September 2021 Line Rider Roundup

Featuring guest reviewers Ethan Li, pocke, OTDE, Ava Hofmann, and Hanuman

Welcome back! There was a whole lot of meaty material to chew on this month, so this is another long read. At this point perhaps I should accept this as our new paradigm, heh. Time to rebrand as Line Rider Longreads™! But seriously, I’ve continued to have a blast writing these every month, and I hope you’ve continued to enjoy reading them!

We have a record cast of guest reviewers this time - some new and some old. First, I’ll introduce pocke, who you might remember from his review of Ribs for the Top 10 Line Rider Tracks of 2020 video, or from numerous tracks reviewed in these monthly roundups, most notably New Machines from back in February. After getting into Line Rider via the Geometry Dash community in the summer of 2020, pocke has been regularly putting out Line Rider work that is often dazzling, chaotic, experimental, and generally a lot of fun. He’ll be reviewing Prospekt's March/Poppyfields by gavinroo538.

Also joining us is Ethan Li, who you may remember as the creator of A Fleeting Life and A Shiver Sequence, which were covered in previous monthly roundups. They would like to introduce themself:

Hi! I'm Ethan, and this year I was introduced to the power of Line Rider for artistic expression via Line Rider Review. After my experience in art and English classes as a kid, I had never thought I'd be able to make art or tell stories which would look and feel the way they did in my head, or to resonate with "Art" (beyond music or popular media) at an emotional level. Happily, art done with Line Rider has proven me wrong on both counts. I hope to contribute to the very exciting body of creative experimentation and emotional exploration through Line Rider, through both creation and appreciation.

Ethan Li will be reviewing the large-scale collaboration Work as well as flanuals are Kan extensions/Hodge Theater by gaoyubao. OTDE and Ava Hofmann are also rejoining us to review flanuals are Kan extensions/Hodge Theater, which it seems was the talk of the town this month. Finally, Hanuman has joined us once again this month to also review Work.

Click here for a playlist of all videos in this roundup (in order). Titles also link to videos individually.

🙌 = highly recommended
👍 = recommended
🤷 = neutral
👎 = not recommended

flanuals are Kan extensions/Hodge Theater (unfinished) - gaoyubao

Guest review by Ethan Li:

flanuals are Kan extensions/Hodge Theater is a two-part video, structured as a quirk track set to a song, followed by a journey story set to another song.

When I watch a Line Rider video, I want it to make me feel something. But with quirk-focused tracks like flanuals are Kan extensions, I usually can't find an emotional anchor for why Bosh is being contorted and thrown around by weird interactions with bizarre structures, and I - an untrained viewer - don't know how to make meaning or imagine a narrative from it. Usually I don't have the motivation to keep watching past one or two minutes, once it becomes clear that the video is not giving me enough to engage with it and appreciate it. It's okay if I don't know how to be in dialogue with some creative work: as long as someone else resonates with it and can describe why, that's a success. I haven't figured out how to emotionally connect with flanuals are Kan extensions, so I don't have anything specific to say about it except that it was short enough that I didn't skip through it.

By contrast, Hodge Theater is much more accessible in presenting creative content and structure for us to appreciate and (re)interpret: moments of lingering on unfamiliar landscapes, crumbling forms, and ambiguous geological features (including volcanoes with eyes??); a strange juxtaposition of flat, oblique, and isometric projections for buildings; interesting textures and shapes; a figure (perhaps the "Annie" of the accompanying song?) descending into and wandering through a city; a dynamic elevator in a seemingly static city; and the dramatic reveal of a monumental cathedral-ish building, the titular Hodge Theater, complete with flying buttresses, gargoyles, and a Gothic-ish rose window. This building has somehow escaped the erosion and decay visible around it despite having totally weird, structurally unsound stonemasonry involving vertically aligned bricks, or else a nonstructural facade. These visual elements work together effectively to build up an unsettling feeling, a sense that something isn't quite right in this world, heightened by the spacey tone of the accompanying song, "·— —· —· ·· ·" (which is the Morse code sequence for "Annie") from Andrew Huang's album "Cosmos". Hodge Theater then escalates its foreboding atmosphere through a frantic escape sequence in which Bosh's sled phases through the ground and Bosh vibrates as if becoming ghostly, and in which Bosh occasionally tumbles as if on the verge of losing control. Other reviewers in this roundup discuss how we might understand this video's reference to the mathematical ideas of Kan extensions and Hodge theaters, the visual representation of a "Hodge theater" as a building, and the video's two-part structure.

If you're like me and don't understand quirk, I still recommend checking out Hodge Theater - maybe even in isolation from flanuals are Kan extensions. It works fine as its own track and can inspire multiple interesting interpretations; of course, derivation of a personally meaningful one is left to the reader.

Guest review by OTDE:

flanuals are Kan Extensions/Hodge Theater is not a very approachable Line Rider track. It’s extremely cryptic, dense with symbolism, and, in more ways than one, a reviewer’s nightmare. Where do we start? How about the title? Seems as good as anywhere else. For the unfamiliar, it’s brimming with context:

• A “flanual” is a Line Rider trick that combines a chain of gravity wells (a “fling”) and some kind of sledding (typically a “manual”, but often flatsled). Given these two constraints, there are a shocking number of different ways to make something that someone, somewhere, might consider to be a “flanual”.

• A “Kan Extension” is a term used in a field of mathematics called “category theory”. Its precise definition is so abstract that a mathematician titled a section of their category theory paper “All Concepts are Kan Extensions.”

• To solve the abc conjecture, mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki wrote roughly 500 pages of mathematical proof. In it, he established a new set of principles, dubbed “Inter-universal Teichmüller theory”, and, among other things, an abstraction he refers to as a “Hodge theater”. The paper was published in 2012, and since then, despite their best efforts, few mathematicians aside from Mochizuki have more than a partial understanding of the paper’s chains of logic. It is a frustratingly unreadable proof for even the most seasoned expert.

From there, let’s look at the track itself:

• flanuals are Kan Extensions is about a minute of playful, weird, messy explorations of different configurations of flanuals. Flanuals are reused in multiple directions, in multiple dimensions, with multiple contact point configurations. As a show of control over Bosh and the physics engine of Line Rider, there’s few things like it.

• Hodge Theater, on the other hand, is a slow, grim, ominous march, with strange, warped architecture giving way to a massive superstructure -- a literalized representation of the Hodge Theater, an abstraction made into something tangible and looming.

All together now.

• The endless configurations of flanual gaoyubao showcases in the first half expose how useless “flanual” as a term can be. Like the Kan Extension, it is an abstraction that “subsumes all other fundamental concepts.” Everything, in the right context, can be a flanual. It’s as much an idea or an aesthetic as it is a trick.

• The Hodge Theater, mysterious and huge, evokes the same feeling you get when you’re doing proof-based mathematics. Your tools are so abstract, built on ideas built on ideas, that it feels like you’re standing at the top of a tower, abstracted so far away from the earth that it’s impossible to see where the tower ends and the ground begins. Mathematics never ends, can always be made more abstract, can always be generalized further and further away from that first moment, when I learned to count with my fingers, and then suddenly the world looked measurable in a way it didn’t before. I had ten fingers and ten toes, and they were different things, but they were both ten. Math keeps doing that at every level, generalizing in new and surprising ways.

This track probably won’t resonate with everyone, and that’s fine, but for me, it serves as a reminder of the way you can dig into the deepest parts of anything that can be studied, only to discover you’ve hardly made a dent.

Guest review by Ava Hofmann:

Gaoyubao’s latest unwieldly-titled track, flanuals are Kan extensions / Hodge Theater is one of the most literary-feeling tracks I have seen during my short time making art in line rider, and that’s for a crucial reason which the aforementioned title hints at: structure. While I suspect other reviews are going to articulate the thematic dimensions of this track in a myriad of important and complex ways regarding flanuals are Kan extensions / Hodge Theater’s connections to the field of mathematics, the nature of obscurity and unknowability, and maybe also some stuff about the quirk bits, this review is going to talk a little bit about flanuals are Kan extensions / Hodge Theater’s structural innovations how thinking about structure can shed light on the ways in which line rider as an artistic medium can be pushed forward.

An apparent structural feature of flanuals are Kan extensions / Hodge Theater is its dual nature: the track has two titles, and is divided into two sections—a fast, unscened quirk section and a second, slow section featuring scenery and narrative elements. Tracks divided in two are not uncommon in line rider: the addition of a color replay appended to the end of the track comes in mind. But this is part of a very nascent trend I’ve encountered (the only extant examples I can think of are OTDE's where a garden once grew, as well as their Shortcuts, which explicitly calls itself a triptych) that uses a contrasting division in structure and style in an artistic way: this track, essentially, operates as a kind of diptych, setting the quirk against the scenery in ways which encourage and incentivize reading them in juxtaposition with each other. In this way gaoyubao assigns meaning to the quirk elements while keeping them isolated and unadorned in the classic quirk stylistic idiom.

Why does this feel literary to me? As someone whose main artistic medium is poetry, I am deeply familiar with the power of juxtaposition, of setting meaningful abstractions against each other in order to create resonances and connections where they were not perceived before. Structural techniques of juxtaposition, of the diptych and the metaphor, are tools that I find to be underused in artistic deployments of Line Rider, especially when they can offer such powerful vehicles for emotion and meaning.

Try putting two tracks together. Try putting three. Make diptychs and triptychs and even further. Make art speak to itself. That’s the fucking stuff of art. It’ll allow you to make track so full of meaning and ideas that it gets overreviewed and overanalyzed like flanuals are Kan extensions / Hodge Theater.

Score: “Unfinished” work and the refusal of closure is an opportunity to invite your audience into the meaning of the track out of ten.

As you can probably tell from these three excellent guest reviews that contain little overlapping material, flanuals are Kan extensions/Hodge Theater (billed as “unfinished” - apparently due to lack of scenery detail near the end - despite feeling solidly complete as-is) is a track that is incredibly dense with meaning, while remaining accessible and appreciable by a wide variety of audiences in different ways. I personally spent the better part of a day journeying down a rabbit hole into the layers upon layers of meaning in gaoyubao’s newest work until I found myself straight-up writing poetic fan-fiction. It seems no two people are likely to get the same thing out of this piece, so I will simply speak about my own interpretation of what the piece is “about”.

flanuals are Kan extensions is a fun, clever, esoteric joke about the abyss that is any attempt to define certain tricks or techniques in Line Rider, in this case a flanual. The better you understand how the Line Rider physics engine works, the harder it is to define what exactly even a basic trick like a gravity well actually is - there’s even a running joke in the community that “everything is a manual”. Needless to say, the understanding of the Line Rider physics engine needed so that you can actually see what gaoyubao is doing in this first half - and thus (provided you know what a Kan extension is) get the joke - is immense. Hodge Theater is then, to me, a representation of what it might feel like to journey down the rabbit hole of Line Rider quirk terminology to eventually find the maddening truth that there’s not actually a meaningful distinction between anything and anything else, that it’s all just vibes. To me, flanuals are Kan extensions/Hodge Theater is a meta-inscrutable piece, which is to say it is a piece about the nature of esotericism. One on level, it’s about the inscrutability of Line Rider itself, and on another level, it’s about the feeling you get when you fall down a rabbit hole looking for answers and find way more than you bargained for down in the depths. You may be a visitor searching for answers, but some people live down here, and you can no better understand what they are talking about than a gerbil might understand calculus. It’s a very particular kind of psychological distress that Hodge Theater captures really effectively.

Given the subject matter, flanuals are Kan extensions/Hodge Theater could have easily been a bizarre cryptic piece that failed to be intriguing whatsoever, but gaoyubao does a stellar job of signposting the layers of meaning that are present. First off, naming the track after two niche concepts in higher-mathematics indicates to the viewer right off the bat that there’s more going on here than meets the eye. Next, after the flanual section there’s a brief section of remarkable temp-stalls precisely synced to a series of beeps - this clues in some viewers that gaoyubao isn’t just messing around here - a signal that he knows what he’s doing and is doing it with intention. Next, the descent into and subsequent exploration of the underground Hodge Theater space is (thanks in part to the stellar camerawork) agonizingly slow and palpably claustrophobic, which, paired with the ominous music, does an excellent job of contributing to a foreboding atmosphere. Then, there are the evocative minimalist drawings of a figure throughout the space who I have decided to call “Annie” (after the repeated line in the lyrics “Annie are you out there?”) who we see looking up towards the Hodge Theater before we see the structure itself, and later sitting facing away from it in a pose that feels almost like she is grieving. Finally, after witnessing the Hodge Theater in all of its incomprehensible glory, we witness Bosh deciding it’s time to get the fuck outta here, rocketing up a tunnel back towards the surface in an extended coda sequence. Exactly how is Bosh escaping? With flanuals. Naturally.

In the end, flanuals are Kan extensions/Hodge Theater is a track with so many layers that, much like the Hodge Theater itself (and much like the mathematical theory it’s named after!) it’s easy to get hopelessly lost in them. Is everyone going to explore every layer of meaning? No. Will some people explore so deep that they find layers of meaning that gaoyubao himself didn’t intend? Yes (me, that was me). Will gaoyubao feel a need to point out some details that everyone missed so they can appreciate what he did? Yes (this happened). Will some people not bother with all the layers and instead just watch it and catch a vibe? Yes (see Ethan’s excellent review). Will just about anyone get something out of this piece on some level? Absolutely.
🙌

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger - pocke

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger is a great example of a concept that could have easily felt gimmicky, but pocke took it seriously and turned it into something that is genuinely a lot of fun. Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger sees Daft Punk’s chopped-and-spliced disco-house anthem of the same name visualized in Line Rider with appropriately chopped-and-spliced scenery chunks that Bosh bumps into in accordance with the music - primarily a copy-pasted cymbal drawing and boxes around the words from the lyrics. In the music, pieces of the lyrics are introduced separately from each other (e.g. “work it / make it / do it / makes us”, and “harder / better / faster / stronger”) before then being combined (e.g. “work it harder / makes it better / do it faster / makes us stronger”) and visualizing each lyric chunk as a block that the rider collides with creates an extremely pleasing effect when it all finally comes together. Particularly brilliant is when pocke reuses the “hour” block for the play-on-words “hour work is never over”, and when everything drops out except the bare-bones four-on-the-floor and the chaotic movement flattens out. It doesn’t always feel polished - there are parts where it seems pocke is struggling with speed management, one part doesn’t have enough cymbals which bugs me, and I wish pocke had done something more creative with the last third of the song where the vocals get all glitchy. But despite feeling rushed at times, Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger is well worth checking out.
👍

Prospekt's March/Poppyfields - gavinroo538

Guest review by pocke:

Prospekt’s March/Poppyfields, like gavinroo538’s last track ...is this it?, is undeniably cryptic. Take my words with a grain of salt, because it’s likely I’m misinterpreting a facet of the track. Disclaimers aside, the first minute of the track consists of literal depictions of the titular song’s lyrics, though gavinroo538 makes sure to emphasize how each lyric relates to people depicted as stick figures. I’d guess this first minute is a commentary on modern society. Though the first minute didn’t have much of an impact on me, it’s juxtaposed with the next two minutes, where the track takes a drastic turn - for the better, in my opinion. Both Bosh’s movements and the lines that branch off of the track begin slow, small, and constrained. As this section progresses, though, the camera zooms out, and Bosh’s movements become faster, which gives the branch lines more space to grow. They grow into beautiful curves and spirals that, as well as the clouds, give the track a natural feel, which blends well with the tone of the song. The branch lines make the track come to life, propping up objects, holding signs, and even interacting with the rider - all of which I thought were wonderful touches, even though I wish they weren’t as constricted to representing the lyrics as they are. It’s somewhat ironic that part of the track with literal depictions of human figures is not the “alive” part of the track - which I think is suggesting the desolation of modern society. I believe this is also suggested by how the branch lines grow as the track progresses, making the first minute the logical starting point of that progression. Though I’ll admit I don’t fully understand this track, I was still left charmed by it, and if anything, I think it’s worth a watch for the visual progression of the second two minutes.

Released on the twentieth anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the New York City World Trade Center and set to a 2008 Coldplay song vaguely about the absurdity of war, gavinroo538’s newest release definitely gives off an air that it has something to say. However, what it is that Prospekt's March/Poppyfields has to say is extremely difficult to parse, to the point where I’m not even sure gavinroo538 had a clear idea of what he was trying to get across. The scenery ranges widely in approach, from extremely literal representations of Chris Martin’s lyrics (e.g. a stick figure checking their watch on the lyric “I asked somebody what the time is”, a literal drawing of fish in a barrel to the line “don’t you wish that life could be as simple as fish swimming round in a barrel when you’ve got the gun”), to clear analogies to events the song is not explicitly about (e.g. stick figures looking up in shock at a skyscraper that extends off-screen to the lyric “smoke is rising from the houses”, stick figures reaching for dollar bills next to a display of declining stocks to the lyric “trying to take what they can get”), to abstract gestures towards the feeling the lyrics evoke (e.g. stick figures lying on the ground staring at the sky on the lyric “time doesn’t matter to them yet”, upside down clouds on the lyric “here I lie on my own little separate sky”), to, finally, straight-up writing out the lyrics (e.g. “Prospekt, how could I forget?”, “I don’t wanna die!"). Prospekt's March/Poppyfields suffers from some of the same issues that plagued gavinroo538’s 2019 release Innuendo, which couldn’t decide if it wanted to write out the lyrics and become a lyric video, ignore the lyrics completely and become a music visualizer, or interpret the lyrics through drawings in the scenery (often in an awkwardly literal fashion), and seemed to be constantly pivoting to whichever approach would seemed best for each individual lyric, leaving the piece feeling rather disjointed overall. Similarly, Prospekt's March/Poppyfields can’t decide how it wants to convey whatever message it has for the viewer, and seems to change its approach with each new line of the song. I’m left wondering, is this piece supposed to be a tribute to the lives lost in 9/11? Is it a general meditation on violence around the globe? Is it about something personal to Gavin that we’re not meant to understand? Or is it simply supposed to be a music video for a Coldplay song with some extra stuff added in for kicks? I have no idea, and at some point I have to change my tune from “I’m not sure what the intention is here,” to “The intention here is muddled and thus the piece is also muddled.”

All that said, there are things I really loved about Prospekt's March/Poppyfields. When the piano and strings come in, Bosh begins slowly sledding up a vine that extends up and up into the sky, dipping and bending in sync with the music, before we eventually see clouds when the lyrics mention sky and the vine shifts into long sweeping bowl-like curves. And while the crossfade to night mode on “I don’t wanna die!” reads as a bit heavy-handed to me, I loved the touch of the cloud scenery flipping upside down after this point, especially when Bosh eventually ends on top of an upside down cloud with poppies growing out of it like it’s an island in the sky. It’s a really evocative progression that captures the disorientation and despair that’s present in the song if you look past the literal meaning of the lyrics. In fact, nothing represents how I feel more about this track than the long, slow, poignant zoom out from this upside-down poppy-cloud-island over the “Poppyseeds” instrumental, that eventually reveals the title of the Coldplay album this song is from, “Viva la Vida” …written out as the hilariously literal mistranslation “Live the life”. (The translation “Long live life” would better capture what Coldplay was going for, but they are also a British pop-rock band naming their album after a painting by Frida Kahlo, a disabled Mexican communist feminist artist-activist who painted “Viva la Vida, Watermelons” eight days before her untimely death at the age of 47 and would perhaps not approve) I hope that in the future gavinroo538 moves away from clunky, literal representations of a song’s lyrics, and either goes full this-is-an-analogy, full this-is-a-lyric-video, full this-is-a music visualizer, or (to play to his strengths) focuses on abstract representations of the themes and emotions present a piece of music, instead of trying to kinda-sorta do all of the above at once. In the end Prospekt's March/Poppyfields certainly has its charm, and there are numerous bits and pieces of it that I really loved, but it’s got a few too many ideas going on that don’t quite gel together and the result is muddled.
🤷

The Escape - Roaxial

The Escape is a spiritual successor of sorts to Roaxial’s Mission Imboshable, but this time, instead of a heist, Bosh is breaking out of prison. The majority (and best part) of The Escape sees Bosh sneaking past security cameras in the complex, before eventually being discovered and leaping off the roof to make a run for it. Roaxial does an excellent job of tightly controlling Bosh’s movement to imply agency and the tensions inherent in stealth - the desire to move quickly rubbing up against the desire to remain undetected. Unfortunately, the escape itself isn’t nearly as exciting as the sneaking around, and while it’s a fun moment to have Bosh dodge a pursuer who crashes into a wall, it’s very strange that Bosh immediately arrives home and goes to sleep just a few meters away from that pursuer, which feels like an extremely abrupt ending. Other issues include the opening - Bosh seemingly walks right out of their prison cell at the start of the track with no explanation offered - and the ominous music, which fits perfectly for the sneaking around, but when the prison locks down after Bosh is discovered, and then after that when they leap off the roof to escape, and then after that during the chase scene, and then finally when Bosh arrives home - as the ominous-stealth music continues throughout all of this without any new sounds or music being introduced, it becomes decidedly unfitting. In fact, everything that happens after Bosh’s escape is discovered happens so quickly that the story beats are given no time to breathe, and the result is the last third of the piece feels extremely rushed. There are some really fun moments in The Escape, but, like Mission Imboshable before it, large swaths of the piece were poorly thought out, so the narrative doesn’t quite cohere into anything that leaves a lasting impression.
🤷

Méditation - Matthew Buckley

Matthew Buckley’s newest release, Méditation, is strikingly similar to his 2020 release Schindler’s List - both are delicate, subtle single-rider tracks synced to music featuring prominent solo violin, and the choreography in both does a good job capturing the tenderness present in the piece. Watching the two back-to-back, there is a sense that Méditation shows that Matthew’s control over Bosh’s movement has measurably improved, and as always there’s a subtlety to the rider’s movement in Matthew’s work that is quite remarkable. But I find it difficult to make a case for why you should watch Méditation - if you’re a big fan of Matthew’s work this certainly won’t disappoint you, but it didn’t leave much of an impression on me beyond “another well-executed Matthew Buckley piece”, which is hardly an insult, but it shows that his work has been shifting towards the formulaic. In the end, the word that comes to mind to describe the piece is “inoffensive” and perhaps that’s a bit damning in and of itself.
🤷

Line Rider Race - Tandem Survival - DoodleChaos

DoodleChaos’s channel is, at best, a wild and wacky emporium of ideas combining virtual physics and music sync that are incredibly satisfying to watch, and, at worst, an endless parade of one-note music-sync gimmicks with little depth. DoodleChaos is always trying something new, in a wide variety of styles and mediums, and everything falls somewhere on this spectrum. Sometimes they’re brilliant, like a music-synced POV virtual roller coaster, but sometimes they fall flat, like a virtual piano that’s also a fountain. DoodleChaos’s Line Rider works fall on this same spectrum. His 2020 release Les Toreadors was a fun way to introduce the remount mechanic, but it was pretty formulaic and shallow from an artistic or narrative perspective, and ultimately did something of a disservice to the storytelling potential of the mechanic. On the other hand, his most recent prior release Line Rider Race was an absolute slam-dunk, realizing the narrative potential of that same mechanic in a race between teams of sledders that is as gripping as it is hilarious. Unfortunately, Line Rider Race - Tandem Survival is much closer to the gimmicky end of that spectrum than it is to the genius end. The core idea (“What if we linked all the sleds together in a train?”) certainly has potential, but it’s mostly squandered here. The music-synced choreography is as solid as it always is in DoodleChaos’s releases, but in terms of narrative it falls far short of the brilliance of the original Line Rider Race. One issue is that this is billed as “survival”, but the riders are catapulted off the sled and back on constantly, instantly, cleanly, and always without warning or tension, which gives the “survival” aspect of what is going on very low stakes. Actually, the sled train starts entirely empty, with it not becoming “full” until halfway through the piece. Never do we see a rider struggling to stay on the sled and succeeding, or feel any tension about whether a rider will manage to stay on or not. The one excellent narrative beat in Tandem Survival comes when all but one rider have made it onto the sled train, and the last rider almost makes it but falls into a pit of spikes, which serves as a good reminder that when he’s on his A-game, DoodleChaos is still very good at this. But overall, the piece consists of impeccably choreographed riders falling from the sky and landing perfectly on the sled, and lines coming out of nowhere to smoothly yoink a rider off the sled, all in perfect time with the music. It’s still satisfying from a music-synced physics-sim perspective, but it gives the whole thing a very mechanical, choreographed, deterministic feel, where the riders don’t feel like they have any agency for the vast majority of the track’s runtime, erasing most of the potential for narrative that makes DoodleChaos at his best so fun. Overall, Line Rider Race - Tandem Survival still has DoodleChaos’s characteristic satisfying physics-sim music sync, but if you’re looking for more than that you’re likely going to be disappointed.
🤷

Work - Malizma, Nevs5138, Xavier Lundberg, TheMatsValk, QBalt, Instantflare, and Arglin Kampling

Guest review by Hanuman:

This track is a modern masterpiece. It’s fun, tightly choreographed, and great to watch, whether or not you understand what is happening. Many tracks in this genre are as eclectic as they are ambitious, often resulting in inscrutable works that don’t translate to the casual viewer particularly well. Whilst Work doesn’t exactly break the mould here, it does at least make the effort, using humour to bridge the gap that might otherwise alienate audiences. As for the track itself, it’s best described as a high-energy rollercoaster of absurdity. The majority of the track is in kramual states, though I like how they took advantage of the lyrics “pop it” to bring bosh into some slightly more natural forms for awhile too. The use of animation in this track was a great compliment to the track, punchy and precise. If there is a theme to this track, I would call it overload, as Work subjects you to a continual stream of high-end techniques, each building on the last. I would also comment on this as a slight weakness, often the techniques flash by so quickly that is hard to fully appreciate, or even recognise what you are seeing, so it is worth re-watching this track a couple of times. Overall though I think it is obvious that for the most part this track had great direction, with the quality and pacing never dipping despite several transitions into different styles over its 1.5 year production time.

Guest review by Ethan Li:

My training in engineering research has taught me techniques for investigating systems which I don't understand well, and an important technique is to mess around with (and even intentionally break) each relevant aspect of a system to see how its behavior changes in response. It's basically the "f*** around and find out" approach to technology. Since I don't understand quirk very well, let's apply this technique to analyze the composition of the quirk work Work, a collaboration between Malizma, Nevs5138, Xavier Lundberg, TheMatsValk, QBalt, Instantflare, and Arglin Kampling. This track is set to Teminite's EDM song of the same name, and the end credits explain that Work took a lot of work to create, involving on the order of 100k lines and 1.5 years of production. So an afternoon of screwing around to "rework" the track by mangling its structure in post-production should result in a significantly worse video, right?

My experiment was to chop up the video into ~7-second segments, each of which had the same bassline repeated twice. I then numbered each segment and labeled it with a description, e.g. "Build-up, part 4" or "The drop, part 3" or "Breakdown". Because I'm not an EDM-head, I might've confused "drop" vs. "build-up" towards the end: the song seems to develop so that the later build-up sections feel more like drop sections. Next, I used a video editor to shuffle the segments around in a way that roughly preserved the timing of interruptions in the music like "AAAAA", "LET THE BEAT GO", "POP IT", etc. My shuffling wasn't a random process, but instead I tried to change the type of segment, e.g. from "build-up" to "drop" or "breakdown", and vice versa, without paying attention to the visual content of the segment. Together, these changes should've made the visual progression conflict much more with the musical progression - you can see what it looks like here. Finally, I applied my creative license to make a few more swaps where my initial reordering had produced very noticeable inconsistencies between the visuals and the music. There were three segments I did not reshuffle: the title sequence at the start, the credits sequence at the end, and QBalt's "extended breakdown" section from 2:15 to 2:45. In total, it took no more than a few hours of work for me to rework Work:

As far as I can tell, this haphazard remix is not significantly better or worse than the original in terms of how structurally cohesive it feels, either internally or with the music. I think the first few segments of the video might even be a little better at matching the intensity of the song's introduction, but that was an explicit goal in my fine-tuning at the end of the shuffling process. If you see any other improvements in my rework, those are happy accidents. But the build-up and drop segments feel the same to me in terms of the jerkiness & unpredictability of Bosh's motion and the distances of Bosh's displacements between frames. A commenter on the original collaboration video, kylaxial, observed that "all these crazy movements are cool, but it's also a bit too fast and unpredictable. even in the calm parts of the song, the rider was getting flung at thousands of units per second every millisecond". I think my remixing experiment subjectively supports this claim about the lack of contrast in movements throughout the song.

One segment stands out as the exception that proves the rule: QBalt's funky "extended breakdown" section, which looked and felt very different from the rest of the track. The laid-back visual style felt appropriate structurally to the role of an extended breakdown for an EDM song, and stylistically to the section's use of slap bass. For these reasons, it felt like the visuals matched and enhanced the song in that section. I wish the rest of the video expressed the same level of appreciation for the song's composition.

From this experiment, I want to offer two constructive suggestions for tracks driven by or synchronized to music:

1. When synchronizing a track to a song, look not only at the sub-second micro-synchronizations but also at how the track might converse with the overall structure of the song. For example, the EDM genre is really effective at making an emotional impact on its audience because of its use of buildup-drop-breakdown structure to build and release tension, as SNL parodied to hilarious effect; you can follow this or even subvert it after setting up expectations. As another example, pop songs have optimized their use of verse-chorus form to be memorable, and it's worth thinking about how a track set to a pop song might take advantage of the song's repetitions and variations to say something interesting. The common theme in these genres is an awareness of the effects of contrast and similarity; making a video which demonstrates awareness and thought about a song's use of these principles is, in my opinion, a much more compelling way than micro-synchronization to respect and appreciate the work done by the musician (though combining them can yield fantastic results, as exemplified by QBalt's extended breakdown section of Work).

2. Many songs and stories aimed at a popular/commercial audience work by guiding the listener/viewer through a journey. If you're also trying to reach people broadly, it's easier to make a memorable and impactful journey if there's contrast, variation, and build-up in emotional intensity; otherwise, you may need to be really careful with the structure and/or have compelling conceptual foundations to prevent it either from becoming dull and boring or from chasing away the viewer. And first impressions matter: in some cases you may want to offer a gentle introduction at the start, while at other times you might throw the viewer right into the action - but your decision should make sense in the context of the music you're working with and the ideas or feelings you're trying to share with the viewer.

Look, I don’t want to downplay the amount of… ahem… work …that was clearly put into Work over many months by many people. But I’m not going to beat around the bush here: Work is a poor representation of the gym-bro-meme-playlist EDM song it is synced to. The track is almost entirely constructed out of kramual cannons and other assorted kramual glitches, and from the moment the bass comes we instantly go from zero to 100, with flattened-Bosh relentlessly ping-ponging all over the screen. This is before the beat kicks in, this is before the drop, this is before the buildup to the drop, this is before we even start building up to anything - this is before we even know this song will have a drop, and we’re already all but maxed out in movement intensity. And for virtually the entire rest of the track, we stay right there at 100, which means that when the beat finally does drop, there’s nowhere to go, and we just keep doing pretty much the same thing. It really does feel like the creators intuitively realized this while working on Work, because after a while they start just… screwing around. This track contains a shift to night mode and back for reasons unclear to me, a giant pinwheel shape that Bosh ping-pongs from the edges of to the center and back at nauseating speed, and an enormous “OWO” made of singularities, seemingly for no reason other than the lols. The places where the creativity of the track makers is most often allowed to shine past an endless barrage of incomprehensible kramuals are the fills that occur when the beat pauses momentarily, so I want to mention them. Sometimes they’re fun or at least cute, like a line of A’s zooming by set to a scream, or an animation of a car driving away set to an ignition sound. Other times they’re solid but bland, like animating the words of vocal samples, or hyper-zoomed-in 6th iteration distortions set to a dubstep grind sound.

But. There is one section that stands head and shoulders above the rest of the track. Presumably, in the cool-down section in the middle of the track, the team realized they should probably do what they didn’t do at the start of the track and actually take their foot off the gas pedal a little. Enter, QBalt’s manual part synced to a funky slap-bass solo. QBalt isn’t doing anything novel here, but for once Bosh is moving in a way that’s vaguely comprehensible as sledding, and the sync is absolutely stellar, capturing how this part feels to listen to instead of just technically lining up with the notes like the vast majority of Work. Maybe it’s just the contrast with the kramual monotony that surrounds this part on all sides, but to me, this part genuinely slaps. Which begs the question, if they’re capable of this, why is the rest of the track so boring?

When Line Rider videos like Work come out, I am often left wondering, who is the intended audience here? Surely it’s not the general public - if I can’t follow what’s happening surely they can’t either. Maybe there are people out there who just want to watch something that feels incomprehensible and be really impressed? If they are, as an artist I wouldn’t recommend catering to that crowd, because the logical endpoint of that is playing a game where you try to trick your audience into getting hyped up for everything you make and believing that you’re some kind of brain-genius, and that’s not a fun way to be in relation to other humans. But I think the more likely answer in this case is indicated by the fact that everyone visibly signed their part on the track itself, stamping their part so that those who worked on the track after them would know what they had made. Perhaps the creators of Work weren’t trying to create a piece of art. Perhaps they were playing Line Rider to impress each other. It seems to me this track was made by a group of friends, who were communicating their friendship to each other by showing off the glitches they could do in Line Rider. And honestly? Good for them. It seems like they had fun.
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Sultans Of Swing - The Red Penguin

The Red Penguin has just started releasing Line Rider videos this month, and with their very first release, Coming Back to Life, it was clear they have a knack for choreographing Bosh’s movement to match a piece of music, specially to guitar solos. In Sultans of Swing, you can see The Red Penguin experimenting with gravity wells, manuals, and even some light scenery decoration. It’s not very focused or refined, and it’s not doing anything terribly new or exciting, but it’s remarkably solid for an early effort, and the music sync is spot on. The Red Penguin isn’t doing anything that hasn’t been done better elsewhere - yet - but I’ll be keeping my eye on their channel in case that changes.
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Mazeppa - HumanoidXYZ

To its credit, Mazeppa is a huge step up from HumanoidXYZ’s previous releases. It’s still set to classical piano, but, there’s a lot more attention paid to structure and motifs (e.g. strings of gravity wells and v-shaped funnel sequences for arpeggios), there’s some new interesting ideas brought to the table (cave scenery, dual riders, musical notation scenery, and an offsled section), and there’s a lot more effort put into precision of movement and sync. There were moments that surprised and delighted me, such as a dramatic pencil-cave opening, double-lined track lines to represent staccato chords, and a mournful offsled section with a triumphant remount right at the end. And, mercifully, there’s a distinct lack of the distracting superficial effects that were all-too-present in Funeral March. However, holding the interest of a viewer for the duration of a track set to a virtuosic Liszt piano piece with another 8-minute-plus runtime remains a daunting task, and on the whole Mazeppa isn’t interesting enough or well-executed enough to pull it off. Some ideas are more confusing than intriguing (such as seemingly random scenery of grass and trees, a giant drawing of Liszt’s face that appears and disappears in moments, and inexplicable scenery of houses near the end), some ideas are bland and unoriginal (such as musical notation à la DoodleChaos and long sections of boring funnel-tumbles) and some ideas are solid but it’s clear that HumanoidXYZ lacks the skills or dedication to pull them off - most notably the dual rider choreography. At times, if you squint, you could almost imagine you’re watching a decent Matthew Buckley track, but far more commonly HumanoidXYZ is struggling to keep both riders on the screen at once and moving at the right speed, sometimes giving up altogether and opting to simply cut his losses and move on. Indeed, the moments that are the most disappointing to sit through are when it is obvious that a certain part wasn’t working or was getting frustrating to work on, and HumanoidXYZ opted to slap something basic together just to move the piece closer to completion. These bits belie a sense that perhaps, if you’ll permit me some speculation, HumanoidXYZ wasn’t particularly enjoying putting together Mazeppa, something that, if true, would explain why the piece, on the whole, reads as an ambitious undertaking that was often half-assed in execution. However, even if Mazeppa had had a flawless execution, I’m not entirely sure how much was here to get excited about in the first place.
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Axolotl - Moon

If nothing else, the scenery in Axolotl is consistent. Maybe a little too consistent? It consists almost entirely of half-thickness wavy lines swooping across the screen to the music, which is a decent idea that works well near the start when there are limited instrument voices, but gets a bit confusing when the same wavy line effect is used to sync to multiple different overlapping voices in the mix. Adding to this confusion is that the movement (and camera zooms) in the track on a macro, structural level are all over the place - with cannons juxtaposed with chill flatsled and slow tumbling juxtaposed with multilined curves, seemingly without a lot of rhyme or reason - leaving the viewer largely disoriented, even if it’s synced to the music in a technical sense. Axolotl certainly had potential, and with some more thought put into what sorts of movement might work best and maybe some more ideas in the decorations it could have been a fun watch, but as it stands it’s a bit of a mess.
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