July 2024 Line Rider Roundup
Hello Gamers of the Cloth, and welcome once again to the round-up! I am a touch late on the release for this one, and for that I prostrate myself before you and beg for mercy until my sins unto the God of Line Rider and Timely Updates are forgiven—which is definitely how forgiveness should look like and I see absolutely no reasons for that NOT to be the underlying framework we continue to use to think about interpersonal accountability and conflict. But be heartened, for in the next round-up I shall dispense my updates speedily, with a distinct undercurrent of frenzy. So look forward to that! My deepest gratitude to Jade / Branches and MoonXplorer for the composition of reviews in this months’ installment. In your honor, I shall light a candle in the deepest wilderness, one that only I and the animals can see, and they will know of your accomplishments, and whisper about your deeds amongst themselves. The animals shall have feasts and banquets in your honor which we shall never witness or know, except in slight shifts in the spiritual axis we all live on, bringing you greater luck and a beatific fate. Thank you. And if you are one who wishes to produce artistic critique of Line Rider tracks, whether in word or image or sound, please Direct Message me your criticism so that you, too, shall receive the esoteric benefits that are so rare in our age of inescapable circuits around the electron mill. I beg of thee, the hard work of writing never ends, and your voice is valuable to this venture, for I am but one (clearly limited) perspective, bound to flesh and temporality—and each fleshiness and each temporality provides greater beauty to our understanding of the world. But let us move on to the “banger” reality of Line Rider artworks in the world, and away from my own chthonic Yapping. So without further ado, here are the words from this newsletter for which you are presumably subscribed…
Click here for a playlist of all videos in this roundup (in order). Titles also link to videos individually.
Rush E 3 - Xavi, Malizma, and L_Crosso
Review by September:
Two or so years ago now, XaviLR et. al.’s Rush E became the most recently released Line Rider track to crack seven digits. Ever since then, the specter of the meme song has periodically haunted Xavi’s channel, reappearing with each sequel Sheet Music Boss makes to his standout hit. And now, for the third time, the name “Rush E” has been repeated, summoning an eldritch, algorithmic being from beyond the stars which has contorted Line Rider into extradimensional madness.
As the still relatively new writerly “voice” of this publication, I think it would be useful to give my personal retrospectives on the previous installments of the Rush E trilogy so that my biases can be more clearly laid out. While Bevibel had rather effusive praise for the first Rush E, citing its effective use of the humor inherent to much of glitch-quirk, I think my opinion of the track has always been a bit more lukewarm, or at least has cooled over time. I definitely agree with Bevibel that there is a wonderful consonance between Rush E 1’s humorous intent and the visual/movement ideas it presents—that certainly deserves praise! But I also don’t think the humor of the track—or of the song, for that matter—has ever really landed with me. I can detect the structure of its work, its pacing, the craft of its construction… but humor is subjective, and Rush E is a joke I just don’t get. And as someone who has watched a fuckton of random brand-new Line Rider tracks on youtube for the purposes of this review series, I have ended up watching so many tracks which attempt to rip off XaviLR and their collaborators’ take on the song—many of them quite bad—which serves to bias me against the Rush E trend in the first place.
Meanwhile, with her review of Rush E 2, Jade highlighted the contribution Rush E (and XaviLR) makes to the popular conception of Line Rider as something welcoming and silly, stating her preference for the Rush E series over DoodleChaos’s tracks as a better entry point into Line Rider. Meanwhile, while I did enjoy things about the first Rush E, I ultimately disliked Rush E 2—that track leans heavily into a fake multirider effect that uses video editing which makes the camera and the riders feel disconnected from each other and kind of completely shatters the illusion that Bosh is actually moving at all. And now—at the end of this series which has had as many reviewers as it had installments—I find myself tasked with having to review the most visually and technically complicated track Xavi has ever created.
And this is something to make clear—this series is Xavi’s series. While all parts of the Rush E trilogy are labeled as “collaborations,” the number of these collaborators has rapidly decreased with each installment, and Xavi has been the primary video editor and scenery artist for each installment. Including XaviLR, Rush E 1 featured eight collaborators, while Rush E 2 featured only five. Rush E 3, meanwhile, isn’t that much of a collaboration at all, featuring reused code made by Malizma for part 2, and a staggering five lines drawn by someone named “L_crosso,” whose main participation with Line Rider seems to exclusively be these micro-contributions to tracks by their direct friends. I can only assume that this is the case because Xavi wanted Rushe E 3 to be labeled as a “Collaboration,” just the same as the first two installments. But, in truth, this is the work of a singular vision which created the track mostly by themselves—the work of XaviLR.
Xavi’s artistic output has often been what I can only describe as rather “meme-centric,” creating tracks to the FitnessGram Pacer Test, “All I Want for Christmas is You”, and, perhaps most effectively, the discography of Bill Wurtz. I loved their release outside from last year, and and the day goes on a year before that. I think this is often because the inherent silliness and memey-ness of Bill Wurtz’s music is counterbalanced by a core of sincere sincerely-felt emotion and musicianship which translates into Xavi’s tracks to these songs. Rush E, however, is memey-ness all the way to its very center. Beginning with ironic requests to make a “Russian Version” of Sheet Music Boss’s joke video “E - Piano Tutorial”, which itself is based on the hyper-giga-ultra-absurdist deep fried Markiplier/Farquad/Mark Zuckerburg “E” meme, Rush E often has the weird and unearned reputation of being the “Hardest Piano Song Ever” to internet normie types. There’s no real human emotional connection I can find within this music besides a detached “lmao” and “WAOH!!! the song is CRAZY and DIFFICULT.” The only value that I personally find is in it's baby’s-first-Black-MIDI presentation, and even then I would rather experience a different song that’s been Black MIDI-ified—or better yet, stare lovingly at the sheet music to “Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz”, which is still my favorite version of the “the song is CRAZY and DIFFICULT” joke to date. This is in large part because it playfully pokes fun at the experience and idiosyncrasies of reading sheet music, which stands in sharp contrast to “Sheet Music Boss,” whose videos bizarrely seem to feature no sheet music whatsoever, but rather “piano roll” MIDI data.
For the Rush E series, this means that—unlike XaviLR’s work with Bill Wurtz’s music—there is no emotional core or weight to this song beyond its two central jokes, which play fairly well the first few times, but begin to grow stale quickly without a clear purpose for these jokes. This, of course, translates to the tracks themselves. Rush E 1 does manage to say something about the connection between Line Rider quirk, humor, and the artform of Black MIDI, but Rush E 2 is left floundering without a clear reason for its existence—and in many ways, so is Rush E 3. And so, as is the case for so many series without a clear sense of purpose, the Rush E series turns to continually escalating the systems which created it. For the joke to keep landing, the wackiness and the craziness of the tracks have to keep escalating, installment after installment. Rush E 1 featured only one rider doing insane gigaquirk, so in the sequel, let’s have six riders doing insane movement for Rush E 2! Rush E 2 was still recognizable as a static Line Rider track, so let’s add constant frame-by-frame animation as well as entire 3D sections made in Blender for Rush E 3!
Yes, the big “woah” moment of Rush E 3 is the introduction of 3D models and animation to Line Rider—so perhaps it would be more fitting to think of this project as “Rush E 3D” (laugh track)! And in this way, Xavi follows the arc of another ultra-viral figure of the Line Rider world: DoodleChaos, who also blursed us with 3D line rider conversions, in the form of I recreated Line Rider in 3D and the result feels cursed and I combined Line Rider with MIDI Visualization | VSQ performs Sia ‘Snowman’. DoodleChaos’s attempts at 3D were fueled by a similar need to keep topping oneself in order to satisfy the algorithm—and these janky attempts at automating the process proved to be less successful than just doing Line-Rider-like music sync in Minecraft or Trackmania. By contrast, Xavi’s attempts at adding 3D is so much more obviously successful by eschewing physics-based simulation entirely and going for straight-up manually creating animation in Blender (an animation-ual, if you will), and in doing so they have certainly achieved the most effective conversion of the Line Rider spirit and style to 3D yet seen. I would be lying if I didn’t admit that those scenes sparked in me a kind of “what the fuck???” joy that is a clear testament to the technical artistry of Xavi as an animator. It’s something that I absolutely want them to continue to pursue, in Line Rider and elsewhere—especially because I would love to see this kind of approach applied to something other than Rush E as a sacrifice to the memetic-algorithmic blood god. It’s reflective of the desire inherent in social media—and capitalism—to ever-grow, gaining more views, more subscribers, more money. But infinite growth is not possible, and the pursuit of it constrains art further and further within its own “bigness.”
And that’s the thing, isn’t it? A track like Rush E 3 is constrained by its artistic intent towards memey mass appeal and virality. In something like Xavi’s outside, I feel as if I better understand them, their interests, and their sense of humor—there is an artistic conversation there. There is sincerity in combination with the jokiness. That is lost in something like Rush E 3, where I see that Xavi is a passionate and skilled animator, but I experience less access to that artistic conversation behind these layers of irony. These memes, this irony, has something that has lived in Xavi’s work for forever, through their Kevin MacLeod tracks, through to even the Bill Wurtz releases, and Rush E 3 makes me feel like that ironic is the only emotional palette that Xavi has to offer—and with any joke, it will begin to grate on you if you don’t get or like the joke, if you hear it too many times. So, in some ways, I think it’s because something like Rush E 3 isn’t really for me, and that there’s an unfairness in my sense of disappointment that these astounding technical/animation chops have been applied to a song that means less than nothing to me. But Xavi, as always, is an exciting artistic talent in this space, and their dedication to Line Rider (and animation) is deeply commendable. I’ll be excited to see how they might bring something just as wild to something like their next Bill Wurtz track—or even better, a venture into new musical and emotional spaces.
Line Rider - Branches / Jade
Review by September:
Yes, Branches (also known as TwigxCabaret or Jade) made a Line Rider track… titled “Line Rider”—clearly the work of a known moniker prankster. Yet, incredibly, it’s a very fitting title for what she has created. Put succinctly, Jade reflects upon her experiences with Line Rider and existing within its tight-knit community, reinterpreting the figure of “Mary Boone” from the Vampire Weekend song of the same name as an internet friend or acquaintance going by Mary_Boone on youtube and discord. We also move through an overlapping mish-mash of Jade’s previous work and tracks—such as clear references to major scenes from There Are People to Mount Eerie—deftly combined with loving references to other tracks, such as Centralia Fire, 4U, and even Bosh Finds His Dad, a now-deleted Line Rider track that handled the topic of suicide in a very poorly thought-out way. In doing so, it feels as though we get to see what has resonated or stuck with Jade during her many years in this community, a moment of stepping-back and considering the journey she has taken from the jankily-recorded Grand Dad all the way to the monumental behemoth of There Are People. It reminds me a bit of how I felt once I had finished ALL THE THINGS I COULDN’T SAY TO YOU. when I went through a period where I just looked back on it all, the journey up to releasing the track—appreciative of that journey, but maybe confused about the place it all had in the future, my future.
The single most compelling image that Line Rider creates of the Line Rider community is as a graffiti wall beneath and underpass, with references upon references stacked upon each other in a vandalism palimpsest, a guerilla art community with voices and ideas stacked all on top of each other, partially obscuring (or perhaps partially revealing) each other. Line Rider really is in its own little silly underpass of the internet, but there is still life here, activity and community and friendly competition. Even the bits that might clash, or might be ill-considered, are all part of this human story, these human connections weirdly strung out through space and time by mind-boggling technology and infrastructure.
And on top of this internet which should exist, I often get an additional, further, distinct sense that Line Rider really shouldn’t exist. It should have, like, super died a long time ago. Anything anyone makes in Line Rider can’t be the only axis around which their life turns—people who make things in Line Rider often grow up and leave the community and find other artforms or hobbies. There’s a fragile beauty to it all, and with all the community, joy, and friendship it has given me, I feel as though I understand exactly where Jade is coming from when she lays out this tangled mirror held up to our community—and then thanks Line Rider, our community, directly. I feel so much gratitude that we can share this little underpass together, where we can share and talk about our little bits of internet vandalism. I feel thankful for the people I share this space with. It’s not perfect, but it’s amazing we get to have it as a space of our own.
Sympathy is a knife - Instantflare (AKA Ray)
[cw: flashing lights, suicide, self-harm, blood]
Review by Jade:
It’s been a hot brat summer, hasn’t it? It definitely has been for me, with my post-coming-back-from-a-really-fun-trip-depression combined with work-related stress and injury, I’ve been feeling a bit bratty. I listened to Brat for the first time last month and was really taken aback by Charli XCX’s sincerity, the way she just fuckin’ says things. I now live in a remote suburban forest up an extremely steep hill that requires a pretty specific BPM and energy to climb every night, and after listening to Brat, Charli’s Taylor Swift anxiety spiral “Sympathy is a Knife” and her existential crisis about the concept of fertility “I Think About It All the Time” quickly became my go-to beats to mountain climb to. Every time I marched to “Sympathy is a Knife”, the words “don’t know why I wanna buy a gun / don’t know why I wanna shoot myself” weighed heavy on me, sticking out like a sore thumb, probably because of the graphic way Ray depicted those lyrics in their track.
If there’s anything to take away from this typographical gem of a track, it’s that Ray is brat — our resident Line Rider brat. In her own words, Charli XCX describes brat as:
that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes, who feels like herself but maybe also has a breakdown. But kind of like parties through it, is very honest, very blunt.
Ray is Line Rider’s k-pop dance girlie, looking for attention, wishing he could, spending all his serotonin on you, with every track they make being an honest statement, a challenge on society with no bra. And in its flashing climax, Sympathy is a knife reflects on moments of heartbreak and attention-seeking from Ray’s past tracks, giving them catharsis, letting them scream out their underlying pain — envisioning them in a louder, brattier context.
Mount St. Helens Is About To Blow Up - MoonXplorer, UTD, CatAtKmart, myan01, Goose, nonexistent, September Hofmann, gavinroo538 / Autumn, Alt-Key Here, Branches / Jade, and Interstellar_1
Review by September:
Full disclosure: this track was a collaboration between 11 Line Rider creators, and I was one of those collaborators. I worked on 1:11-1:33, and that’s obviously going to color my review in some capacity. I couldn’t find anyone who hadn’t worked on the track to review it (because there were 11 collaborators and Line Rider is a very small community), so I decided it would be better for me to write a review rather than not have a review for the track at all.
Because, for one, speaking of “blowing up”—Mount St. Helens sure did! Well, that’s at least true relatively speaking, reaching over 12,000 views as of the release of this review. Why is this the case? Well, at least partially because the algorithm is a strange and mysterious creature, but also because it’s a fascinating—if somewhat shallow—look at all the talent out there in the Line Rider world in 2024, featuring sections from a wide variety of vastly distinct artistic voices and the sort of zany contrasting interpretations of the song that are really well-suited to Bill Wurtz’s surrealist music. Of course, that means nothing all too concrete ends up getting said—but it was never going to have the sort of clarity of purpose that a track made by a single creator or a focused group of collaborators would have, and we sure do get some great visuals and funny bits along for the ride. MoonXplorer created the collaboration, and it had a very loose structure that meant people brought whatever they wanted to the table—similar to some of the quirk megacollabs we’ve seen in the past, but with a focus on scenery instead of movement. On the one hand, it meant that, at least in this case for this track, people brought a lot of themselves into the project, which ended up being quite positive for the project!
On the other hand are the aforementioned problems with shallowness and clarity of purpose—but also some shakiness on the administrative side of the project. And I think this gives me the opportunity to reflect a bit on what makes for a good collaboration from a collaborator’s point of view. I think collabs really work on a “fun for the collaborators” level when people are given an interesting theme or idea to work with, are given a lot of freedom with their individual parts, and are run in a way where the collaborators are aware of what’s happening. In my personal and biased point of view, I think Mount St. Helens was a big success on the first two points, but had some trouble with that third point. People went back to redo their parts, or to add things to other people’s parts of the track—myself included—which definitely meant that it wasn’t always clear who was working on what. This organizational confusion resulted in one of the color layers for a drawing in my section being turned off and made invisible, resulting in that drawing looking less finished and polished than I intended it to be. It’s not something that other people viewing the track are probably going to notice, but I notice it, and it means I end up enjoying the track less than I feel I should, which is a bummer. Of course, this wouldn’t have been a problem at all if all collaborators had been pinged and given the chance to review the track before it was posted—but this didn’t happen either, sadly, which also points towards some of the organization issues with the way this collab was run.
In the indie publishing world, where most of my writing has been published, editors will send you a “proof” of the issue of the magazine or book in which your writing is being published—essentially, a final ready-for-print draft for you to look over and make any final minute adjustments before the publication’s release. As someone whose last name is a rather unusual and easy-to-typo variant spelling (“Hofmann, with one F and two Ns”), this opportunity to typo-check works right before they release is a godsend for me, and I think it should be the default operating procedure for Line Rider collaborations, within reason.
But I am, admittedly, a bit of a control freak when it comes to my artistic output, so this kind of thing is ultimately not a big deal and this stuff won’t really affect most people who watch the track. I really enjoyed participating in the collaboration and watching how my fellow collaborators explored their sections of the song—and really I hope MoonXplorer considers doing collabs like this again in the future!!!—but I think it would be worthwhile to give this advice to anyone in the Line Rider community thinking of running a collab—making sure your collaborators have some sort of say on the final video! Regardless, Mount St. Helens is a romp, and I hope more romps like it happen in the future and ends up being an even better experience for both the collaborators and the audience.
Homecoming Serf - william017
Review by September:
william017 is a fascinating Line Rider creator, in no small part due to his relative creative isolation from the rest of the Line Rider community. His trackography—somehow featuring the 25-minute Impossible Soul as his debut alongside the visual experimentation of Montreal and Trustfall—presents us with an artist whose line of thinking and influences come from a personal track-making tradition which is his and his alone. william017 doesn’t appear to be attached or really connected to any kind of Line Rider community to speak of; one time, I invited him to make an application to the Line Rider Artist’s Collective, and he politely declined. william017 works at his projects seemingly entirely in private, animated by the kind of dark artistic drive that would prompt him to make—and complete—a 25-minute track as his debut Line Rider work, and to still have enough motivation to still be making things in Line Rider even a year later.
Which brings us to Homecoming Serf, a minimalist movement track in a style similar to Impossible Soul or So You Are Tired which continues to push forward William017’s unique style of movement. Emphasizing stylized dismounting/remounting, tight arcs which move Bosh in surprising and nonlinear ways, and fast headriding rolls which evoke Branches/Jade’s more meditative use of the technique, the end effect of this style of movement is one that feels refreshingly contemporary and cutting-edge, despite being an unscened movement track. Indeed, the track ends with an extended offsled section where Bosh and the sled bound around each other in a series of near-misses which effectively teases the prospect of remounting in an emotionally expressive and tension building way. One could certainly complain that the track is too short, or that it lacks scenery, but for what seems like a quick bit of movement practice/experimentation, I’m just happy we get to see more Line Rider work from this particularly singular talent.
Love Yourself - MoonXplorer
Review by September:
MoonXplorer’s Love Yourself, takes inspiration from Love Yourself—an experimental Line Rider track set to the Sufjan Stevens’ song of the same name that I made with my friend Tulips for pride month—and gives us a much more standard interpretation of the music, both visually and thematically. There’s some neat ideas here, like the vertical sledder/camera movement and using two colors to denote the two members of the relationship depicted within the track. And while my take on the song is more centered on examining love from the perspective of queer pride and self-discovery, MoonXplorer explores their subject with a focus on queer romantic love. And it’s really fascinating to see how much two Line Rider creators’ interpretations of the same song can differ from one another, producing entirely different results.
So, on one hand, I’m glad this track exists—dedicated to their partner, the track depicts a kind of young queer love that I’m so grateful that Line Rider can be a safe space for someone to depict. On the other hand, the way MoonXplorer depicts love is, in fact, coming from a young person, one who is probably new to love and its pitfalls. I’m lucky to say that I’ve been married to my partner for eight years, and started dating them even earlier, way back in high school—but our relationship has thrived not on the basis of big romantic declarations, but on a kind of ruthless realism centered on interpersonal logistics and giving us both space to be our own independent persons. For example, when my partner and I got together, something we established with each other very early on were the situations in which we absolutely SHOULD break up if they came to pass. So when MoonXplorer depicts this exchange between the two partners:
Promise you won’t leave?
yes… i promise
I have an awareness that this is supposed to be cute and endearing, a display of affection between two people… but there’s a part of my brain that says, “That’s a very serious promise to make—it may, in fact, be a quite dangerous promise if you try to keep it. If you love someone, you should want them to be able to leave potentially dangerous or unhappy situations instead of staying with you no matter what.”
But perhaps I’m being a bit of a stick in the mud. I, for one, definitely made bombastic overpromises to my partner early in our relationship—and so perhaps I shouldn’t take these kinds of romantic declarations so seriously. Often, these sorts of promises are less often literal statements of contractual intent and instead something closer to a symbolic gesture intended to convey one’s devotion to the relationship—an act of reassurance. Ultimately, Love Yourself is a cute little track that depicts its romantic elements from a romantic, sincere place—and who can really fault it for that? Art is one of the best places to work out the biggest feelings we experience in our lives, and I’m glad that MoonXplorer has an outlet to do that through Line Rider.
The Backrooms (Line Rider Footage) - ELR line rider
Review by MoonXplorer:
When it comes to Line Rider, you probably wouldn't expect to have a full blown Backrooms short film because of Line Rider's limitations. That was until ELR line rider uploaded The Backrooms (Found Footage). ELR line rider is a Line Rider artist I haven't really heard of until now, and their first impression is really strong. The track starts off with a seemingly innocent song until... disaster strikes!!! You are now in the backrooms!!! You wander around asking for help, but realize you're not alone and one of the entities is coming for you!!! You make a run for it and end up in another area... After going through some more areas, the entity finds you again and your sleep is destroyed!!!! You wake up in a grassy field and your sled is gone, never to be seen again... End scene. This sort of Line Rider editing is POWERFUL and kept me at the edge of my seat at every moment. There were moments where I would be screaming at Bosh "GO GO!! YOU CAN ESCAPE!!!" And moments of shock "Woah... It's another level!!!". Line Rider editing is already a thing, used in tracks like outside or it's time to give up on being human but this sort of track is something I really haven't seen before. It's unique, interesting, creative, and suspenseful! Keep riding these lines, ELR line rider!!!!
Review by September:
Unlike MoonXplorer, I am rather familiar with ELR line rider. A self-professed “12 years old game dev and line rider creator,” I know about them in large part due to the fact that they have credited my tracks as inspirations for a couple of their previous tracks—the “Know Thy Self-as-interpreted-by-ten-year-old” THE PARTS OF BODY/X MOVIMENTS and slideshow known as Deforestation. I also know them through the deeply hilarious WHAT HAPPENED TO ME : A LINE RIDER STORY BY ELR, which lovingly recounts the fact that their first subscriber happened to be the Line Rider Archival Project’s youtube channel and the fates of several prior tracks that have been taken down due to copyright (curse you, YouTube). I’m obviously biased because this child is a fan of my work, but I find ELR’s continued engagement with Line Rider to be rather endearing and clearly well-meaning, if at times a bit too focused on subscriber numbers. The Backrooms is ELR’s first track which seems to be thoughtfully put together with a clear artistic intent (i.e., to tell a scary story about Bosh going to the Backrooms) that has a polished enough execution to be comprehensible to an audience that is not ELR! And yeah, that’s fun and exciting! I always love it when people stick around with Line Rider and get better at using it for their artistic expression, and this is no exception. And, hey, it’s a pretty experimental work, too, using cuts and video editing to tell its narrative! Honestly techniques used within remind me quite a bit of what I did with Three Memories of Snow—the influence of which is all but confirmed in a later scene of the track which quotes from Three Memories pretty directly. And honestly, I think more people should steal from Three Memories—I should steal more from Three Memories! All in all, it’s a fun take on the potential of narrative Line Rider tracks, and I hope we continue to see things from ELR line rider in the future.
Can Can by Jacques Offenbach - Csquare
Review by September:
Can Can by Jacques Offenbach is another release from Csquare in the same vein as last month’s Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, featuring some of the most common associations with the song and the time period of its release. Of course, an issue that comes with portraying this section of Jacques Offenbach’s “Orpheus and the Underworld” and colloquially known as the Can Can is the “Can Can” itself—which is most often remembered as a professional dance routine wherein a line of women do high kicks in medium-length skirts in order to provide the audience with a lascivious view of their undergarments. Of course, this idea of the “Can Can” evolved over the course of the 1800’s from a (still salacious) couples dance performed by both men and women—but neither this Line Rider track or pop-culture historical memory portray this fact. Which, really, is a missed opportunity for the track—give us some men along with women doing the high kicks! Give us the opportunity to “admire the physical form” of some dashing, high-kicking lads! The focus on the dance also means we learn relatively little about the original context of Offenbach's music, which comes from an Opera reinterpretation of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and only became associated with the Can Can dance after the fact.
Ah, but I digress. The highlight of the track is undoubtedly the high-speed movement of the riders, which matches the zany, je ne sais quois quality of the music itself. It’s so fast, and the visuals creates such a trippy effect when it comes to the movement of the riders relative to the camera, that it almost makes me wonder if it was time-remapped to be sped up a bit? The speed, however, also prevents us from really being able to admire or even really see the various drawings CSquare made about the song, the dance, and its period in history, leaving the viewer mostly with what I can describe as a “vaguely french blur of images.” Ultimately, I’m left with even less of a clear picture of what Csquare intended to do with this track as compared to Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. The movement and some of the visuals (like the drawings of a triangle instrument in time with the triangle instruments’ sound) were more effectively executed than in Csquare’s previous track, but the rapid pace meant there was much less room to appreciate the music in its historical and cultural context, despite various illustrations which attempt to encourage viewers to do so. As always, I’m very curious to see what Csquare might do in the future, if he really “locks in” when it comes to having a clear intent for his artwork, and making sure that that intent is clearly communicated to an audience.
QUICK ROUND!
THESE ARE REVIEWS THAT ARE QUICK! HOW FAST THEY GO! HOW SILKY THEIR FUR AS WE BEHOLD THEIR MOVEMENTS. YES, BEHOLD THE REVIEW AS IT QUICKENS, TO THE QUICK:
SHIKANOKO NOKONOKO KOSHITANTAN is a more minor release from Autumn this month, part of her periodic syncing Line Rider tracks to anime OVAs, such as 星座になれたら (If I Could Be a Constellation), 転がる岩、君に朝が降る (Rock'n Roll, Morning Light Falls on You), and LOST IN PARADISE in previous months. This time Autumn syncs the OVA song from “My Deer Friend Nokotan”, which seems to be about a deer… girl…? Who has antlers? Autumn follows the general structure of the OVA animation fairly closely, up to an including a barely recognizable drawing of Japan and, somehow, a canonical Dark Souls “YOU DIED” reference which seems to have become a meme within the show’s fanbase. Of course, Autumn adds some of her own spice with her drawings, and a quick aside about a trans interpretation surrounding the deer girl’s (often male-associated) antlers. It’s a fun little romp, and a good cooldown from the back-to-back bangers that have been coming from Autumn in previous months.
Dimmadome—uploaded by Brostab and created by Jensin, Xavi, Brostab and Interstellar—is a short quirk collab set to a mondo-dead meme which doesn’t bring anything especially new to the table. I hope the people who made it had fun, though, which seems to be Brostab’s focus as of late.
Ryanair in line rider by Nolan’s Fun combines the creator’s hyper-interest in airplanes with Line Rider by syncing to RyanAir’s peculiar on time landing jingle and featuring a short, minimalist narrative about Bosh traveling by air. The best bit is definitely Bosh being launched upward right as the drums hit, which somehow makes the jingle feel genuinely impactful — but there are other highlights, like Bosh landing and xir landing gate at the end, or Nolan’s Fun’s best attempt to draw an airplane. A fun little track with some interesting ideas.
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