August 2024 Line Rider Roundup
Hello, O roundup readers! You might notice that this review is a… lot later than should be expected. This is to my shame and despair, but I do have a reason for my tardiness in publishing this missive to be excused. These past few weeks have monopolized my time through the sudden passing of my father, and all the funeral events, emotional processing, and travel that that entailed. I don’t want to dwell on such things for too long, as it’s generally a bummer all around for what is supposed to be a wacky little review newsletter and has no bearing on our Line Rider releases for the month of August.
We will need to catch up quite a bit to put out the September round-up; and indeed, I am considering whether to simply merge the months of October and September for the next installment. It is my hope that new installments shall be released rather rapidly. But it bears repeating: if you are able, please do send a review to me. It will be a massive help, greater than you may know, as it takes the great burden of reviewing Everything off of my shoulders.
On that note, huge thanks to Malizma, Bevibel, and MoonXplorer for their contributions to the roundup. I pledge fealty to you, and grant you one (1) Epic Token, which you may feel free to offer up to me at any time and have me contractually bound to write a one-stanza poem about thine epic-ness. This poem can be used to boost your self esteem, ward off evil spirits, or train a generative AI model in my likeness in an elaborate, vengeance-fueled scheme to engage in identity theft and eventually replace me within my own life. Thank you!!!!!
Without further ado, onto our reviews!
Click here for a playlist of all videos in this roundup (in order). Titles also link to videos individually.
in the absence of comfort - September Hofmann
Review by Bevibel:
Parallax movement actually has a long history in Line Rider, in which it has never quite broken into widespread usage. Line Rider 2: Unbound actually had a fixed number of additional scenery layers designed for different speeds of parallax movement, in a long tradition of Unbound features that were great ideas in concept but terribly executed in pratice. In the meantime, there have been attempts at creating parallax with video editing, such as Ollie’s motion-sickness-inducing Tranquility. in the absence of comfort is the first Line Rider release whose parallax effect (achieved with color keying multiple recordings) I would describe as seamless, beautiful, and appropriately thematic.
After a cautiously first half with doodles and subtle little rainbows, the piece dramatically opens up into a vast universe full of paper-cutout planets, song lyrics, and rainbow ribbons that the rider glides along, all set against a background of rainbow paper stars. This breathtaking scene, created by the sense of depth afforded through parallax, evokes an overwhelming sense of childhood wonder, suddenly re-accessed as an adult after a long period of gentle self-encouragement. The piece ends with an assortment of rainbow-pastel mini illiustrations reminiscent of a whimsical school notebook design from the early 2000s, along with mirrored text about forgiveness and healing.
It’s a strikingly beautiful and tender work! And it feels very different in aesthetic than September’s usual angsty scribbles and bumpy, janky sledding. And I always love to see artists trying out something new, but I can’t help but note that, thematically, in the absence of comfort is… familiar. When you get right down to it, this feels to me like a more polished, less raw, more abstract, less specific, more universal, and less experimental retread of similar themes to works like on a day like this one, Love Like You, or What Was I Made For? When I interviewed September back in late 2022, she has some bold and salient critical words for art that leans this direction:
I just want my tracks to not be viewed as like a corporate product, which I feel like a lot of very perfect art... A lot of standards for what good art is, are oftentimes just what a good product is. I’m not really interested in making a good product - I’m interested in making a good piece of art. And although there’s plenty of great art that is also very clean, I feel like the emphasis on something that makes the labor of the artist invisible is representative of a culture that makes labor invisible in general.
Given that she commented earlier in the same interview that she also admired “perfect” art a lot because she couldn’t do it herself, I’m left wondering, now that September is capable of making art with this kind of polished, straightforwardly beautiful aesthetic, is there anything that might be lost in the pursuit of that? Of course, this is all a bit rich coming from yours truly. Certainly, it’s also important to ask what is gained from a polished, abstract aesthetic. This track is undoubtedly beautiful and moving! But personally, I also kind of miss the raw angsty scribbles, because it’s hard to find them anywhere else.
solace - william017
Review by MoonXplorer:
I love “Solace” by Earl Sweatshirt. There's something about it that hits deeply with me. What people think is one of Earl's most disturbing song actually makes me find it the most melancholic. Feeling nothing, wanting to do nothing. And what better person to visualize this into a track than william017.
william is notorious for creating ground breaking tracks in the shade. He declined an LRAC invitation, and isn't even in the Discord server (not like that's even important anyways but whatever)! but solace is like a combination of all of them. The intensity of Trustfall, the melancholy of Montreal, the droning of So You Are Tired, all of it tucked into a neat little 10 minute package!
Now, I originally was planning to use this song on a track and when I saw this track in the Line Rider Discord, I wasnt even mad. Hell, I was happy that this track exists! Not only because William would have done a greater job than me, but because of one thing that sticks out like a sore thumb: the melancholic ambience. The reason why I love Earl's song is because it's melancholic, it's cold, it's sad. William saw that and decided to throw that in a track and they SLAYED!!! At the begining, the song's lyrics were flashing in the screen: “I’ve been here before”, and it foreshadows later in the song. William NAILED the pulses to the song later on, it's all perfect!
But then again, maybe I just am overreacting, you'll have to watch the video for yourself... So get comfortable, dim your lights, put your headphones in, because this experience isn't worth missing :3
Review by September:
Right off the bat, it’s important to establish that solace is a bit of a monster of a track — at a full 10 minutes of runtime and set to the Earl Sweatshirt EP-length-song of the same name, William017 approaches this work with new idea after new idea, exploring underexplored visual territory in ways that feel cohesive and fresh, combining Line Rider with Geometry-Dash-esque visualizations. If nothing else, solace is worthy of a watch and thoughtful consideration (and my own personal admiration) within the broader conversation of Line Rider art, especially as a further exploration within william017’s already-experimental style. william017 is bringing new ideas to the table and doing things nobody else is doing, and that is—for me, at least!—deeply exciting.
solace is built atop a sort of video-collage editing technique, the kind which has become rather suddenly popular alongside other tracks from this year, such as Rush E 2 and my own in the absence of comfort. When UTD (re-)introduced video editing and multimedia collage to the creative possibilities of Line Rider four to five years ago, I don’t think he could’ve imagined the aesthetic Pandora’s box he had opened—especially in combination with the addition of color layers so soon after, which made green screen techniques feasible for anyone with a halfway decent video editing program. Line Rider tracks no longer needed to necessarily be built entirely as a singular piece, but rather as fragments that can layer on top of each other and gain three-dimensional qualities, can be formed from disparate tracks tied together in sequence, or can incorporate visuals created in programs entirely external to Line Rider. These new techniques (which are really just rediscovered old techniques) are able to push Line Rider into places that are entirely unfamiliar to our medium, offering us new forms of self-expression—as well potential growing pains and missteps. As someone who has created a track this way a few times now, making Line Rider tracks in this way loses the simple charm of being something that can be created in a single, linear space—of zooming out and being able to see the whole thing right there. Instead, you make pieces, little components that only become whole as a part of the editing process—the final work is assembled, instead of simply drawn. This new methodology, of course, has its own charm, but this difference in process feels like an even greater departure than the workflow changes introduced by camera controls, color, or even multiple riders. And the resulting tracks certainly feel different to view as well.
Put simply, these techniques (as evidenced by my review of Rush E 3) are not going to be uncontroversial, and there’s definitely room for an argument to be made about whether something like combining Line Rider and Geometry Dash (or other non-Line-Rider media) may endanger the visual and artistic identity of this medium—which is small and therefore unstable, hardy though it may be. Within my own personal biases, I tend to be and am a fan of this kind of experimentation, though I do think it’s worth starting this conversation now about a potential GeometryDashification of Line Rider (for example), and to talk openly about what makes Line Rider special to each of us. For many, the physics engine is what has made Line Rider special, giving people the ability to create what are, essentially, physics-based animations centered around a rider—be they used for creating pretty scenery, showing off sick tricks, or creating music-synced visuals. But to signal my own biases, I have always been more ambiguous on the rider aspect of Line Rider—as early as at the doctor’s office, you can see that animating a physics-based rider has been a little less central for me, as compared to other Line Rider creators. What Line Rider has always offered me was compelling access to a customizable physics-based camera—and, in many ways, still I could personally take or leave the rider itself, even if the Bosh’s particular quirks have grown on me over time. Others, however, are certainly going to disagree with me on this, and that might result in a different opinion of solace and other tracks that are increasingly combining Line Rider with other art mediums.
With that preamble, let’s move into solace itself—like the song it syncs, it is broken into distinct, smaller chunks which each inhabit their own distinct aesthetic environment and visual ideas—such as zooming the rider in and out separately from the background (similarly to the visual effect in Designated Male at Birth), nonlinear movement over a scrolling Geometry Dash background, or stacking the track with itself at different zoom levels to create the appearance of depths (similarly to the visual effect in mother). These chunks, however, are linked through consistent color schemes—washed out colors, with a particular emphasis on various tones of black, white, and grey. Indeed, the amount of variation and emotional depth that william017 is able to get out of combining various greyscale tones is rather impressive—from discomfort, to dissociation, to outright horror. This emphasis on grey tones matches quite well with Earl Sweatshirt’s music as he raps about his mental health struggles—the visual language sends the viewer to a place of a kind of inebriated depression, making the world feel like it is spinning or zooming in and out against the sort of soul-crushing, dirty-feeling greys you might find in a shitty apartment or dirt-cheap room at a motel.
In fact, william017 does so much to visually represent the abstract vibe of the Earl Sweatshirt's music and does it so effectively, that it’s a bit of a disappointment that they did significantly less to evoke the meaning and thematic content of the lyrics. Earl Sweatshirt talks about some pretty heavy, personal stuff, here—linking his struggles with mental health to broader social patterns of Black incarceration and the experiences of incarcerated people, discussing his problems with sleeping and eating, and his experiences with loneliness and missing relatives like his grandmother who are no longer with him. Perhaps it was shrewd of william017 to simply match the emotional content of these topics with tactful abstract visuals instead of diving into them directly, but shrewdness is easily mistaken for artistic cowardice, especially when it comes to topics as intense as these. A lot more could’ve been done with this thematic content, at the very least.
However, this doesn’t mean william017 doesn’t interact with these thematic elements entirely, and the thematic moments he DID put into the track are indicative of thoughtful consideration of the thematic material that does come across as quite tactful. In Part II of Earl Sweatshirt’s song, william017 includes these scrolling Geometry Dash visuals behind Bosh—in particular, a cage asset (which William has used other previously, in tracks like Montreal) and what I can only describe as something which looks like a mass or column of skin and flesh. This imagery evokes the ongoing theorization of flesh and enslavement within critical race theory by Black theorists such as Hortense Spillers, Alexander Weheliye, and others. In these theorizations, (nonwhite) “flesh” is differentiated within systems of white supremacy from the (white) “body”; after all, according to Spillers, enslavement “marked a theft of the body—a willful and violent severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire.” The flesh is what remains—a site of literal and social wounding, one which is still deployed against Blackness in the present day through structures such as those of police violence and incarceration.
The deployment of these images mirrors Earl Sweatshirt’s own comparisons between the literal imprisonment of incineration and mental health struggles and depression (which itself operates as a kind severing of a person from their motive will, especially when one considers the increased rates of untreated mental illness among Black people due to violence inflicted upon them by white supremacy): “my mental was caged / see, I ain’t been to prison but the feeling’s the same.” william017 makes this evocative comparison literal, juxtaposing the rider against cages which hang menacingly in the air and these columns of flesh which feel at once the kind of imagery that someone Going Through It might imagine to themselves (I sure have, at least), and the experience of being reduced to the condition of flesh which characteristic of enslavement. At the end, William017 takes this imagery full circle—placing us in a space that feels cavernous by virtue of an (admittedly hacky) depth effect. And in that moment, a single additional cage drifts by—this one, decayed and visibly falling apart. Is this rotting cage a symbol of escape, of an imprisonment worn down by time, or is a symbol of even greater imprisonment and neglect? William017 leaves us with this image in an isolated, almost hauntingly ambiguous way, just as Earl Sweatshirt leaves “Solace” in a state that’s somewhere between hopeful and despairing.
What’s here is definitely compelling and thoughtful, in my opinion, which is why I definitely wished there was more thematic consideration of the song from william017—something that would also prevent these topics from going under the radar within the work, and would more clearly signal william017’s own personal investment with these topics instead of remaining rather (frustratingly, at times) enigmatic. However, william017 is very clearly putting their all into these Line Rider projects, and the way these visual and tonal experiments are pulled off is extremely effective, at least for yours truly. As the boundaries of what counts as “Line Rider” gets pushed, we continue to find new aesthetic avenues which surprise, resonate, and prompt invigorating reflection from this community.
Afterimage - Malizma
Review by September:
Malizma’s Line Rider oeuvre is one of the most unique and technically impressive collection of tracks currently out there—I mean, the range of techniques on display in something like Denmark/Van Gogh and Gone already exemplifies the depth that Malizma is able to find in pushing Line Rider to its technical limits—and much of it done while still keeping true to Line Rider’s minimalist and brutally sparse roots. With Conundrumer absent from the track-making scene for a couple years now, it feels as though Malizma has taken up that specific aesthetic mantle in his place, consistently putting out works that feel like the OKAY or Ragdoll of our present moment. Which brings us to Afterimage, Malizma’s latest experiments with using procedural layer-automated animation to create in-engine effects that are so seamless that they look video-edited. Malizma’s eye for trippiness is on full display, here—from the opening which slowly desyncs the background line animations from the camera’s movement speed, to the expanding geometry which appears in time with the upper synth line—so much so that I would say Afterimage is absolutely a fitting title for this track! Each time I have watched Afterimage, it has left me a few moments afterward full of perceptual distortions consistent with the classic motion aftereffect optical illusion, and I have to give credit to any track that can make me experience something unique on a raw, bodily level—and even more so given that Malizma called his shot when it came to this effect.
The whole thing makes me think a bit about the external-to-Line-Rider op art movement which began in the mid-20th-century and its potential connections to the Line Rider of today. Nowadays we kind of regard optical illusions as a bit of a party trick or a toy, but for a while optical illusions were the central focus of a cutting-edge visual arts movement that had interesting things to say about visual perception on a philosophical and biological level. Some of that stark visual tradition certainly lives on in Line Rider—a medium which is often also often a land of deep and revealing illusions—most obviously in the form of 156R’s Devil Cut,—but also in other places, like the movement illusions in Bug Thief and the visual distortions caused by Afterimage—and, indeed, much of Malizma’s work… so much so it feels like a deeply productive lens in which to view his Line Rider art these past couple of years! At the very least, it’s certainly an aesthetic wellspring that’s worth drawing from, and has a lot of interesting things to say about the artsy things we do in this silly game of ours.
But I think the most striking moment, though, is the moment when Bosh collides with a ten point cannon—and it explodes into particles as if it were fireworks or the disintegrating lines from Line Rider 2: Unbound. My mind certainly did the same thing! It’s odd, then, that Malizma, in the description of his video, describe Afterimage as having “a lot of same problems as Coyote in terms of composition,” when, as compared Arglin’s track, Afterimage is so deeply nonlinear and responsive to the rider’s movement—even going so far as to make the track react to Bosh’s touch. These sorts of moments that Malizma is able to find (like in How, for example)—where the rider and the track are able to interact with each other, communicate, and respond to each other’s touch—are some of my favorites. It makes the world of Line Rider feel all that more complex, emotional, and alive.
Let Linger - Toivo
Review by September:
Let Linger, Toivo’s first new track in 2024, is the sort of pure-movement quirk track which is a frequent mainstay of his output, like Replica or Giving. What distinguishes Let Linger from these other tracks, however, are the creative restrictions Toivo placed upon himself as part of the creation process. By limiting the rider’s top speed/rotation speed and disallowing sharp direction changes, Let Linger concerns itself with a clearly-defined set of aesthetic goals for the track centered on producing a coherently smooth and floaty movement style. Toivo is especially well-suited to this task, allowing his deft expertise with quirk to create a grounded sensation of Bosh’s weight and inertia even as the track moves them in ways which feel almost otherworldly. Key to this is the subtlety with which Toivo changes Bosh’s speed—these momentum changes often take the form of gradual pushes which accelerate or decelerate the Rider slowly enough that Bosh’s weight becomes distinctly tangible, even as these momentum changes register as almost mysterious forces float Bosh along the track. And the whole thing gels quite well with its mellow musical accompaniment, giving it a satisfying sort of push-and-pull. I’ll readily admit I’m a sucker for this kind of movement, so while it obviously isn’t anything special on the level of I Can’t Ride These Lines Without You, It’s ok, You’re ok, or Dance Alone, Toivo’s deeply considered approach to movement in Line Rider is always a welcome addition.
Review by Malizma:
Let Linger is Toivo's first release in a while, with their last track, Line Rider Crossword Puzzle, having been released at the beginning of last year. That being said, it is very much reminiscent of their earlier works that focus primarily on movement (their track Giving specifically comes to mind). This is likely because the track was first started in late 2021, around the time when more movement-focused tracks were being released and when quirk was more prevalent in the Line Rider community. The track had only been finished recently due to a spell of (totally valid) burnout.
The beginning was made in 2021 December, and I worked on this track mainly in 2023 spring and summer. Then I experienced pretty bad Line Rider burnout, that lasted almost a full year. Didn't really do much LR stuff, until this summer I picked up this track, and found some motivation to make tracks again.
It's rare to see this type of experimental, movement-heavy track recently, especially one that focuses more on the aesthetic produced by the overall result rather than the increasing intensity of skillful tricks. The only other recent track like this that comes to mind is The Moon by Leonis, released last month. Much like The Moon, the aesthetic created by the movement is no accident, with Toivo setting restrictions on the track creation process to achieve the effect.
I had some "rules" or "restrictions" while making this track; Go slower than 12 P/F. Don't change rotation too quickly/after rotation change, keep that direction for some time. Avoid really "harsh" movements.
These restrictions create a visibly prominent aesthetic in the movement. There's a sense of weightlessness to the rider, and the track lines feel much more delicate to the touch. This creates an effect of continuous attraction between the rider and where they want to go, which makes the lines producing said movement serve more purpose as scenery that grounds the movement into the world space. This grounding is emphasized by the subtle camera work, which slowly zooms to give the appropriate amount of screen space to each section. Sure, there are occasionally moments where the movement feels somewhat harsher, which may be what Toivo is referencing when they mention in the description that "Some parts are a little rushed." However, the harsh sections feel appropriate to include during the sections of music that they are included in. It also makes the track overall feel less artificial or dull, providing contrast against the moments of softness and adding more variety to the movement. The strongest parts of the track for me, though, are when the lines do very little guiding and let gravity do most of the work. It creates this, you could say, "lingering" between sets of lines, where the rider is drifting through the air, awaiting the next movement. But this is also where the track falls short for me. I wish these moments weren't so quick and fleeting, that they went on just a little longer to simmer on.
The beginning and ending segments of the track, while seemingly normal, are probably the most peculiar sections of all -- because the track begins where it ends. It's not an immediately obvious loop, either - it defies spatial logic, since a large portion of the track heads downwards without an equal return upwards. Thematically, it ties into a couple of ideas of what it means to "linger" -- letting something replay in your head over and over, focusing in on it for an extended period, while not consciously recognizing that you are replaying it in the first place. This is what I enjoy about much of Toivo's work; not only is there a unique aesthetic to the movement, but the aesthetic is created to explore particular ideas about consciousness in a spatial context. Similar to how movement in Line Rider Nightmare creates the claustrophobic and disorienting feel of experiencing terror, or how Dream emphasizes the bizarreness of unconscious thought with a surreal and non-Euclidean world, Let Linger is patient with how often it switches between motions, allowing time to absorb and dwell on those motions. With all this being said, I look forward to whatever Toivo releases next!
THE MESSAGE - Interstellar_1
Review by Bevibel:
THE MESSAGE is a short piece directly visualizing M.I.A.’s “THE MESSAGE”, a song about corporations tracking online activity and the ties between government and large tech companies. It’s a fun, punchy concept that Interstellar_1’s illustrations do an excellent job of conveying. On the other hand, these visuals depicting the lyrics are simply overlaid on a separate video of a simple Line Rider track visualizing the instrumentation, which makes the actual riding of lines feel superfluous, especially when the track moves from left to right for the entire video’s duration. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a perfectly fine little graphic accompaniment to the song - but I find myself wishing for more, especially after reading the description.
In a note in the description, Interstellar comments on how the notion that large companies and governments track and gather data on people’s internet usage - a notion so evidence-backed and broadly accepted today in 2024 as to seem trite and unoriginal - was widely seen as a paranoid conspiracy back when M.I.A. released the song in 2010, for which she was relentlessly mocked online (or so she claims). Digging into this, it appears that rather than predicting the NSA scandals exactly, she was making wild claims in interviews around the same time, such as “Google and Facebook were developed by the CIA”, a claim which remains firmly in the realm of conspiracy theory today. (It’s also worth mentioning that basic awareness that the US’s National Security Agency was unconstitutionally gathering data on US residents dates back to the government’s much-debated response to the 9/11 attacks in 2001, nearly a decade before the song’s release.) More recently, M.I.A. is in the news for being an anti-vaxxer, claiming that she has had three friends die from taking the vaccine. (It’s worth saying that there is currently zero evidence linking the COVID-19 vaccine to an increased risk of death).
I present all of this not to debunk the claims made in “THE MESSAGE” (which remain accurate) or to “cancel” M.I.A. as a musician (though I hope nobody looks to her for facts about how the world works). I bring all this up to say, there’s so much to dig into here around the tension between conspiracy theories that years later turn out to be completely true, versus conspiracy theories that were always fully detached from reality. There are almost certainly beliefs that are widely understood as conspiracy theories right now that we will learn were true all along at some later point in time. There are almost certainly things that will forever be understood by the general public as conspiracy theories, that have been true the whole time, but rarely believed. And there will always be people attempting to spin personally held conspiratorial beliefs that turned out to be true as them having perceived the truth accurately long before anyone else (which is to say, before there was any evidence to support it). And maybe some of them really did figure it out before anyone else! There’s so much here to unpack and wrestle with human psychology and how we deal with knowledge and uncertainty and our desire to make sense of the world. Which leaves me a little disappointed that THE MESSAGE keeps its message (heh) so clean and straightforward, and avoids digging into these issues and getting messy with it.
On the other hand, I do appreciate the message (heh). And I do like the illustrations!
And now, a surprise - Interstellar_1
Review by September:
And now, a surprise is a new joke track from Interstellar_1, featuring the song of the same name from Vylet Pony’s joke EP “I’m Creekflow”. In it, Vylet Pony professes her love of drinking oil, proclaiming “I can’t stop drinking oil / [...] / guzzling it” and how she finds it to be “a delicacy,” all in hilariously-autotuned form of rant-singing. Joke tracks are hard, I think, because the timing for humor is so specifically nuanced and jokes themselves are difficult to construct—so often, joke tracks are simply recycling a meme for the upteenth time or are utterly incomprehensible. Of course, picking good joke songs helps a lot, and Interstellar has certainly made a great song selection here. After having listened to this song, I, too, have found myself allured to the concept of drinking oil and its potential significance. There is something… queer… something… transgender about drinking oil on a conceptual/aesthetic level. I can’t explain it or why, I just find it to be absolutely true in my heart of hearts. Is there not something distinctly petrochemical about gender in the 21st century?
But I’ll leave my incoherent ramblings about gender out of the equation. The offsled movement and drawings of oil are like, sure, yeah, funny enough. I think it would’ve been nice to actually have some imagery of someone actually guzzling said oil, instead of it left as an abstract concept (a la my own track, I Swallowed Shampoo). However, where I think where the humor really shines in And now, a surprise is in Interstellar’s rendering of text. Most of it is in a fairly well-done BELLS-esque scratchy style, but Interstellar is also careful to keep the text sensitive to the minutiae of the singing’s emotion, adjusting the speed of the offsled rider and the size of the text in accordance with the enunciative forces of Vylet’s singranting. A key highlight, however, are the moments when the font changes in response to the singer’s descriptions of oil. When oil is described as “tantalizing,” interstellar writes that out in a distinctly more legible cursive, and when it described as a delicacy, the text becomes emphatically readable, shimmery, starry text which emphasizes the alluring quality of hydrocarbonic chains. It’s genuinely hilarious, and I think it’s cued me into something I hadn’t previously realized about Interstellar: they’re actually quite good at creating and syncing stylized text!
Consider another track of theirs from all the way back in 2021: Overture, which despite being a rather standard “visualizer” style of track remains one of my personal favorites from Interstellar's oeuvre. And while the written lyrics of that track are in a font instead of being handwritten, we can still see inklings of Interstellar's typographic proclivities in the subtleties of where Interstellar places text on screen (particularly of note is the word “Dad” just barely drifting onto the screen as part of the build-up to the next section of the song.) They also do this really well in their other 2024 release, SPACE, which used cleverly layer-automated text to make the lyrics feel appropriately massive and “spacious” (pun intended).
To sync a vocal line well in Line Rider is a difficult task — it is, perhaps, one of the artistic questions that has driven a huge swath of my Line Rider work. Many of the major players and innovations in the early music sync era of Line Rider tended to devote their time to music that did not include the human voice, such as Bevibel’s This Will Destroy You, or DoodleChaos’s work with tracks set to classical music. By the time I came onto the Line Rider scene, I had the distinct sense that much the music-sync vocabulary of Line Rider was centered around instruments—guitars, synths, and especially percussion, which formed the backbone of some of the best music sync works. Vocal sync was and still does feel less developed, for a number of reasons—such as the time-consuming nature of making text by hand, and the fact that vocal performances are nuanced in ways that are rarely ever straightforward. The typographic potentialities of Line Rider are numerous and still vastly underexplored; there hasn’t really been anyone in the Line Rider community who’s been as much of a typography-head as me since DeafTab quit line rider. So while this is a bit of a smaller release from Interstellar this month, I think it suggests some exciting avenues in which Interstellar could take their work—emphasizing typography, the minutiae of the human voice, and the emotional dimensions and nuances of using letters and motion in in order to evoke the beauty of song.
mine all mine - CatAtKmart
Review by September:
CatatKmart’s newest full release mine all mine certainly has a lot going for it and manages to bring a some new ideas to the table. For one, it’s quite the visually distinct track; the color palette, consisting of blues, greens, and reds, is certainly quite pretty, and the use of an SVG cursive font gives it a visual flare we haven’t seen before in Line Rider. The choruses especially are a highlight, featuring a series of smooth jumps through hearts rising to the sky like hearts, while the cursive font changes to include a variety of heart shapes and grows smaller as the vocal melody fades back into the verses. It’s also dedicated to CatatKmart’s partners, which is certainly a sweet touch. However, while it is certainly a nice and sweet enough track, I can’t help but feel there were several missed opportunities for making this track resonate thematically with the music, and I think highlighting these things might be useful for a number of line rider creators. While the fundamentals of music syncing in Line Rider are already their own challenge, understanding how to thematically and tonally sync a track to music is another task entirely, and I think mine all mine presents me with a good opportunity to discuss with this less obvious aspect of trackmaking.
First, let’s consider the song to which mine all mine is synced—“My Love Mine All Mine” by Mitski. In it, Mitski addresses the Moon, asking it if she could
Send my heart up to you?
So when I die, which I must do,
Could it shine down here with you?
She asks the Moon to do this because “[Her] baby here on Earth / Showed [her] what [her] heart was worth”—specifically, that “Nothing in the world belongs to [her]” except for her love, which is hers and hers alone, and Mitski tells the moon so, saying that it is “mine all mine.” And thus, because she now understands what her love is worth, she wishes to shine that love down onto her love when “it comes to be [her] turn” to die and can no longer be with her love on Earth.
This song is touching and romantic, yes, but also quite macabre and just a bit pessimistic. The world of the song is one where death lingers in the background and where love is the singer’s only true possession. Addressed directly to the moon, it evokes something like a night-time prayer, a lonely sort of thought someone might have while lying in bed. The music itself supports this vibe, with instrumentation and vocals evocative of lounge music, as if Mitski is singing in a smoky cocktail bar in the middle of the 20th century—smooth, but with just a hint of jazziness all wrapped in a twinge of inner darkness.
What “My Love Mine All Mine” does not evoke for me are rolling green hills and bright blue skies, which are the primary visual elements of CatAtKmart’s track. On just an over literal level, if the song directly calls upon the image of the moon—of the lights in space shining down on earth—why is the track set so distinctly during the day? CatAtKmart writes out the word “Moon,” for the lyrics, but seemingly it does not occur to him to set at least that portion of the track at night—or to draw that “hole of light” which “shines down on” Mitski so powerfully. It feels like a missed opportunity, because the entire song is addressed to the moon, and yet the track completely misses the tonal and thematic potential of including that imagery.
As a result, mine all mine communicates something closer to a more straightforwardly bright and romantic theming while the song itself clashes with these ideas. Consider, also, the scratchy, scribbled quality of the scenery in mine all mine—which, in isolation, is a visual technique I quite enjoy and have frequently championed. And it also looks great in mine all mine! But this kind of scratchy, scribbled quality doesn’t quite match the smooth and understated quality of Mitski’s lounge-esque instrumentation. Nor does this feel like an intentional response to the music itself; the linework isn’t scratchy as part of some kind of larger conversation about the music. The cursive font, meanwhile, is actually a pretty solid choice in this respect: clean, but with just a touch of cheesy ornamentation which compliments the lounge vibes well. However, considering the strange thematic choices present elsewhere in the track, it’s hard to say how intentional this choice might’ve been, or if the choice was made in conversation with “My Love Mine All Mine.” And this gets to the core of it: mine all mine doesn’t feel as though it is conversation with the music it syncs. Instead, it attempts to use the music to say its own, separate, unrelated thing about love—namely, its function as a dedication to CatatKmart’s partners. And that thing is fine enough, and truly a sweet thing I don’t want to be too much of a grouch about. But I can’t help but feel a strange cognitive dissonance between the song and the track, one which undermines the track’s message and leaves me feeling just a bit hollow. But I hope this track can be a useful learning experience for both CatAtKmart and others—and maybe a little bit of a portrait of why I find a thematically-grounded approach to syncing track and music to be so important.
trauma - MoonXplorer
Review by Bevibel:
While watching trauma, I found myself wondering what the impetus might have been behind creating a piece like this. It’s got a striking aesthetic of scribble-heavy red-lines-on-black, along with with text and imagery that seems to be playing with the concept of a rider who remembers past timelines of violence and death. What it doesn’t have is anything that seems to indicate anything about the creator - that is to say, MoonXplorer themself - or why they would choose to venture into this dark thematic material. When a Line Rider artist ventures into dark or disturbing territory, especially when there’s a lot of scribbling and original text involved, I tend to assume it’s coming from a desire to share, process, and/or convey a difficult or traumatic experience in their life, and I find that when that’s not the case, the messaging can wind up being extremely off-putting. Other times, such as in Malizma’s DROOL, the focus is mostly on the aesthetic and vibe, and the actual messaging can get comfortably lost in the fray. However, after some consideration, trauma doesn’t seem to fit into any of these pre-conceived boxes in my head to categorize Line Rider tracks with dark aesthetics.
My best guess as to the goals of trauma is that MoonXplorer simply wanted to try out exploring some darker themes without there being any deep personal truth that needed to be painstakingly excavated from their psyche. But on the other hand, it’s not a Malizma track - there’s not a lot of flashy effects or dramatic visuals, and the focus remains squarely on the narrative around trauma. But despite the sensitivity of the subject, I don’t actually have anything much to criticize here - it’s just a relatively grounded exploration of what trauma does to the mind: fragamented memories, inner turmoil, the fragmentation of the psyche into parts, and fatalistic catastrophizing. The lack of a personal angle keeps it relatively contained - almost tidy - which makes it an exploration of trauma from a relatively detached perspective that never becomes about the artist - merely that of the rider. I’m honstly not quite sure what to make of trauma. It doesn’t really evoke any deep feelings or resonances in me, but I find it kind of fascinating, and I did enjoy analyzing it. Make of that what you will!
The Round Electric
Very Invincibility is one of a couple of explorations from Brostab utilizing the invincibility mod available on the Line Rider Advanced branches of the Line Rider tree. Oftentimes, invincibility tracks are kind of extremely bleh—I find the “reverse fakie” that happens in invincibility mode to be rather unpleasant the vast majority of the time—and nowadays, with the implementation of remounting, I suspect invincibility more often than not closes off the expressive capabilities of Line Rider’s mechanics instead of opening them up. However, this was honestly a fun little exploration of the concept, using the invincibility in the service of rapid momentum changes and the creation of compelling music-synced animations that interact with the rider. And the brief flashes of reverse fakie almost work here, evoking the kind of dramatic flailing that might occur when one goes absolutely feral in response to a song. Sometimes, I wonder what an invincibility mode for linerider.com could look like, with all the creative tools that are available there. Quirkers like Arglin have explored the creative avenues of invincibility quite a few times, but I think there is other creative territory out there that we simply might have not let ourselves consider.
バーチャルセックス is the first full track from Sooshimanh, and despite being rather minimal overall, I would say it’s a promising and compelling release. The music does a lot to sell it for me, evoking a similar intensity to the music from Ride Liner’s HAM. Of course, Sooshimanh’s movement isn’t going to live up to that kind of hype, but it was still an enjoyable experience that’s a workable foundation for further tracks from this creator. It reminds me a bit of how william017 started out, although with a little less fanfare than something like Impossible Soul. I’ll be watching for Sooshimanh’s follow-up to this track, at the very least—there’s the potential for exciting things to come from them.
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