September 2024 Line Rider Roundup
Welcome one, welcome all to the September 2024 edition of the Line Rider Roundup … in November! However, my dear readers, it does seem as though I am catching up, slowly but surely—as I think I’ll be able to put together October’s roundup in the next ten to fifteen days, and we’ll have returned to the uneasy equilibrium, the endless struggle against linear time, that this roundup represents.
However, I think that this round-up will be the last of the ones that I really grind out to make truly comprehensive—many of my reviews this month had the misfortune of cracking or nearly racking a thousand words, and writing multiple reviews a month of that length is just not sustainable if I also want to separately follow my own creative pursuits. Otherwise, this whole operation will simply fizzle out, and we may not have a monthly round-up at all—as I don’t foresee there being a successor to my tenure as lead reviewer anytime soon. There’s two ways I can see it playing out: either I write the normal length of review for fewer tracks a month (maybe around 1-3 tracks), or I write shorter, quicker reviews of the same number of tracks and give myself a stricter word-count. Readers of mine, which would you prefer to see, going forward? Please let me know. I’m not yet committed either way. Regardless, I foresee these changes taking place by the November round-up at the latest.
This month, my endless gratitude goes to Jade, for her excellent review of Sighs, and MoonXplorer, who has really been showing up with a review every month in a way I deeply appreciate. Y’all make my job so much easier, and I burn a candle for you both in the darkness of night, making burnt offerings to forces beyond our comprehension for the sake of your happiness and health. Lo, as the days get shorter, those who contribute reviews to this lonely endeavor are a beacon of daylight. Do not let these times steal your bright hearts.
As evidenced by my reference to the amount of ink I have spilled for the sake of the tracks this month, there is a lot that’s really compelling to discuss and reflect upon in this particular batch of tracks! So now, join us as we engage thoughtfully with this silly little artform we have grown to love.
Click here for a playlist of all videos in this roundup (in order). Titles also link to videos individually.
Glass Beach - william017
Review by September:
When I first watched Glass Beach by william017, I was absolutely thrown for a loop. Even now, watching it back for the purposes of this review, I am filled with a visceral, bodily thrill, like I am being launched forward within the music and its world, hanging on its every word and note. Part of this is because william017 chose an absolutely banger song that I already loved, of course, but also because I felt like—here was a creator who was putting everything out there, going no-holds-barred with the experimental and visual narrative elements of their work, trying new things in order to create a messy, passionate, and gleefully imperfect vision of their relationship with the music. This isn’t a track that feels like it’s making safe decisions with how it chooses to convey its song, but one that is firmly grounded in william017’s grounded exploration of his thematic, symbolic, and visual interests. And that messy, raw passion felt like it matched the music perfectly, in its own raw and messy expressions of love and solidarity for another.
Glass Beach is a yet another continuation and deepening of the formal and artistic exploration william017’s has been exploring for the past year now, the full scope of which I outlined in my review of solace, which he released in September. Some of it bears repeating, however: in these sorts of highly experiment works, william017 is not so much making Line Rider tracks as he is assembling videos which use Line Rider footage as visual components, alongside footage from Geometry Dash and other effects created with more traditional video editing technique. This way of creating Line Rider works wildly opens up the expressive possibilities of the medium, but may also weaken specific unique aspects of Line Rider which are distinct from these other sources of footage, such as taking place in (the illusion of) a grounded, continuous world.
This is especially true and heightened when we consider that—unlike solace, which is simply labeled as “Line Rider” in its title—william017 has chosen to label Glass Beach as “Line Rider + Geometry Dash,” a mixture which has origins in works like Unused Assets and Paqqin as well as William017’s own Montreal. Of course, solace, also features Geometry Dash assets, so the “+ Geometry Dash” distinction probably has to do with the inclusion of footage of GD gameplay—but also a thematic and tonal distinction on william017’s part. Even more than solace, the larger narrative structure and moment-to-moment experience of Glass Beach features ways of seeing and modes of abstraction that come wholly from Geometry Dash, expecting viewers to already be familiar with reading and recognizing these elements—potentially leaving those unaccustomed with these structural conventions feeling alienated. For me and my personal artistic inclination, however, these choices are less acutely felt as alienation and instead as an exciting influx of new-to-Line-Rider concepts and material which heightens the track’s thematic and narrative elements in a way which lets everything remain rather abstract while also still feeling concretely narrative and thematic.
As an example, the abstract and symbolic way Glass Beach goes about exploring the narrative and thematic elements of its song is extremely Geometry Dash. If you listen closely to how Geometry Dash creators who make works which are personal and expressive talk about their levels, you start to find language that’s very strange to someone who is external to this scene: things like blocks, certain jumps or game modes, and even things like colors begin to be referred to as something akin to characters—narrative symbolic elements that convey personal meaning and go through entire emotional arcs over the course of a level. This is probably a product of the fact that Geometry Dash has a relatively limited and abstract pool of visual assets, and drawing something yourself like in Line Rider is not really possible without external mods. The resulting particular perspective one gains within such a limited creative environment results in creators viewing spikes as characters and jumps over them as story beats; there are a number of GD creators who eschew using text and deride it for being too literal and concrete. Glass Beach applies this same approach to Line Rider, transforming two colors—particular shades of pink and teal—into symbolic characters which bounce off of each other, interacting and intersecting in a myriad of ways throughout the track. This is not entirely new, of course—consider the blue and pink lines in Ray’s i was seeing you through rose-coloured glasses (i still do, i'm sorry), or even the different line textures in Toivo’s I Can’t Ride These Lines Without You—but in Line Rider that sort of thing is often the main focus of a track, eschewing other forms of visual complexity or representation so that the abstract-symbolic character work is front and center, which is something that Glass Beach resolutely does not do. Instead, william017 includes another character, one which is rendered with more explicitly imagery but which still functions in a similarly abstract way: the figure of “The City.”
The city is a symbol which has haunted much of william017’s work, starting with Montreal. In that track, the city environment was an overcast tomb for the singer and her ambitions—a lifeless place full of federal prisons, Amazon warehouses and “pointless” banks. Ever since that track, the particular overcast greys of that track and that city-tomb have haunted the color palettes of William017’s other work—as bugs and dried blood in Trustfall and, like, just the entire vibe of solace, even including copied cage assets from Montreal. In Glass Beach, however, the city returns in a more literal and physical form, sporting those same ashen-grey skyscrapers against gloomy clouds. And in Glass Beach, the city functions as a mechanical, impersonal space that acts as a sullen barrier between the other two color-characters—a force which pulls these colors apart even as they strive to bump into each other and connect.
This abstract narrative really works for me when I consider the way these elements in the track correspond to the music. The song “Glass Beach” features two characters—the singer and the person they are addressing—which are drawn to each other even as familial abuse works to drive them apart from each other. It is, ultimately, a song about two people coming together in solidarity with each other in the face of abuse, loving and caring for one another and growing out of the environments which try to destroy their metaphorical souls. While keeping the specific imagery pretty abstract, william017 manages to convey these themes with the use of these character-colors, which support and love each other against an environment (the city), which tries to suppress their vibrance and solidarity with each other, boiling over in several sections into the fleshy, gory reds of Trustfall, evocative of the abuse which hangs over the track. In one particularly striking section, the lyrics are written out in contrasting but stylistically-resonant handwritten red and blue fonts—except for one word, “family,” which is written out in a monochromatic serif text which seems to be nearly falling apart.
It feels as though these colors are working to escape their environment, to break free of the structures and the imagery that try to sever the bond that they have with each other. Though abstracted, it’s deeply resonant with the themes of the song—and I really think it works for me because of how this abstraction means that it really dive into the emotional moment-to-moment of the music and experiment powerfully with its visuals without getting bogged down by literal imagery. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely love that literal imagery even for really tough subjects—I am the person who made My Pal Foot Foot, after all—but I also don’t think every artistic work that addresses familiar abuse can or should do such a thing, and I think it’s really exciting that Glass Beach manages to cathartically explore these topics without necessarily forcing the viewer to see literal depictions of them.
I think this thematic narrative of solidarity in the face of abuse works also fantastically on a metatextual level, as well—william017’s labeling of this track as “Line Rider + Geometry Dash” brings us to an awareness of this tracks’ medley of elements, of these two mediums working together to break free of the limitations of either one. Line Rider is made to look like Geometry Dash and Geometry Dash is made to look like Line Rider, the elements of each playing off of each other and combining through the medium of video editing. These elements are mixed together further and further with the slow buildup of the song in its second half—until finally climaxing into a moment of pure music visualization, lightning bolts of pink and teal tearing through the black void, replying to each other almost as if they were in conversation. What really gets me about this moment is how, in the absence of a rider or a GD cube, the jagged music-synced flashes of this moment feels as if it both represents and transcends these two artforms—the GD-style flashing visuals contrasting against the zig-zag waveforms that are a much more common occurrence in Line Rider visualizers. The two elements move past their material parts and talk to each other, calling out to each other through the void as the sickest fucking guitar solo rips through them, animating their desires.
And it is this solidarity which calls out through the void that will vanquish these things which try to kill our spirits—and so it is no coincidence that right before that pure-visualizer solo we see the overcast clouds of the city begin to part… with a grey sky behind it, sure, but the hole in this place’s armor has begun to show. And then, after the visual-solo’s conclusion, another layer of the sky opens up behind the clouds again—this time, to part the city itself into a circle of real, actual sky, full of stars and falling snow—and the color-characters become ribbons which guide us as we and Bosh
Look up to the sky
And climb up the moonlight
It's ours
The moon and the stars
They'll forget who we were
And we'll be together again
And at that moment, the structure is obliterated, blown wide open. We are thrown into a jumbled sea of GD assets resembling destroyed towers—the city in ruins. J McClendon’s lyrics ring out, singing “Sleep till the sun sets,” as those lyrics appear, and I am thrown into an ecstatic frenzy, the structure of everything having come undone in a moment of catharsis and connection. The grey itself regains its color, however desaturated it may be. The text “HOME AGAIN” is barely visible, drowned out by the jumble of energies which surround it. Are we “home again”, or have we destroyed the idea of ever having to go “home again”? The distinction probably doesn’t matter, save for in the context of william017's personal reflections and connection to the work—for us viewers, either understanding works.
I’ve certainly sung the tracks’s praises, but I do have a few quibbles: I think perhaps just a little bit more literal imagery would have been useful to key people into what the track was doing visually and metaphorically. And I think, because the track is so restlessly experimental with its visuals that there are a few that I think work less well than others—the one where buildings pass in front of Bosh comes to mind, somehow managing to always block our view of Bosh right as she is about to do a flip or change the direction of her momentum in sync with the music. There are also a few errors with the written-out lyrics in the track that it would’ve been good for william017 to double check before releasing (though that kind of thing happens to us all, I will admit. I accidentally wrote out “TRY” as “TPY” on I Say ‘No’, much to my personal devastation). But I think the least successful element of the track also comes from those same otherwise interesting and new ways of seeing thinking about a track that william017 is importing into this track—namely, GD players’ seeming total lack of awareness of their player icons as part of the artistic experience. william017 has done nothing to stylistically change the looks of their personal player icon, here—which is quite unfortunate, because I think bright blue and orange 🥺-ass seal riding a seahorse is deeply inappropriate for the tonal thematic content this track is exploring, undermining the track a bit for people who aren’t familiar with Geometry Dash.
However, overall, Glass Beach is one of the most exciting and personally rewarding tracks for me this year. The way it experiments with its medium and goes about expressing the explosive solidarity of its music helps make me feel less alone and more hopeful in a year numerous with trials and tribulations I have not always handled well. I highly recommend watching it.
Youngest Son - Autumn
Review by MoonXplorer:
This track was part of an event called "Secret Songsta" where each person gets a randomly assigned song to make a track to the tune of it, but this year we had to choose a random color palette aswell, and this track was part of it.
Using the song “Youngest Daughter” by Superheaven (which yours truly has chosen btw!!), Autumn tells the story about a trans boy receiving a letter from his mother telling him to come back home and saying how she gave up on helping her son with the lyrics "It's useless, I tried to no avail" and lists a bunch of reasons why he should come home. The son then replies saying that she's dead to him and that he is proud of who he is, with the ending revealing a flowy trans flag that Bosh rides on.
While the original song has a different meaning, Autumn flips that around and conveys a different story masterfully!! Personally, I can't really relate to this track, since I'm not trans, but I can feel happy knowing that some other people can relate to this in a few ways!
I've been reading a webcomic called “The Recloseted Lesbian” which talks about the author's parent neglect that she received for being lesbian. Again, the author may not be the same as the character from the track, but they have the same problem, and it's awesome to see people using this art media to talk to people about what's happening.
This track is for everyone who has received neglect and backlash from their loved ones, and I hope you guys are ok!!
Review by September:
Thanks to Tulips for their insights and discussion about this track.
Youngest Son, Autumn's sole release for this month, has quite a bit of meat on its bones for a reviewer like myself—especially when it comes to topics like author identity, authentic expression, the makeup of the Line Rider community, and the complexities of (trans) gender(s).
For context: Autumn, a nonbinary trans woman, made this track as part of the Secret Songsta event, a Line Rider “Secret Santa”-like event where participants swap songs with each other and sync tracks to the songs that were selected for them. Over time, Secret Songsta has become a particularly interesting creative environment for Line Rider creators, forcing them to create Line Rider tracks to songs and musical genres they might not otherwise explore, creating exciting narrative opportunities for track-makers, like in my own Running Red Lights or Ray’s (very excellent) I wish I could. This is relevant because Youngest Son, set to “Youngest Daughter” by Superheaven, is a similar sort of response to the music that we’ve seen in these other Secret Songsta tracks; in it, Autumn choose to interpret the lyrics of the song as coming from the mouth or perspective an abusive, controlling parent—a personal interpretation which diverges from a general audience’s understanding of the music. It’s also a perspective which is particularly inflected by Autumn’s own experiences as a trans person—and honestly, with lines like:
I am sick.
I am horrified at everything I hear.
The youngest daughter lost her way.
Every day repeats itself again.
[...]
Please come home.
I totally see it—the kind of weird, strained, estranged relationship that trans people all too often have with their parents. If you do a bit of digging on the internet, this is stuff that transphobic parents of trans children say, like, all the time.
However, there’s an additional conceptual wrinkle to this interpretation. Lines like “the youngest daughter lost her way” are not so much the language of anti-transfeminity as it is the language of anti-transmasculinity. The concept of the “daughter” who has been deceived and “lost their way” is one often deployed in rhetoric which targets and discriminates against trans men and transmasculine people. Autumn picked up on this fact, and, as a result, chose to make her track into an exploration of anti-transmasculinity and the discrimination transmascs face. In the description of the video, she articulates this fact in her own words:
To make this track, I tried to do a bit of research on specific examples of discrimination against transmascs (AKA anti-transmasculinity) and I tried to incorporate what I learned into this track (specifically the bridge). I'm not transmasc myself, so hopefully I did all this stuff with justice!
Making art which steps outside oneself into a perspective that is not your own—even ones that have close ties with each other, such as the different subcommunities and identities within transness itself—has many challenges all of its own, so Autumn’s trepidation about whether she did justice to these topics is very warranted and speaks well to the self-awareness she possesses regarding her identity as an art-maker.
That’s a lot of ink spilled about the context of this track, but does it manage to achieve its goals? Is it, like, “good” or whatever? Well, at the very least, Autumn does a lot on the technical and music-sync level to make the track visually and tonally effective—the all-blue color palette, in combination with the choice to time-remap the entire track into state of mild slow-motion is great at conveying the downtempo, ominous tone of the song, and the use of scribbled expanding lines is a great tweak on the standard formula for this particular song, making them feel closer to blue explosions or rushing rivers. The choice to use slow-mo really really works here in combination with Autumn’s normally quite fast and flippy manuquirk style. The slower physics means we get to really sit on the physical dynamics of each flip, manual, or fling, and it really lets Autumn's movement style breathe and shine—in fact, this track in combination with Nude suggests that Autumn is able to get so much mileage out of slow motion that I would be quite excited to see what else she can do with it. And, after having discussed the track with a transmasc friend of mine, Autumn's examination of anti-transmasculinity is certainly well-research and considered, and her classic visual storytelling technique of creating what I can only describe as “sentence clouds” actually manages to be fairly tasteful when it comes to the subject matter. And honestly, the blue lines at the end becoming a goddamn trans flag at the end, DoocleChaos-style, was honestly so fucking sick and was a great way to send the whole thing off.
And, while this track is certainly a fairly successful exercise in artistic empathy, it is still very clearly a track that is not made from Autumn's personal experience. A lot of the sentences from the mother character’s cloud of anti-transmasculine sentiments, while accurate to the character of anti-transmasculinity, feel like abstracted, generic examples that any transmac person could experience, and as a result can’t contain the same kind of true and real-word specificity that would arise out of the actual lived experience of being one specific transmasc having a conversation with one specific transphobic parent; the mother character does not cohere into a single, coherent person but rather the symbol of the transphobic, anti-transmasculine parent. She is both someone who is both a TERF who reads Irreversible Damage and a religiously-minded transphobe makes references to a “Heavenly Father”—and while these groups often share spaces and goals with each other when it comes to trying to oppress trans people, these groups still come out of very different cultural contexts for transphobia. And there’s nothing with the same sort of specificity you might get from pulling from lived experience, the justifications for transphobia you can only really get from an actual conversation with one’s parents—one of my parent, for example, asserted that I only thought I was transgender because I had some kind of undiagnosed dissociative identity disorder, which is, like, such a wild and out of pocket thing to just throw out there and is so wrongheaded for a multitude of reasons.
But that’s the kind of rich social specificity of lived experience that Youngest Son can’t quite manage to capture. And like, obviously it wouldn’t be able to do that, and I don’t think it would be fair to hold this track to that standard! But… jeez, man, this track really makes me wish we DID have that kind of track, one that was made by a transmasculine person drawing from their own experiences. But there aren’t a whole lot of transmascs in the trans community—and not any who seem positioned to create that kind of track. That lack gets reflected in the limitations of the art that gets made, like in Youngest Son, which is the closest right now that we’ll get to that kind of Line Rider release. Perhaps this track, and other supportive forms of art-making, community building, and increasing accessibility to Line Rider might change that.
At the same time, the Line Rider community is still very small—and it’s not like it’s getting any larger these days. The demographics problem of this community will take a long time to solve… and it involves so many wider social issues that it’s something that might honestly not ever be properly addressed. What stories in Line Rider can’t be told because we don’t have the people to tell them?
sighs - pocke
Review by Jade:
I’ve been really digging this Florist tune called “Moon Begins” lately, which has a part that goes like:
catch light in summer like leaves
a sparkle tells me who I am and where my moon begins
and there is a part of me
looking for the spirit placedeath will come
then a cloud of love
there's no land like the water's edge
it follows her magic eyethere's something that waits in the forest for
you to learn how to be afraid
Yeah… there is a part of me looking for that spirit place, and I think it’s the same part of me that refuses to let Line Rider go.
It’s that part of my sibling that asks them to keep playing Animal Crossing: New Leaf on their Nintendo 3DS every now and then, tucked in bed with a hoodie and pyjamas as winter morning sunlight shines through the windows and bounces off crystals and prisms in quiet sparkle dances across the walls. But Animal Crossing… that game is brutal, man. If you don’t talk to your villagers for a week, one will randomly move away after some time, and a patch of dirt with the exact dimensions of their old house is imprinted in the grass surrounding where they used to live. The little explosions of conversation, along with the opportunities for further connection and understanding, are lost to the geologic force that is the natural migration of animals, and your forgetfulness towards reaching out. Once that patch of dirt is there – once that mark is made, you’ll never forget.
In a way, I’ve devoted my entire body of Line Rider work to capturing our desire to connect with creatures. This art always sits somewhere in between feeling like I’ve succeeded or failed to understand others. I float in an overcomplicated interplay of believing that connection is possible and impossible. It’s always possible, just in big and small ways. These feelings of wanting to reach out and understand, and capturing how those feelings are part of the ecosystem and the bigger natural world, is basically my Line Rider brand at this point. That’s the thing we’re all about, to the point where any new tracks we make exploring those themes seem almost formulaic. So, when I see the word “desire” written on a house in this track with a literal trademark, I scrunch my face and exhale out my nose, smiling.
sighs is the raw essence of desire™, like if you put all those feelings of ecological longing and put them in a weird art juice blender. This is that “spirit place” that waits for us in the forest, and it’s not the first time something by pocke has made me feel this Line Rider-based spirituality… this visceral yet simple knowledge that we are animals breathing in a world that is impossible to assign borders or strict definitions to, and that the art, stories and conversations we share are all just born out of weird animal tendencies. To See the Next Part of the Dream and how it feels to chew 5 gum both capture an ecological ambivalence, and sighs feels like it stylistically resides right between those two tracks, in the way the word “Sherwood” resides somewhere between “cardboard” and “gum”. sighs has a similar black and white intensity of To See the Next Part of the Dream, depicting worlds and visual styles which, intentionally on the artists’ part, fail to cohere with each other, often whizzing by in misaligned flurries. But sighs is full of these little pockets of worlds, hiding spots similar to the place coloured in how it feels to chew 5 gum, and when accompanied with lyrics that embody the same dance between social connection and disconnection – “she’s the only one I’ve ever known to feel the same, she’s the only one I’ve ever known to walk away” – it’s these small, beautiful details showing traces of animal activities and plant responses that really draw me into this track.
pocke intentionally draws incomplete images and doodles into the corners of the frame, lurking in the margins so that instead of the rider fully entering and exiting the worlds of the track, we are merely catching quick glimpses. The whole track feels only half-scened, which goes against many trackmakers’ logical tendencies– if you draw an image, you probably want to frame it front and centre so people can see and understand what’s being depicted– but being able to see and understand everything isn’t what sighs is going for, or what our day-to-day lives are actually like. There are entire worlds inside of all the people we pass on the street, beyond all the doors and windows we never enter the rooms of, and we’ll be lucky to even catch a little bit of that in the corner of our eyes.
I’ll quickly touch on a few of my favourite glimpses from sighs. The first drawn world of the track we see is this big ass tree, which only feels so big because we never have all of it in our field of view at once. The entire first verse is spent with the tree lurking, dancing on the left side, branches swaying and leaves rustling in the wind. Really, look at the two lines that are subtly shaped like gusts of wind, and how their directions are consistent with how the tree’s branches are bending.
Oh hey, it’s a transmasc person! One of my most favourite weird in-between worlds.
We spin backwards and land into this tiny pocket of a forest entrance after hitting a ten-point cannon at high speed on the lyric “a quiet place to be” – if Line Rider was an extremely cursed rhythm game where you have to draw something to accompany the song and the game grades you on your rhythmic and narrative timing at each beat, a flashing “Perfect!” text box would be appearing right about here. There’s even a bench, which I view as communal invitations to sit down and reflect.
This drawing is... unclear what it's supposed to be, in a confusing, beautiful way. To me, it looks like a castle at first glance, but the rough shading conveys a large rocky mass, something mountainous but inhabited, maybe carved by ancients. There seem to be entrances to buildings or tents, and there is even a ladder and a flag. It's in our view for a very short time, but long enough for us to know that whatever this obscure landform may be, people have definitely been living here.
It feels strange to take a still image of this since it’s meant to be seen in motion, but the shadows of these plants are such a thoughtful detail that completely change the tone of this world. To me, the length of the plants’ shadows convey a sunset on the horizon, despite there being no sun drawn in the background.
I already mentioned the “desire™” moment earlier, but this is a similar moment of a world that sneaks by in the midst of the track’s final scribbles, where “desire” is written on a mat in front of the door of this cabin. There are worlds of creatures connecting inside of buildings and homes, because people have a desire to share stories and rooms. Organisms want families; creatures want a home.
Whenever I write a roundup review for a track I really love, there’s usually an odd, slightly lonely feeling, because I’ll admit that some of my motivation to get this written is coming from a place of wanting to convince friends and readers that this track that they might otherwise ignore is really good, and knowing that that’s kinda stupid and that it probably won’t work and it doesn’t actually even matter that others like this track. If you have read this far and considered sighs a bit more, I do really appreciate it, and if you've seen sighs before and didn't think much of it, I would recommend giving it another shot, because I've found it's a track that grows the more you watch it - I'm still noticing new details as I'm revising this review.
I also must acknowledge the dark section that builds to the final chorus, where Bosh navigates swooping melodies in a nightly otherworld that holds the same emotional core as Andrew Hess's Run Away With Me, but without the distracting polish of a perfectly-choreographed music video. No shade to Run Away With Me of course, but to me, it's one of those tracks that feel a bit too perfect, where everything I need to know and enjoy about that track is already there on the first watch, and there's little to come back for. I feel that way towards many tracks.
Of course, I do appreciate tracks that are stylistically or thematically definitive, and have a consistent story or visual palette or movement pattern that’s neatly laid out in front of you – there is a lot of value in conveying a clear message that way. But emotionally, I’ve found that for myself, that kind of trackmaking can never take me to the spirit place, to the water’s edge, to the wild animal that waits in the half-shadow of a forest entrance. Being artistically transported to that place is what reminds us intimately that we are land and water, that you and I are an ecosystem, and that we can just talk and hang out and learn to be afraid together if we want to, and that feels like an important principle for us to live by. sighs makes us excited to be the world – its fun energy gets me crazy hyped about breathing in and out, glancing at a distant mountain for a second, and occasionally drawing a little goober in the corner of my notebook page.
im so tired - tilez
Review by September:
tilez, one of the duo who made awesome, beautiful a few months back, has returned with her first solo release—this time, with her take on the song “I’m So Tired” by Fugazi. If that sounds familiar to you, that might be because this isn’t the first time that this particular song has been synced to a Line Rider track — namely, Anton’s 2022 release of the same name.
According to the description of tilez’s track, this similarity in song selection was entirely coincidental, even if this coincidence invites comparison. While Anton’s release is a (rather direct) exploration about his own feelings regarding as a long-time community member who has watched the scene change over the years, Tilez’s take on the song comes from almost the exact opposite space—being new to this community and artform, and using the song “to experiment around with track structure and certain set pieces.” For Tilez, the tiredness of im so tired is external to the Line Rider community, and instead comes from external (and thereby more universal) feelings of loneliness and creative burnout.
It’s a difference that changes a lot about the tone of the final product, and while Anton’s work is definitely more thematically and narratively cohesive (and for that it deserves artistic consideration and respect), it’s distinctly enjoyable to watch someone at the start of their Line Rider journey explore what they can do artistically. tilez’s takes on movement and scenery are particularly compelling, containing that hint of Geometry-Dash influence that often helps newcomers from that game build tracks that feel synced with the music on a deeper, more thematic level. tilez has Bosh fall into the sea, mournfully sled by other riders distant in the scenery, and—upon dismounting—literally depicts the line “sheep are counting me” as she leaps over a fence within a sleepy sheep’s thought-bubble.
The biggest set-piece of the track, however, and the emotional climax of track, comes during an instrumental section, where Bosh sleds slowly on a straight line past a sunset environment where scraggly trees cast ominous shadows behind them. The music-syncing intuition in this part, where tilez chooses not to sync any of this instrumental section in with Bosh’s movement or any direct form of visualization but instead manages to create that tonal sense of visual synaesthesia with a simple and static environmental scene, is deeply impressive. It’s pretty easy and intuitive to sync Line Rider tracks by letting Bosh bounce off a line in accordance to every note. The problem is that that often fails to actually capture what the music is doing—things like the speed, timbre, and emotional tone of the music must also be considered. Just look at, for example, early CrazyGameMaster tracks as a case study in the issues of forcing the rider to hit a line on every single note—the nuances of the song get lost in the insistence on making the rider touch a line in accordance to every note. What is much harder is syncing a Line Rider track by not syncing it. A great object lesson in this concept is on display in Bevibel’s Nocturne, where a repeated refrain is depicted simply in the form of a sequence of sweeping curves—in doing so, Bevibel forgoes depicting the micro-nuances of each individual note and instead chooses to emphasize the more important structural elements of the song—namely, the way in which this musical phrase is repeated with variations which deepen the emotional character of the song.
You can find this sort of thing all over some of the best music-syncing out there, and the fact that tilez manages to strike at that sort of technique in what is their second-ever release is impressive and a testament to their personal intuition for what makes a Line Rider track great. It’s awesome stuff! I’d keep an eye on tilez’s Line Rider work in the future, and I’m excited to see how next they explore Line Rider’s artistic vocabulary.
in knots., (Da Da Da Da), Interlude, and Not in That way! - moss7
Review by September:
moss7—also known as Moon—has been on a bit of a Line Rider tear recently, having released nine tracks in the month of September alone. Now, to be fair, some of this stuff had been privately released to the Line Rider Discord in the month of August, but it was only in September when Moon decided to create moss7—his alt channel specifically dedicated to releasing Line Rider tracks—that many of these have been available publicly. The creation of the moss7 channel also seemed to jumpstart his creativity, as well, and he’s been on a multi-week creative binge at this point that has seen him releasing a deluge of Line Rider tracks that have ranged the gamut from boring to conceptually compelling to actually interesting. moss7 is putting out so many of these quick, bite-sized Line Rider tracks that I thought it might be appropriate to compile a series of quick, bite-sized reviews of his tracks into a larger, more cohesive picture of moss7’s current Line Rider output. Is this kind of replacing the lightning round for this month? I’m not at liberty to say.
Not in That way! is probably the least successful for me in this batch that I’ve chosen to review, and through it we can get an initial look at both Moss’s strengths and weaknesses. For one—the music choice in these Line Rider tracks is often excellent, and offer moss7 a lot of opportunities to explore interesting and dynamic soundscapes through Line Rider, giving him a great foundation to work from. However, in rather lengthy track we see what I would consider to to be the foremost weakness of many moss7 tracks: there’s just a lot of aimless noodling around with the quirk in a way that undermines the music and the expressiveness of the rider. Honestly, a lot of this quirky noodling around in Moon tracks feels like an unironic version of the “alt-quirk” section in Autumn’s …is this it?—something which was intended, in fact, to be a parodic depiction of this kind of aimless, flow-killy quirk.
“Flowiness” is definitely an abstract concept in Line Rider and definitely isn’t an end-all be-all aesthetic ideal, but the concept of the “flow killer” helps maybe point at a concept that’s useful for conceptualizing what can make a Line Rider track immersive—namely, that the the sort of dense noodling-around we see in Not in That way! and other moss7 tracks means we are kind of stuck a standstill for long periods of time, stuck in a standstill where neither the rider’s movement nor the thematic ideas of the track can really develop or progress. Because very little of Bosh’s momentum is allowed to carry over from one moment to the next, the track consequently becomes detached from the momentum of the music it ostensibly syncs to; perhaps this is what it might mean for us to understand that old Line Rider proverb that commands us to “sync to the flow” in our present-day community context. Indeed, it is the sections of the track where moss7 lets the rider breathe a bit that we find a greater degree of resonance between the movement and the music. I also appreciated that moss7 wrote out the lyrics of the song, but the way it was done at around 2:30 into the track reminded me a bit too much of Goose’s utterly madcap wat did yuo sae for me to take it seriously.
Meanwhile, in knots. is significantly more effective. Using short flings to build up momentum in a way that that feels dynamically linked with the energy with which Dios Trio slam down guitar riffs works quite well, and the minimalist, abstract scene-ing of the flatsled platforms along with some curvy and spikey visualizer lines is tasteful and fun. Too bad the track is still stuck with the occasional noodling section which manages to break up the pace to the tracks’ detriment—and I wish moss7 had gone out of his way to make scenery which spatially grounded both the flatsled and quirk sections.
(Da Da Da Da) is one of those August releases I mentioned earlier, and thus was made much earlier than either in knots. or Not in That way!, and instead focuses more directly on decorated platforms and sweeping movement over dense quirk sections, and I’m very thankful for that. As a result, the sweeping curves where Bosh bounces back and forth between either side of various lines manage to much more elegantly capture the exploratory energy of the song’s math rock riffs. Even the addition and writing out of the lyrics at the end feels like a wonderful coda to close out the video. It’s a short track, but sweet, and shows a lot of moss7's artistic strengths.
However, my absolute favorite of this month’s batch of tracks has to be Interlude, which is another entry in a rare genre of track where the camera focuses on only a sled, the rider entirely absent. I personally think this is a criminally underexplored genre of track, and there’s so many narrative and emotional beats you could explore with a sled isolated on all their lonesome that nobody has yet managed to capture. At a short 29 seconds, this track doesn’t manage to do anything all that narratively wild with its concept, of course—but the dismounted rider at the start combined with the intense tonal landscape of the music evokes a feeling almost like the sled is running away from the rider, escaping their controller to go out and frolic and experience the world on their own. moss7 also takes advantage of the fact that he doesn’t need to worry about the rider dismounting, and propels the sled at a relatively high speed while weaving them in and out of quirk-y flips and granual integrations. For me, this is moss7 at their best: exploring kickass and tonally evocative music and experimental with the tools given to him, and as a result producing works which, although often unpolished, feel aesthetically unique and satisfying. A lot of the things we see in this track feel like the seeds of the excellent and aesthetically evocative stuff that came out from them in the month of October, and I think best represents my hopes for moss7’s Line Rider work going forward.
I’m A Princess - Alt-Key Here
Review by September:
There are a few musical artists who I would say, at this point, have fallen into the territory of making “Line Rider music”—which is less about any particular quality of the music than it is about what musical artists Line Rider creators tend to gravitate towards—though there certainly are particular musical qualities that can make one song easier to sync in Line Rider than another. What music would I place within this category I just made up? There’s obvious things like classical music and the like, but also a couple of other musicians, like Sufjan Stevens, who have had a number of tracks made by several different trackmakers. Bill Wurtz, memetic music-video-crafter extraordinaire, also falls into this category, featuring releases like XaviLR’s outside, Branches’ Fly Around, MoonXplorer & company’s Mount St. Helens Is About To Blow Up, and finally, the subject of this review, I’m A Princess by Alt-Key Here.
Now, I’m going to be honest here and stay that I don’t really “get” why Bill Wurtz is such a popular musician for Line Rider tracks? His music, is, of course, well-designed for a video format—because, in fact, most of it was made with end intention of being a video, music synced and intricately designed according to Bill Wurtz’s unique aesthetic sensibilities. And therein the problem lies: why make a Line Rider music video for something that already has an aesthetically compelling and complete music video which was designed to be watched in combination with the music? This is obviously one of my personal biases, here, but I tend not to create tracks to songs that already have a great music visualization—like Bill Wurtz’s work, many of Jack Stauber’s songs, or some of Frums’ most famous songs—because they already have a profounding beautiful and thoughtfully designed music video visualization. You can’t beat Bill Wurtz at his own game, here, so why not focus on music that doesn’t have a good visualization for it at all?
Of course, the answer to that question is that each Bill Wurtz track must answer that question in its own way, and the artistic potential comes from how you are able to intervene into the song with that answer. Fly Around answers this question by making the track about Jade being on the cusp of graduating high school and going to college. outside answers this question by doing a bunch of flashy and crazy-cool technical stuff nobody had really seen done before in Line Rider. Mount St. Helens answers this question by being a fun collab that was intended more for the enjoyment of the creators than of the audience.
How does I’m A Princess answer this question? Well, it doesn’t, really, which is probably its biggest problem. In I’m A Princess, Alt-Key demonstrates really excellent skill with the technical elements of Line Rider—like movement, camera control, and layer automation. A huge chunk of the track contains sophisticated multirider movement in combination with dynamic camera movement, and several layer automated sections manage to really pop—such as the “Open the door / Close the door” section which features a door in a house literally opening and closing alongside changing written-out lyrics. There are a lot of really great movement syncing ideas in this track, too—what I’m A Princess is able to do with 10-point-cannon temp stalls, for example, manages to nail the feeling of the music in ways that are quite impressive. But unlike something like Fly Around, for example, I’m A Princess feels like a mere imitation of Bill Wurtz’s style rather than an interpretive intervention into this particular Bill Wurtz song. There are plenty of Bill-Wurtz style gags and visuals—such as writing out the words “(funky groove)” during a part with a funky groove, or the extremely saturated neon color palette—but they’re simply not going to out-Bill-Wurtz Bill Wurtz, especially considering the fact that Alt-Key’s scening and visual composition still leave a lot to be desired (a minimalistic scribble shape above a road simply labeled “mountans” [sic] comes to mind).
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed watching the the track, but I’m not really left understanding why Alt-Key was so moved to create omething to this song, and it leaves me a tad emotionally cold. Although there are moments that definitely show Alt-Key has at least a grasp of some emotional ideas which surround the song—like the interaction between to riders paying off the near the end when Wurtz sings about dreaming of his “friends in need” and some of the fun implied LGBTQ vibes with the color palette choices—none of these ideas come to a head as a complete and thoughtful interpretation of the music. There are even some jokes that seem to undermine the things that Wurtz is singing about, such as writing “right here lol” about a temp stall when Bill Wurtz sings “what an interesting song / tell me where I belong.” And I know Bill Wurtz is like the funny ha ha meme music that pretentious people like me tend to overanalyze to death, but these songs do have meaning if only on the level of raw emotions and collage of poetic word-associations, and ones that are often quite emotionally touching even if they are quite funny at the same time.
To be sure, Alt-Key is a very talented Line Rider creator who is playing a bunch with what Line Rider can do in ways that are routinely enjoyable… if also confounding at the mix of their effective and ineffective elements. My impression is that Alt-Key Here continues to be that they are a promising trackmaker who simply needs to discover their artistic voice and deepen the elements of their visual and thematic voice. And that’s the sort of thing that mostly comes with time, practice, and sincere reflection on one’s own art and the art of others. If Alt-Key keeps up with Line Rider, I think that kind of improvement is very, very possible.
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