lines, exploding and scattering the individual graphics of the YouTube video player all over the screen to create an overwhelming sense of disorientation, before once again instantly resetting to the start of the track to conclude the video. The pairing of these disorienting visuals with Sarah Cothran’s powerful belting about embracing nuclear annihilation I found to be very powerful - even emotional.
Curious about the inspiration for the piece, I went and watched Fatulation and Mauntee’s Beat Saber map that inspired the Line Rider track, and was struck by the striking visuals, the shattering of the platform itself during the second chorus, and the fact that it seemed to be a “lightshow” video rather than an actual playable map. As someone impressed by this video and deeply interested in music videos created with sandbox games, I poked around a little for more information. I discovered that it this is actually a playable map, but that the highlight of the level is the background effects created with mods, and the relatively easy gameplay serves to spotlight these music-synced visuals. I was also directed toward a modest curatorial effort of these kinds of creations in the form of the Lighting and Modded Map Awards section of Beat Saber Modding Group’s 2022 BeastSaber Mapping Awards. Judging by the fact that As the World Caves In won the “Best Visual Modchart” category, it seems to be one of the best examples, if not the best example, of evocative music-synced environments created in Beat Saber. Naturally, I also found a lot of people talking about how mad they were that a Beat Saber level made them cry.
I also discovered that the version of this song by Sarah Cothran is a recent cover of a 2017 song by Matt Maltese, which is, bizarrely, about an imagined romance between Donald Trump and Theresa May as they trigger nuclear armageddon. No, I am not making this up. I was as surprised as you likely are reading this. Maltese stated in the interview linked above where he discussed the meaning of the song that he hoped it would come off as “romantic, sexy, but also sinister and stupid”. Well, I suppose it makes sense that in the age of COVID-19 it no longer comes off as stupid, and is instead being taken fully in earnest by wide swaths of the internet.
Personally, as someone who grew up in a white, American, liberal, middle class, suburban bubble, blissfully unaware of most of the hardships of the world (and taught that everything was getting better all the time and would continue to do so), the past decade has been a continual, still-ongoing journey of discovering that not only are things much worse than I was taught, but that there are systems at work that are actively working to prevent me from understanding the incredibly dire state our late-capitalist, post-colonial world is actually in. I’ve not been alone on this journey - there are enormous swaths of people, especially in the United States, who are just beginning to get the sense that there’s something deeply wrong, and that we’re not getting the full picture, and it feels like a rug being pulled out from under us - like the Beat Saber platform collapsing beneath our feet, or the YouTube video player itself self-destructing.
Far stronger than the desire to save or fix or heal the world is a desire to actually understand what the fuck is going on. If the true end of the world can be known, if we know for sure what will be “our final night alive”, and we know we can’t stop it, then we are at least freed from this exhausting, endless nightmare-prison of learning about the latest horrible atrocity taking place somewhere in the world being brought to our attention, and try to figure out if there’s anything we can do about it that will have any kind of impact. If there’s one thing in our world everyone seems to be aware of, regardless of politics, it’s our ever-growing sense of society-wide isolation and alienation - our failure to connect with each other. It often feels not only like a staggering, unsolvable problem, but a loss that must be grieved, and a common response to grief is bargaining. It’s deeply romantic, then, to imagine going out on a nice date on what you know will be your final night alive, or lying in bed with your chosen love against the backdrop of an unstoppable destruction of the world. How many of us could say that we wouldn’t accept the end of the world in exchange for being with our most desired lover in exactly the way we most desire? How many of us wouldn’t at least be tempted to push that button, in a moment of impulsive loneliness?
It’s an incredibly seductive thought. But it’s not real. Fortunately for everyone, converting this fantasy into a reality is not a power that anyone has. HypersonicPineapple’s instantaneous and repeated returns to the start of the track convey this gorgeously and wordlessly - romance set against a backdrop of apocalypse is a fantasy we might gratuitously fall into, before snapping back to reality. Even more evocatively, HypersonicPineapple implies this to be a cycle, that this fantasy is an irresistible guilty pleasure that we keep falling into with increasing intensity, only to find ourselves feeling numb and hollow afterward. Still lonely, still tired, still sad. This has absolutely been my experience. But, for better or for worse, the only way out is to do the hard thing. Connecting with others can be incredibly difficult, and has only gotten harder since the start of COVID-19, but not only is it still possible to make a difference and push for a better world (it’s always possible), but the most potent power we have to make a difference in the world often lies in forging connections with others - finding those sweet spots where you are both able to help each other; finding ways to be caring, to be kind, to be loving, in ways that fill you up and leave everyone involved feeling better than before. I would like to dream of a world where less of us find a fantasy of love against an apocalyptic backdrop seductive, and more of us are dreaming of forging new paths and striving towards a better world together with our loves. I’m not there yet, but I think I want to move in that direction. My biggest revelation of 2023 was discovering that it is indeed possible to find ways that kindness, care, and love multiply with the act of giving. Reader: in 2024, I hope you are able to discover that for yourself.
Linerider.com Livedraw Demo (Inspired by FakeLR) - Malizma
Review by Bevibel:
For around four years now, Ollie has been working on a program which he calls FakeLR. I never really liked the concept for a number of reasons, chief among them an obsession with reproducing the visuals of manuquirk, which has always struck me as an extremely limiting concept. The visuals of manuquirk arise organically out of what people considered engaging challenges under the mechanics of Beta 2, and thus any attempt to replicate those visuals, without unpacking and expanding on what was compelling about them, will always be limited to sentiments along the lines of “whoa, wouldn’t it be cool if this was actually made in Line Rider”. The name of the program in an indication that this is the explicit goal of its creator, and that Ollie is uninterested in exploring music visualizations that fall outside the realm of manuquirk, let alone outside the realm of Line Rider as a whole. Which is why it caught me completely by surprise when I found Malizma’s FakeLR-inspired code for Linerider.com so captivating!
My first impression of Malizma’s video was that it was a strange but captivating visualizer, and it was cool how Malizma had coded it into existence, and I decided to write about it. As I was about to start writing, I noticed that Malizma had actually posted the code in the description and thought I should try it out myself as research for writing the review. I downloaded Malizma’s “fake-lr-clone” code, opened up Line Rider, pasted it in, and hit play. I was about 10 seconds into messing around when it suddenly clicked. Malizma had not written code to generate a visualizer for the video and then recorded the generated visuals. Malizma had performed a music visualization live and recorded that performance. I was suddenly overcome with an overpowering desire to do them same. I grabbed an audio file of Do Make Say Think’s “The Universe!”, hit play, and lost my fucking mind.
Fortunately, before I actually hit play I had the wherewithal to set up my screen recorder, and the result was this video, recorded in a single take without any prep or practice. Hopefully apparent from the video itself is just how much I was having an absolute fucking blast. It’s hard for me to overstate how much fun it was, but I can say that I’ve been in an unflinching good mood for the roughly 24 hour period between then and now. I strongly encourage anyone reading this to try it out for yourself to see if you also find it more enjoyable than you expect.
While creating the universe!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, I realized a few things: First: I find it extraordinarily fun to visualize a song in real time as it plays. If watching a good Line Rider music sync is like a virtual version of watching a dance performance, and creating a Line Rider music sync is like meticulously designing virtual choreography, creating the universe!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! was like actually performing a virtual dance in a way that I have never before experienced. The closest I’ve come is with certain theater tech gigs where I’ve dabbled in DJ lighting/busking, improvising shifts in lighting along with improv singers or dancers performing to music. I’ve had a fantastic time whenever I’ve had those opportunities, but I was always balancing the fun I was having against the need to center the performance itself and make sure the audience could actually see the performers. While performing the universe!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! it was just me and the music, with no other considerations getting in the way.
Second, I was reminded for the first time in a while of what I always found captivating about the aesthetic of old-school manuquirk tracks - the near-entirety of the path of the sledder through space being visible for the entire duration of the track. A track like ClosedDo0r’s 2007 release Vertigo is fun not merely because it contains cool manuals and flings, but because the rider keeps passing through the same areas, creating a maze of lines that either are all either currently being ridden, have been ridden, or will be ridden, all of it arising organically out of creating the desired movement of the rider. It hits that sweet spot of organized chaos - not so spread out we lose a sense of place, but also not so dense we lose a sense of where we are at any given moment; not so driven by tricks that we lose a sense of moving with purpose, but also not so driven by movement that we lose a sense of pulling off sick skateboard tricks; not so focused on achieving a clean aesthetic to erase any sense of organic roughness, but also not so focused on organic movement that we can’t cultivate an overall general aesthetic; not so focused on precise music sync that we lose any sense of playfulness, but also not so focused on tricks that we can’t have a moment where movement and song come together beautifully; not so focused on variety that there are no recurring themes in the movement and visuals, but not so focused on sticking to those themes that we can’t break away from the maze and do an absurdly long hand fling for style points. Vertigo is far from the only manuquirk track to strike this balance, but so much of manuquirk in the last decade has been about creators attempting to min-max one or more of these or other possible attributes, which leaves behind everything that made these tracks fun for me to watch back in 2007. Often it seems like everyone wants their movement to be the “most” of something or other. When I found myself able to entirely improvise a path through space in a live performance of visualization to music, I was forced to give up on making anything remotely close to perfect or even coherent in any specific respect, and just start having fun without worrying about whether anything was as accurate of a visualizer as it could have been or stressing over whether I was making “mistakes”. I also naturally gravitated to the playful chaos of revisiting areas over and over to create a giant mass of previously-trodden paths, and when things got a little intense I felt the familiar old tensions of, “uh oh, we’re getting pretty fast here, gotta figure out how to find my way back to where I was while still maintaining the visualizer!” In short, I was able to tap into the fun of making a manuquirk in ways I haven’t felt in a very long time.
And finally, it got the gears in my brain turning around why this was so much fun, in ways that transcend Line Rider itself, especially when performanced-based rhythm games have never been terribly appealing to me. I think it’s the difference between trying to execute a task with precise instructions and being given the freedom to create messy, playful art. One reason dance has never been appealing to me is that I was never “good” at executing someone else’s choreography - at following the rules of the performance. (I also struggled with music performance for similar reasons!) But I’ll let you in a little secret - I actually love dancing. This week alone, I’ve have multiple spontaneous solo dance parties in my kitchen! And, more broadly, I love actively making art to visualize music in real time - I’ve occasionally sat down and listened to a song and scribbled on a piece of paper to visualize the music while it played (Maybe I should record myself doing this in Line Rider sometime???). Creating the universe!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! with Malizma’s code has opened up a world of exciting possibilities in my mind for improvised virtual dance and music visualization - what if instead of a side-view sledder graphic (which looks really awkward when there’s no gravity involved) you were a top-down-view car, driving around to the music with paint on your wheels, creating a gigantic messy abstract artwork? What if there were mutliple people doing this at once? Could it be possible for us to do virtual dance together???
FakeLR has never been released to the public, so only a select few people have ever had the opportunity to actually use it. (It’s probably a safe assumption that they have all been keen on recreating the visuals of manuquirk as closely as possible.) I have no idea if playing around with Malizma’s code was anything like FakeLR. But (and I’m shocked I’m saying this) I’m incredibly glad that something like it is finally available to the public and that I had a chance to mess around with it. This might sound dramatic, but I feel like I’ve had a personal breakthrough around what really makes me tick - stuff at the intersection of art, music, animation, and play. Maybe someday we can improvise music visualizations by dancing with each other in virtual spaces. I think that would be pretty cool.
RUSH E TWO - XaviLR, Arglin, Techy Witch, Goose, Malizma
Review by Jade:
In RUSH E TWO, some riders bounce around—off of lines, even. There is quite a lot of bouncing. Sometimes there’s more than one rider—often, actually. Sometimes there’s like, a lot of riders. It is, dare I say, a bit of a silly time. The track switches between brief interludes of orderly motion to total chaos in a matter of seconds and it’s perfect. There’s all these E’s of varying fonts and personalities from the original Rush E collaboration that have now coagulated into an architecture of horrific E-tendrils that whiz by the screen like a high-speed train passing a graffiti mural. Then, we reach Malizma’s contribution where ten riders arrange themselves to be the joints (or “contact points” as some people call them) of an enormous rampaging rider, and it’s like wow! That sure is something! How substantial and frolicking! And then the ten riders miraculously arrange themselves into an E formation and the track ends.
If I’m not mistaken — the original Rush E collaboration was the most viewed Line Rider video of 2022, pulling just ahead of the most watched DoodleChaos tracks from that year. This is a very good thing. XaviLR obviously isn’t Line Rider’s most profound or thought-provoking voice, but they are easily among the silliest, and I think it’s very valuable to have someone so playful and ridiculous producing some of Line Rider’s current “biggest hits”, so to speak. I want bazillions of people to watch RUSH E TWO and think, “wow, Line Rider is so fucking silly.” DoodleChaos tracks can only do that up to a certain point—they often have a widespread comic appeal but not to the deep degree of insanity that the Rush E and its sequel manage to convey, because it's clear DoodleChaos isn't actually that into Line Rider as a part of his life or culture. He uses the medium of Line Rider as a tool for visualizing the rhythms and progressions of classical music, whereas XaviLR is very much inside Line Rider, and Line Rider occupies a place deep inside of XaviLR. They fucking breathe and live Line Rider, and RUSH E TWO ends up being about this fascination with the medium not as a tool, but exploring it for its own sake. And with DoodleChaos’s dwindling activity in Line Rider, it’s really cool to see XaviLR and their business partners in silliness become important representatives of our niche little Line Rider corner to the wider world of internet culture.
転がる岩、君に朝が降る (Rock'n Roll, Morning Light Falls on You) - gavinroo538
Review by Bevibel:
Honestly, it’s been ages since I watched a Line Rider track and couldn’t stop grinning from ear to ear. Two whole years ago, gavinroo538 released the enormous A Rush of Blood to the Head, and I had positive but very complicated feelings. (I just re-read my review for the first time since 2022 and holy shit it’s so unhinged, I really was just slowly losing my mind and documenting the process.) I’m very pleased that some of the things I had mixed feelings about in A Rush of Blood to the Head, such as a very specific style of manuquirk movement, mediocre stick-figure drawings, and text that goes by too fast to read, are things Gavin continues to double down on to this day. Nowhere is this clearer than in 転がる岩、君に朝が降る (Rock'n Roll, Morning Light Falls on You), which is choc full of manuals, flings, text that goes by too fast to read, and bad stick figure drawings. Oh, and also there are rainbow colors everywhere, because she’s gay now!
Much of the text and drawings are obviously stream-of-consciousness stuff, but they touch on moments of simple but profound humanity - little things that hint at connection, realization, and discovery. Occasionally they even reflect directly on A Rush of Blood to the Head, such as the stick figure standing between two trees wondering what they mean, or two stick figures commenting on how a drawing looks bad, and then later on how a second attempt at the same drawing looks a little better. And yes, they did go by too fast to read, but a couple years later I think it might be more of a personal hangup of mine that I can sometimes be frustrated by that than anything approaching actual art criticism. In Rock'n Roll, Morning Light Falls on You, at least, everything I had to pause to read was so unrelentingly pleasant and wholesome that I found that going back and watching the track again while pausing to read everything was a delightful experience.
The track climaxes with a glorious slow motion section of rainbow and trans flag colors that quotes September Hofmann’s My Boy and Ray’s i was seeing you through rose-coloured glasses (i still do, i’m sorry), before ending with a lovely little self-portrait. This is where my personal feelings around Gavin as a person really start to bleed in, but the similarities to parts of A Rush of Blood to the Head got me thinking about how far Autumn has come in the last couple of years, from the harrowing No Surprises, the desolate at the door…, or the deeply sad midnight., all in 2022, to 転がる岩、君に朝が降る (Rock'n Roll, Morning Light Falls on You) today. At the risk of coming off as cheesy, it gives me hope.
Butterfly 3000 - Instantflare
Review by Bevibel:
My first thought watching Butterfly 3000 was how similar it was to Arglin’s 2019 release Skyline, a piece which, like many Arglin releases, starts out with an interesting concept before making boring and predictable creative choices. Fortunately, Butterfly 3000 starts off with the same zero-gravity ghost-trail concept but goes much more interesting places later on. It’s a slow burn that doesn’t really kick off until the final 30 seconds, but when it finally does we are treated to choruses of sledders writhing to the music in mesmerizing fashion, with with instant zooms, ghost trails, glitchy visuals, and chromatic aberration effects all coming together into something explosively creative. And then it’s all over just as suddenly as it began.
Kingdom Lines - Blockson64
Review by Jade:
After Blockson64’s hypnotic release Weightless Sledding became an instant classic from the past year, this promising artist has followed up with a similarly-styled track that weaves animation and flowy rider movement in a way that resembles the overall motion and choreography of an experimental contemporary dance—all expressive and with these big arm reaches and sudden tumbles across the stage, you know? But Kingdom Lines definitely didn’t invite me in and captivate me in the same way Weightless Sledding managed to—and don’t get me wrong, Kingdom Lines has some lovely ideas such as when the piano melody first gets introduced and is visualized through shifting the rider’s height on a series of horizontal lines, like Bosh is playing a rhythm game, and like in Weightless Sledding, there are some fun moments where an animated sequence will suddenly stop and the rider moves at normal speed at the edge of the animated assets—but despite all the creativity, Kingdom Lines loses me pretty quickly and is sort of a mess.
I think a lot of it has to do with the music “Dearly Beloved” from the Kingdom Hearts soundtrack, which is intended as background music for a video game and thus, repeats the same loop endlessly and doesn’t really travel anywhere in the way that Bosh does in this track. It’s lovely music, yes, but for such a musically involved Line Rider track that is constantly throwing new visual ideas at you? I suppose it’s a neat choreography challenge, to try to make the same sixteen piano notes feel fresh and new on every repeat, but gosh is it ever obvious when Blockson64 is really trying to convince us that every strike of this piano is the most incredible emotional revelation in the world and is deserving of highspeed kramualing with animated lines! And honestly, there’s something really commendable about that effort, like I bet you could make audio of yourself making a bunch of fart noises for 3 minutes, send it to Blockson64 as a commissioned track, and they would still try their best to be as improvisational and creative as possible to your farts—like, that’s seriously admirable. It would make a really weird track, and I think Kingdom Lines is also quite a weird track in the end, but I would be lying if I said it wasn’t filled with creativity presented in a deeply personal improvisational approach.
It’s definitely an interesting lesson in soundtrack selection, as it makes me appreciate how together the track and music of Weightless Sledding feel. It might initially seem like “Dearly Beloved” is, as Blockson64 puts it, “a bit more active” of a piece of music than the song in Weightless Sledding, since it’s more melodic and has a very clear chord progression and rhythm—but because it’s an endless loop it actually feels more static than Weightless Sledding’s song which is not a loop, just a very slow build with lots of subtle variation which its track responds to really organically. It’s like how Miles Davis’ solo on “So What” feels like it has a lot more movement and variation and a story to work off of than Baby Shark 10 Hour Loop, despite having almost no chord progression and a much more mellow energy. That might seem a bit random, but I think it really makes or breaks the viewing experience in this case. Obviously, I’m still stoked to see what Blockson64 does next and I see this track mostly as them practicing their craft rather than making something with a lot to say, and I hope that craft is better musically supported in the future!
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