April 2022 Line Rider Roundup
Hooo boy do we have a doozy of a roundup for you this month! The highlight is absolutely Ava Hofmann and S’s behemoth of a guest review for Jade’s 48-minute masterwork Mount Eerie (it’s a full-spoilers review of a piece I cannot possibly over-recommend, so I highly encourage you to watch it first if you haven’t seen it yet!), but there’s a whole lot more after that as well.
In addition to Ava and S, I’m also pleased to have Twig & Cabaret back for a guest review of Ava’s Know Thy Self, as well as HeirOfAvians as a new guest reviewer! Enjoy the roundup, and see you next month!
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
Mount Eerie - Branches
[cw: discussions of death, suicide, and transmisia]
Guest review by Ava Hofmann and S:
1. Rating
Branches’ Mount Eerie is my favorite Line Rider track.
2. Death
Death is desirable.
Many people like to deny this sentiment, either explicitly or implicitly. It’s understandable—intuitively, we might want to deny or reject the desirability of something harmful. And to acknowledge that there is an element of desire in death might be seen as condoning or encouraging suicide. To admit that death is desirable is to also confront your own feelings about living—do you actually love life? Do you actually like being alive? And all of these things can be difficult for people to confront.
But to pretend as if death is entirely undesirable is to also minimize and discount the real feelings actual people have. Because suicidal people do, in fact, very pointedly want to die—and many more people quietly and routinely wish for oblivion, or to simply not exist. When I have wanted to die, classic anti-suicide platitudes like, “you don’t really want to die” or “well, i don’t want you to die” or “this feeling isn’t permanent, but death is” have been deeply aggravating because they refuse to actually engage or acknowledge the real emotions that exist in my body or the reasons why I might want to no longer exist. On a deep level, to deny that anyone could really ever want to die, is also a rejection of human bodily autonomy—it forecloses the possibility of assisted suicide, stigmatizes those who are suicidal and prompts them not to tell others about the way they are feeling.
Jack Stauber’s “Dinner is Not Over” operates as an example of this reality; in it, Stauber uses “Dinner” as a metaphor for life, and “Dessert” as a metaphor for dying. Stauber acknowledges the desirability of death outright: “I tasted dying and it tasted good.” But then he goes on to turn us back towards life and its own capacity for desire and being— “but that’s dessert / you can have it / when the dinner is gone.” There is nothing wrong with desiring death. But I, at the very least, cannot pretend that I desire death and death alone – and survivors of suicide frequently regret their actions in the middle of their attempts. Our love and desire for death is actually one part of a bigger picture—the bigger “dinner”—of life. To want to die is, in a real sense, is to want at least one thing from life.
Mount Eerie is about loving life. It is also about dying, about loving dying, because that is part of the lives we love. The Microphones’ album Mount Eerie, which Branches’ track is set to, is a sequel to The Glow Pt. 2, which concludes with Phil Elverum (the front man of The Microphones) bleeding out, alone in the woods. Mount Eerie is a track which occurs after the end—but also back at the beginning. In the song “III. Universe”, Elverum sings, “How many times have I learned this before? / How many times have I made up this song before? / How many times have I died here before?” What follows in Branches’ track is a deeply important moment where Bosh sits still and looks up at the stars for an entire minute--absorbing the universe. Experiencing.
I am an atheist and ex-Christian. In Christian thought, death and life are positioned as total opposites, concepts and states of being that are in conflict. Mount Eerie, both as an album and as a track, contrasts with this dualistic philosophy regarding what it means to live. Jade draws stone and ash and destructive fire with as much love as she draws flowers, the rain, and vast beauty of space. And although there is pain, and suffering, and death within this spectrum of existence, it is still existence, and access to experience remains a strange little gift. At the moment of Bosh’s death at the summit of the titular Mount Eerie, dying is first framed as a “big black cloud”, a “bloating bully”, as a kind of thief of life. But this bombast is one of the most alive and fun moments in the track, electrified with scribbles, clouds drawn with threatening-cute and sad-cute faces, and the playfulness of high-speed offsled track-making in line rider. Death is kind of like transness, in that way—something that our culture has deemed scary and threatening, which is actually so full of life and playfulness and cuteness and joy.
It really is no coincidence, then that Death has become a symbol for transness. Both because trans people are often targets of violence and death—there’s a “Trans Day of Remembrance” for a reason, after all—but also because transition often functions as a “death” which allows us to access a love and desire for life. In a poem about transitioning, from “[…]”, my first book of poetry, I wrote,
out my mouth a monster for wanting for // […] for living, for murdering the man who
was me, her exhumed form leapt, flying // […] exhausted bird […] wrapped her dead
limbs around me, pushed me […] grave // […] the liminal […] peel the […] me […]
back […] buried ground […] i above him waving // goodbye, goodbye […] good […]
riddance i’m not afraid burn me at the stake // for loving dead rotting things for being
”in love with myself” auto-[…] // when what you really mean is i love myself, i love.⁹“for living, for murdering the man who / was me”; “i’m not afraid burn me at the stake / for loving dead rotting things, for being / in love with myself”; “what you really mean is i love myself, i love.”—these statements get at a less literal kind of desire for death: a love for a “death of self” or “ego death” or that which has been deemed “dead” by society. The transgender noise pop/industrial music duo Black Dresses also reflect this sentiment in their song “death / bad girl”:
death-obsessed
that girl's fucked in the head
[…]
she looks like death
fucked in the head
I WANT TO BE HER FRIEND
DEAD BITCHES RECOGNIZE
DEAD BITCHES RECOGNIZE EACH OTHERDeath can serve as a site of recognition for a certain kind of transfeminine experience. There can be friendship and desire and humanity contained within this kind of “death”. The “big black cloud” of Jade’s Mount Eerie dwells within this kind of transfeminine death, with its playful faces of trans anger and explosive references to my tracks BELLS and My Pal Foot Foot, which, like “death / bad girl” are artworks created by trans women. In the video description of Mount Eerie, Jade writes that her track is (emphasis added) a “personal representation of queer realization and how life-threatening but ultimately important it is to embrace who you are.” I cannot help but “recognize” these connections and references to my work, and to recognize Jade, from one dead bitch to another.
3. Decay
We continue to follow Bosh’s corpse past that moment of death, onto the desert side of the mountain. This moment in the album is described by Elverum as the “Wind and Vultures”; Bosh’s body decays, her flesh consumed by birds and the natural elements. But this decay is meditative, peaceful—and even funny during the section that Bosh’s sled bounces around on ruined metal pipes along with metallic clangs in the music. The decay of the body is not framed as if it is a horrible, monstrous thing; instead, it is tied into our physical connection with the natural world and our small, individual relationship with time.
When a living thing decays, its body returns back to the natural environment. Fungi, plants, and scavengers consume its flesh, transforming the corpse’s atoms into its own. Other atoms become part of the soil and water and air. These atoms then continue onward, in cycles of living and dying, in a continual transmutation of material forms.
In Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s 2015 book Stone: an Ecology of the Inhuman, the literary theorist and medievalist draws on ecofeminist and posthumanist thought in order to describe the ways in which rocks and stones are participants in natural and social environments, are in some sense “alive”. A key insight within posthuman and ecofeminist thought is that the objects in the environment around us are participatory and—either in a literal/panpsychist or socially constructed sense—are lively, active participants in human and cosmic relationality. This line of inquiry has been instrumental in fields as diverse as animal studies to civil engineering, and asks us to push beyond anthropocentric conceptualizations of the world towards viewing life as part of an interconnected, intersubjective relationship with the material world. Regarding Stone, Cohen writes, “Relations do not create things like rocks and mountains; things like rocks and mountains are what allows relations to flourish […] in the geological frame in which mountains exist, pinnacles rise and fall in fearsome undulations. […] Continents smash into each other then break to wander the sea.” If we step out of our limited human perspective, into the cosmic expanses of “deep time”, stone is no longer solid: it is fluid, flowing, and alive. Time has gone on without us before we were around, and will continue to do so after our deaths. At the end of the Wind and Vultures section, Bosh’s body is swept up in a rainstorm. She lies on a flat line, creating an illusion of rainy clouds slowly drifting by, but gradually the clouds fly by faster and faster, until they are blinking by at a speed that resembles timelapse footage. The clouds writhe in ways which communicate the immensity of time that will continue on after our short lives. And then—darkness. Even the clouds, the undulating mountains, are but a short moment in comparison to the immensity of cosmic time.
In one passage, Cohen writes, “Human identity has always depended upon and been sustained by dispersive networks of actors and objects […] human identity exceeds the boundaries of determinate bodies, is dispersed across a phenomenological world in which Homo sapiens is a powerful but in the end nonsovereign participant.” Throughout Mount Eerie, Jade’s trackmaking echoes these sentiments. The rocks and clouds have faces, they cry, they resemble suns and stars and plants and animals, they undulate in peaks and valleys with the music. The mountain is as much a character of Mount Eerie as Bosh is—interrogating Bosh (“WHAT DO YOU WANT?”) and adorned with hearts at its peak. Human identity is contained within our interactions with nature—and, indeed, much of Jade’s expansive identities are reflected all through this track in various forms.
But we are not the sovereigns of nature; we are only ever in minor collusions with or oppositions against it. At the start of Mount Eerie, Jade quotes a statement from Phil Elverum: “It just feels like… nature doesn’t necessarily want us in it.” The real natural world is beyond us—always more powerful, more expansive, and more incredible than all human endeavor. The creation myth of Genesis states God created humanity from dust—one of only a few good takes in a widely misinterpreted and misused text. During the atmospheric and complex percussion solo which takes up the entire first 10 minutes of the track and album, Bosh arrives from dust and rocks and water into the world; she is born from the stones of the mountain. But just as soon as the earth gives life, it will take it away: Bosh is killed by her climb to the summit of the mountain. Her body decays, eaten unceremoniously by birds. We return to dust and dirt.
It can be really hard to love and appreciate the world, to love life, in part because the world fundamentally does not give a shit about you. As a result, many Humans really, really, REALLY like to pretend to have control over their environment. We like to imagine futures and goals and narratives and identities for ourselves. We like to build gardens and governments and infrastructure and political systems to stave off and forget this inevitability. We do this even in our burial rituals; we preserve our bodies with chemicals and decay-resistant coffins in order to maintain the illusion of a stable body separate from the universe, to resist the truth that we are made of mutable matter which will return from where it came. In doing so, these preservation chemicals leech into our soil and cause environmental damage, and we prevent the material of our bodies to return and contribute to the vast ecology of our planet.
Bosh’s death in Mount Eerie very directly resembles the Tibetan funerary practice of “sky burial”, or Jhator, wherein the deceased’s corpse is placed on a mountaintop to decompose while exposed to scavengers and the elements. This practice is deeply tied to the Buddhist beliefs of the region—Jhator is viewed as an instruction or reminder of the impermanence of life. Jhator also is viewed as an act of compassion on the part of the deceased—their flesh is being used to provide food for other living beings.
Compassion and love for others even after we are gone, after time has eaten us up, feels like such an incredible statement on the human capacity to love existence, to love reality, even as it is cruel to us. In the 2020 track You Are the Sunset, which Branches names as the sequel to Mount Eerie, Elverum describes another such example of this capacity for love even after we return to dust:
A week after you died a package with your name on it came
And inside was a gift for our daughter you had ordered in secret
And collapsed there on the front steps I wailed
A backpack for when she goes to school a couple years from now
You were thinking ahead to a future you must have known
Deep down would not include you4. The Afterlife
Mount Eerie was released, perhaps coincidentally, on Good Friday, the Christian holiday commemorating the death and crucifixion of Jesus Christ. As an ex-Christian and “dead bitch”, the crucifixion was something that always fascinated me. This ultimate moment of dying and compassion, the selfless act of someone “who so loved the world”, who loved existence, that he gave his life for it.
In my experience, the rest of Christian theology and thought has never really lived up to this idea about death. For Christians, after death we go to a number of places separate from the earth: a “heaven” or “hell” our souls will go to for all that eternity in the afterlife. To a culture which buries its bodies full of toxic preservatives in order to preserve their appearance even when you can’t fucking see them because they’re buried in the fucking ground, this idea of a static heaven, an eternal paradise is certainly appealing. But it robs people of their capacity to love anything about life—even death. Christians are regularly commanded to be “apart from the world” in order to preserve their faith for heaven. In their moments of suffering, Christians are told to look towards God—and thus heaven—for the eventual alleviation of their pain. In several denominations suicide is explicitly banned as a sin that prevents one from going to heaven, in part to dissuade people from committing suicide specifically in order to go to there. The desire for death stops being a desire for oblivion, for one part of life among many, or for the transmutation of the body, but for a static “afterlife.” This is how people forget that desires for death or oblivion are possible—because we exist in a cultural cosmology that forecloses its possibility, that totally pretends that oblivion does not exist.
Mount Eerie and Good Friday, however, focus in only on that moment of death. The transformation—the transition—of the body from something human to something posthuman, something expansive. There is already queerness and beauty there. Leave the resurrection out of it.
Many before me have already discussed the homoerotic qualities of the Christian faith, and of the crucifixion in particular, but I want to echo this sentiment. Sufjan Stevens' “To Be Alone With You” traces the homoerotic dimensions of the Gospel, which can easily be read both as a religious devotional song to Jesus and as a gay love song. Sufjan sings that his addressee “gave up a wife and a family” and “went up on a tree” in order to “be alone with [the singer]”; he ends the song by singing “I’ve never known a man who loved me.”
The classic joke about Sufjan’s stevens is the question, “Is this song gay or just about God?” There are even a number of memes devoted to this topic:
The articulation of my queerness within a conservative Christian childhood often had to come about in these kinds of doubled, hidden ways. To say how I felt without others—or even myself—understanding what I meant. It also meant, that as I got older, I gained deep enjoyment in willful misinterpretation, in reading things “wrong”, in putting my own bizarre and playful stories into art and history—I mean, look at what I’m saying right now. Mount Eerie (the track) does this to Mount Eerie (the album) in order to read trans and queer narratives into the track. Did Elverum intend the death and dying in Mount Eerie to have a particular queer and homoerotic quality? Did Jade? Who actually fucking cares. The conclusions of these Mount Eeries are about the transformative power of death, our complicated desire for it, and inherently contain within it the human desires for identity and each other, the transformative power of transition and growing up.
After Bosh and the sky vanish into darkness, “V. UNIVERSE” begins. We have joined Bosh in a kind of “afterlife”—but not really, because this afterlife is still the universe. We have returned to those stars Bosh watched for so long on the mountainside, among them. Any atom heavier than Hydrogen or Helium was made from the explosions of dying stars—of supernovae. This includes the atoms in our bodies. The scientific community’s old platitude for this vertigo-inducing reality is that “we are made from star stuff.”
Bosh is star stuff. She drifts amongst these stars—white at first, but then joined by an array of blue, orange, and green ones. In this moment after death, there is a reckoning with one’s relationship to the universe, that we are from and of and will leave our consciousness to it:
Now that I have disappeared I have my sight
Beautiful Black, you are unveiled
Now you're mine
So let my voice bellow about you Silent Night
Let my voice echo out from caves and minesOh, you have a bright disguise: Mountains and Lights
But, Universe, I see your face in blackest night
And you see mine
Oh, Universe, I see your face looks just like mine!
We are open wide!Gradually, the stars arrange themselves into a representation of Bosh’s scarf—and then all of her. Her face looks just like the universe’s. I look into the mirror, after years of HRT, and recognize my face for the very first time. Dead bitches recognize each other.
From the star-stuff Bosh explodes an LGBTQ+ pride flag—well, a rainbow, really. In this moment, we are “open wide”—we are out to the world and the world is out in us. The camera begins to zoom out and we catch sight of a full, colorful universe. A life that has opened up, one that is full of possibilities.
Watching Mount Eerie made me feel old. Old like how Bosh is old in the forest under the earth. It made me feel old because in Mount Eerie Jade created a queer coming-of-age story. I have been out as trans for, oh my god, five years now. And I came out when I was already an adult—21. Mount Eerie is suffused with this ash-covered optimism and hope for the future that I can remember so clearly feeling when I was a teenager and when I first came out. Here is another thing that makes loving the world hard: we live in a world full of oppression and inequality and misery. It is hard to love a world full of transphobia, a world where I ended up begging in tears for my mom to use my name and pronouns. Loving the world does not mean that we should not try to make it better, to desire an end to bigotry and inequality, to show a socially grounded and systemic compassion for all living things. It is so strange to realize that, for a couple years there, that I forgot those hopeful feelings I felt in my heart—but it is not so strange if I remember how exhausted and frightened I have been during all that time. But I am sick of being tired and angry at everything. I want to feel those ways again! I want to stay with the emotions in my heart, to feel deeply and wildly like I have for so many years. I don’t want to look at my art, my life, and only see my outrage and quibbles and regrets. The outrage and quibbles and regrets are part of the truth, part of my desires, of course—but I also want to remain in awe that I have gotten to experience anything, to have that pain, to experience the strangeness of life even as a traumatized and mentally ill transgender freak living in a world that refuses to accommodate me. That I get to experience the camera zoom out at the end of Mount Eerie and see an entire universe full of planets and stars and trees and mountains and water and weird abstract scribbles and and and and and—
Even if it does not in Christianity, oblivion does exist in Mount Eerie. As the camera zooms out and out and out, we bear witness to the vastness of the universe around us – planets, stars, trees, a vast expanse that is both so full and so empty – Bosh disappears from our view. First, as a speck engulfed in the everything of everything. Then, as a speck which has left from our view entirely, with only the universe remaining. And oblivion will come for the universe, too—somehow, bizarrely, our universe has a beginning, and it will have an end, a heat death. There will be a period of time several orders of magnitude larger than the current age of the universe where only black holes will exist, each and every star having long been snuffed out. Eventually, even the black holes will dissipate into nothing. And then there will be a long, long all-nothingness. As a child, these things used to terrify me—when I was 10, one of my greatest fears was the threat of black holes. Another one of my fears was that one day, a little long while from now, the sun would swell up into a ball of fire and consume the earth. These things no longer scare me; they make me happy. They fill me with shivers and joy and humility. The same shivers and joy and humility I feel when the universe of Mount Eerie zooms out even further, as it drifts further and further away—and disappears entirely into the white nothingness of Line Rider’s blank canvas.
END
I’m gonna level with you - I have absolutely no fucking idea how to talk about Mount Eerie. For the first time since I started writing reviews in 2007, I feel like no review I could ever possible write could do this piece justice. If you’re reading these words, I implore you watch this track and read Ava’s words above, if you haven’t already. That said, here is my feeble attempt at praise:
In my opinion, Mount Eerie is the best Line Rider work ever made, hands down. As a film, it stands head and shoulders above anything I’ve ever seen even attempted in Line Rider to date, far beyond anything I could remotely conceive of in my wildest dreams. It might be my favorite work of art ever made.
Nobody but Jade could have ever made Mount Eerie. It pulls from an uncountable number of inspirations, but it’s somehow more uniquely and unapologetically a Branches release than any of her previous work. Inspired by everything, and yet utterly unlike like anything I’ve seen before in Line Rider.
As a queer person, I resonate deeply with the story beats of Mount Eerie - suffering through a bleak existence, sliding into a soft and beautiful daydream, struggling to climb the mountain to make that dream a reality, despairing that it’s too hard while still continuing to put one foot in front of the other (because what else is there to do?), suddenly and unexpectedly being swept into a horrific whirlwind of death and then slowly decaying into the earth, before finally discovering the truth: that you are one with the vast neverending expanse of the universe itself, that you are but one cell in the mega-organism that is Everything, and that The Neverending Expanse itself has an end, has a death, and that Death is Truth is Life is Everything is You, that these pitiful little attempts by everyone in this miserable little world at separation, at distinguishing between me and you and nature and civilization and the Universe are the walls that have been preventing us all from Understanding, preventing us from truly existing at all. Did that make any fucking sense? NO??? Fuck!!! I’m sorry!!! I’m trying!!! This is hard to put into words okay???
The most intense feeling I have with regard to Mount Eerie is awe. I’m in awe of the piece, of it’s creator, of the Universe, of my place in the Universe, and of the overwhelming understanding that I am the Universe and the Universe is me. It’s a marvel that a 45-minute full-color Line Rider track exists at all, let alone one about queerness as a metaphor for decolonizing one’s relationship with the Universe, let alone one that’s as subtle, as captivating, as profound - as Mount Eerie. It’s about the personification of nature and the naturification of humanity, and how it’s all the same thing in the end. It’s fear, it’s joy, it’s sadness, it’s despair, it’s anger, it’s peace, it’s power. It’s every emotion at once. It’s the meaninglessness meaningfulness of knowing, deep in your bones, that All is One and One is All. It’s every facet of existence at once. Mount Eerie is Everything. It’s The Great All-At-Once. It’s just really really really good guys please watch it it’s so good it’s cute and sweet and nice and it gives me all the big big feelings go BOOM WHOA WOW OH HOLY SHIT BAM ZOOP ZIP ZAP ZOP KABLOOEY I like it very much and I really hope you like it too and I want everyone in the Universe to see it even if they don’t understand it.
I have no clue how to end this review. I think all I have left to say is that I’m immensely honored for all the ways that things I’ve made or stuff I’ve done have had something to do with anything that made a work like this possible. MUCH LOVE TO THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE!!!
🙌
Know Thy Self - Ava Hofmann
[cw: transmisia, religious trauma, domestic/verbal abuse, body horror, hanging, dysphoria, dissociation]
Guest review by Twig & Cabaret:
Arguably Ava Hofmann’s most vulnerable Line Rider piece to date, Know Thy Self is difficult to start unpacking, because watching it feels less immediately like watching a coherent piece with symbolism, metaphors and morals meant for dissection (even though there are numerous present), and feels more like witnessing a horrific event like a car crash happening in front of your eyes and calling the wreckage of an aftermath “art”. It’s emotionally raw, coming out from a place of terrifying sincerity, and it’s often horrendous and disorienting for most people to look at - all the great qualities of trans people!!
In the description, Ava writes: “I will grow into something so repulsive to you that you will recoil from me. And in that moment of your weakness, I will make my escape.”
As a trans woman who is early into transition-hood, I often feel dysphoric about the validity of my gender. I spiral into vortexes of questioning if people actually believe I’m a woman or not. I’ve developed a tick where I repeatedly rip out the hairs from any traces of a stubble on my face. As I was about to tell people that I’m using a different name, I was terrified that no one would adapt. Especially the adults in my life: teachers, mentors, parents.
In BELLS, Ava introduced the idea of using jarring, abrasive drawings to visualize catharsis, but Know Thy Self specifically uses a messy, viscerally uncomfortable style to represent the tension of gender dysphoria and the internal terror of coming out to your extremely Christian parents. Scribbles are violently smothered across the screen and over Ava’s deadname, but they aren’t excitedly whizzing by like in BELLS; they agonizingly linger as Bosh sporadically twitches through the incoherent pathing of the track, emanating the feeling of being stuck mid-transition. Ava milks the use of tangent lines to connect disparate environments in intentionally confusing ways, like the so-called “male box” turning into a room with 3D perspective containing a table with a lamp hanging from its underside, which feels similar to the flow of an average day when our disassociation is most present.
Eventually, I bit the bullet. The week leading up to the release of our track Mount Eerie, every time someone said my deadname, I informed/corrected them. I felt like such a broken record player, but to my surprise, people genuinely did not mind. My peers caught along quickly, and some of the teachers really surprised me too, even standing up for us and correcting other people. I still couldn’t bring myself to tell our parents though. They’re the ones who named us in the first place, the ones we financially rely on, the ones who have known us as [deadname] for the longest.
In Know Thy Self, an older version of the character from My Pal Foot Foot (Know Thy Self’s prequel, exploring how abuse is passed down through generations) has haphazardly grown out her hair without guidance on how to take care of it, and is shown contemplating suicide, being stabbed in a skirt by a crucifix-shaped sword as the word “boy” surrounds her (such a fucking mood), getting tossed out of the house into the pouring rain, and even undergoing an exorcism as silhouettes pry at her head, torso, and limbs, and separate them into individual packaged gift boxes.
There’s also a repeating motif of the “hanged man” tarot card, which represents surrendering yourself to seeing the world from a completely different perspective and literally flipping your world upside down (except,“man” has been scribbled out for obvious reasons), but the action of hanging also alludes to suicidal thoughts as well as ex-Christian feelings and being a dead bitch. Additionally, a hanged (wo)man’s figure appears in the snow, possibly dating back to the abandonment of the blue rider in Three Memories of Snow, showing how a past of being bullied is inherently connected to unrecognized transness.
My parents learned one day that I was using a new name, since the school office actually found out before they did. They were confused and trying to follow along as I grappled at words to explain how I needed to be identified as, but they were pretty calm about it even if it was super weird and uncomfortable. They’re still boomers, but they’ve got common sense. They aren’t religious, and definitely not abusive. After a few weeks, they started calling us Jade more often than our deadname, which is pretty good progress. Things really are going to be okay. I still feel petrified and stuck a lot of the time thinking about how others will respond to the real us, which is why I connect deeply to this track, but the course of events in the track is not my real experience. And for that I feel extremely lucky.
Personally, Know Thy Self presents the worst possible come-out outcome, and thus, everything I was afraid of in the past few months. But it’s not just a hypothetical what-if scenario in my head; it’s extremely real, and something that happened in Ava’s lifetime as well as countless other trans people, which is why watching the track is so brutal, like seeing something you weren’t supposed to. None of this is supposed to happen, but it does, because we unfortunately still live in a society that wants trans people fucking dead.
I personally still feel like something repulsive and something to be recoiled from, but truthfully there are people who, instead of turning away from your hideous, mutated presence, will welcome you with open arms, and recognize you for the beautiful mess of a monster you are. There will be some that are weakened by the real you, but so many more who will be strengthened by your newfound connection, appearance, art, and existence. And those who are strengthened will band together in recognition, acceptance, and hope. A frail, bloodied, but determined pair of fingers, pointed towards the future.
As a work of art, Know Thy Self is a difficult and uncomfortable but extremely well-crafted video-art memoir piece exploring Ava’s trauma around coming out as a trans woman to her unaccepting evangelical Christian family. Adopting the sketchy comic book storytelling style of her January release My Pal Foot Foot (a semi-fictional black-comedy that doubles as an abuse allegory), Know Thy Self contains no artifices of fiction, and no comedy at all. It’s a brutally raw and honest depiction of Ava’s lived experience, despite being aggressively non-linear and dreamlike in its structure, a far cry from the linear narrative of Foot Foot. It’s not a remotely enjoyable or entertaining piece, but if you at all are interested in understanding what it’s like to come out as trans in a conservative Christian environment, consider it highly recommended.
On the other hand, I’m unsure if Line Rider was the best art medium for this piece. The sledder’s staggered tumbling movements are rarely connected with a sense of choreography or travel, only really serving to move us through the narrative beats by moving the camera - yes, the movement is loosely synced, but rarely does any sledding take place that feels like it’s supposed to draw focus, or is even meant be noticed at all. All of the Bosh graphic has been made solid red, to match the only color in the piece besides black and white, and while this certainly strengthens the piece as a work of video art, keeping the sledding from distracting us from the much more important fever-dream comic-book scenery, it also begs the question, would this piece be better if there was no sledder at all? The sporadic sledding does create a kind of lo-fi analog shaky-cam, but that feels like taking an unnecessarily hard route to achieve a certain effect because the medium itself has been taken for granted.
On the other other hand, de-emphasizing the sledder to this extent does work really well to convey a sense of dysphoric dissociation - living your life with severe dissociative issues, after all, does feel a lot like trying to watch a Line Rider track and struggling to focus on what Bosh is doing. So this subversion of what you would expect from a Line Rider video does kind of work at conveying dissociation, but only in the context of being a Line Rider piece in the first place. Is it better for a work of art to subvert the medium used to create it to better capture a feeling, if it becomes more esoteric in that subversion? I have no idea, but it’s worth thinking about.
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The Cost of Yeast - Justin Lee & Jade Decker
Over the last few years, I’ve occasionally found myself pondering the idea of Line Rider as a visual aid for a video essay, but I could never quite picture how it would work. Well, now it’s no longer a vague idea but a reality. The Cost of Yeast isn’t just an interesting proof-of-concept, but a surprisingly well-executed video presentation, utilizing a wide array of Line Rider features to great effect. Delightful, clear illustrations help walk us through what is being discussed, with text here and there to aid understanding. The entire piece has a thematically appropriate beige background, with most of the illustrations and text in a darker beige, which gives the colors a nice pop whenever they are utilized. Sledding is used to add motion when it aids understanding, and, along with camera panning tools, to draw the eye of the viewer to the appropriate place at the right time. All the trademarks of what make for a great Branches track (Jade’s channel, which The Cost of Yeast was released on) are here - the distinctive illustrations, the professional polish, the incredibly good color theory, and even invisible track that’s scened over in ways that somehow mesh with the movement better than if it had been left visible. It’s even got some lighthearted, whimsical humor - some especially fun bits are when a zoom-in on a freefalling sledder highlights the existential question-asking part of the video (“But how did it come to this? Why does it cost this much for yeast, of all things?”), when large numbers of crashing sledders are used to visualize the multiplication of the yeast cultures, and when the processing of the yeast is depicted by an offsled rider ragdolling through the manufacturing plant before landing on the store shelves as the camera pans away.
It’s an incredibly well executed little piece, but it’s very obvious it was made for a school project. Why do Jade and Justin care about the cost of yeast? Why should the viewer care about the cost of yeast? Why are the much more interesting topics in the video - such as what yeast is, how it’s used, and how it’s manufactured, all sidelined for a presentation on some weird esoteric economics question that virtually nobody watching this video is asking? It’s clear to me that the topic of this video essay was assigned rather than chosen, because while parts of it read like an explanation for a general audience, other parts read like an overproduced internal company presentation for economists working for grocery stores. The presentation seems to take for granted that I’m going to be shocked by the $8 per pound figure, but I’m left confused, still wondering “Is that a lot?”, while the presenters have already moved on, skipping over the implied, “But I know what you’re thinking! It’s yeast! How could it possibly cost that much?” to the existentialism of “How did it come to this?”
I don’t blame Jade or Justin for this, but the institutions of education in colonial society themselves - structures which rarely allow us to learn about and present information by following our own interests, instead forcing us to research and present on something we don’t care about at all, to our peers who also don’t care about the topic at all, and then grade us on how good we are at executing a clearly pointless task. It makes us into great workers, but destroys us as artists and human beings. I’d love to see videos that take the stellar format of The Cost of Yeast and apply it to a topic that the creator genuinely cares about, thinks I should care about too, and wants to educate me on. Heck, even if it’s the cost of yeast, if someone thinks that’s important! Do you care about the cost of yeast, Jade and Justin? Should I? Of course, if the answer is no, then the logical conclusion is that this assignment was largely a waste of time. Which most of school is! But I doubt Jade and Justin would have gotten an A if they made a presentation rejecting the premise of the assignment and the entire education system itself.
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[Untitled Malizma Project] - Malizma
Guest review by S:
Time remapping marks an end to the This Will Destroy You-style era of music sync; we just haven’t realized it yet. This track is a glimpse into what that ending actually means. I will not elaborate further.
An obviously-unfinished experimental piece, [Untitled Malizma Project] looks to me like it came out of Malizma messing around with .com features such as the shade mod, color layers, invisible track lines, and time remapping. Perhaps surprisingly, it also manages to go hard as shit. Don’t get me wrong, nothing here is polished or cohesive in the slightest - but the sync is excellent, and it’s full of brilliant little ideas like visualizing a guitar line with shapes in scenery platforms. However, the real standout here is the creative use of time remapping. Malizma uses ultra-fast transitions between slow motion and hyper-fast-forward combined with camera zooms and even remounts to sync to a future-funk song with incredible precision. It’s fantastic. It very much feels like a rough draft or WIP, but the mindblowing time remapping makes it worth checking out in my book.
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Forgotten… - Instantflare
Released on a second channel under the name “Ray”, Instantflare’s Forgotten… is a somewhat cryptic meditation on the impermanence of memory. We see Bosh slowly sledding down a sloping cliffside past debris - furniture, toys, animals - scattered amongst rocks and vegetation, suggesting that all these objects, and maybe Bosh themselves, have been cast down here to be forgotten. The reflective piano music creates a sense of nostalgic melancholy as we tumble down, down, and down. It’s easy to imagine that some of the things depicted are personal to Instantflare, especially after we enter a freefall and drawings of faces flash briefly on the screen. I’m not sure exactly what to make of the next section, as Bosh zooms through a cave and flies back upwards, but after this we arrive at the start of the track again, marked by a familiar drawing of the post from the start. Now all the drawings are gone, and even some of the original slope itself has dissolved into thin air. So much of the track has disappeared, in fact, that Bosh can’t even make it down the slope anymore, and eventually crashes, ending the piece sitting on partially-dissolved line as the music ends. All memories fade, even memories of the memories you used to have.
It’s a simple yet solid concept, with a solid execution, even if it didn’t exactly make me feel anything. I suspect this may be because I don’t have any personal associations with the objects and drawings on the slope - my guess is that they’re personal to Instantflare, which makes Forgotten… intriguing, but a bit of a mystery. It’s easily my favorite Instantflare track so far, but more than anything else it’s made me excited to see what’s to come.
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Fizz - Rabid Squirrel
Guest review by HeirOfAvians:
This track is absolutely wonderful.
The track starts pretty small. Bosch is being led around by semi circles and comforting pretty shapes, something which makes me think of childhood personally. To me, the beginning feels like a child being led around, being generally safe and not having to worry about the bigger things.
After that, it goes to these big all encompassing lines, and the screen gradually zooms out, showing the absolute immensity of life. lines diverge and keep diverging, showing that now Bosch has to worry about choices and where he will go, no longer being led safely.
That is, until the end. Bosch is old here, having seen and witnessed a lot, and is no longer capable of making his own choices. the shapes are harder here, with more edges, (though the eventual return of a semicircle does indicate he's being cared for). It's confusing at first, he’s made his own choices for so long that its disorienting to lose that freedom, which is why the shapes are seemingly placed randomly. Eventually this all becomes clear again, and Bosch follows the path laid out for him, as he did before. Until, after the last square, it's over, and he falls into that great unknown.
It’s a very short and sweet little track that I think you could interpret in a million ways, but to me it feels like a short review of life. The comforting start, the massive middle and the confusing and hopefully pleasant end.
walk/rain - pocke
Guest review by Ava Hofmann and S:
I’m just going to say it: quirk lines are pretty. Like any kind of abstract, incomprehensible mark-making (like numbers or drawings), I am drawn to quirk lines for their unintended expressive elements. I have esoteric opinions about what “good” quirk lines look like; I think stacks and long fling lines are prettier, if somewhat unnecessary, and I think quirk tracks could benefit from adding some green lines that look like quirk lines that don’t do anything to add some value contrast to the splatterfields of their incomprehensible movement. Most basic quirk irritates me because it doesn’t do anything with the peculiar dynamism of the lines they create, instead geared towards the frequently less dynamic matter of what is being done to Bosh.
I think quirkers are aware that the lines they make have a kind of abstract beauty, but it seems so often like they are at a loss at what to do with the jagged visual explosions their movement tech creates. In response, quirkers with an aesthetically-direct sensibility often try to hide their work lines, either through highly formal abstraction (Well-Tempered Spaghetti) or by trying to get some poor artist to scene their fling nightmares (pretty much of all of the pre-sync era of quirk). This is a conceptual framework when it comes to Line Rider aesthetics which has continued to maintain itself: the visuals hide the quirk.
What if you reversed this relation? Turned scenery into track and track into scenery? This is a notion which has been explored in a few other tracks—the unused track lines in You Are the Sunset come to mind—but walk/rain takes this exploration to its own kind of extreme. Gigaquirk becomes abstract grey shapes which punctuate extremely static scenery movement, inverting this aesthetic hierarchy in bizarre ways.
This is, weirdly enough, quite fitting for the thematic content of walk/rain—that of the commute. In truth, despite how dark or dreary Line Rider can potentially get, it is so often a fantasy—that of explosive, visceral, bodily movement, of velocity and speed and physics. Even with tracks like Broken, which try to undermine the speedpilled hypegorging of Line Rider’s bro era, we are entranced by the pull of the body in physics – Bosh’s visceral struggle against minute hills and steep climbs still thrills us, lets our body empathetically feel depression and has us move through it. But this is a fantasy! The visceral joy of movement, of physics, so often eludes us – especially during commutes amongst the crowded unknowable structures of our collective cooperation. Our spaces are increasingly dynamic and bizarre even as we grow smaller, more static, with less capacity for dynamism in our bodies and minds. In this way, walk/rain is the most realist Line Rider track ever.
And that’s why, unfortunately, it kind of sucks to watch! I want to get immersed in the space of the track, but I’m just like, so over the realism of the moment. I’ve been alternately sitting static (quarantined) and doing an unsatisfying commute-walk for two years now, and I’m sick of it! walk/rain is a worthwhile aesthetic exploration that I’m so glad that pocke made, but these days I just want to use the remaining time I have left in the extremity of dance, emotion, and wild bizarro rejections of the real.
I’ve watched 1-minute Line Rider videos that were extremely boring, and I’ve watched 30+ minute videos that sustained my attention throughout the piece, and I think what makes a piece most capable of holding my sustained attention are two things: pacing, and development. First, I want things to happen - new things, not the same thing over and over again - at a rate that isn’t fast enough to be dizzying (this is the mistake that, historically, the vast majority of Line Rider works make), but not slow enough that I get bored waiting for the next thing. And second, I want those things to respond to each other - following naturally from one to the next, perhaps building something up, tearing something down, shocking me with a twist, or any number of other things that things can do in dialogue with each other through the passage of time.
walk/rain opens with a fascinating concept: Bosh is slowly traveling at a steady rate down a flat line past sparse city scenery, while the light-gray ghost lines of gigaquirk tracks float in the background. It evokes for me the feeling of thinking about Line Rider while traversing the boring drudgery of everyday life - imagining a virtual world of exciting, dynamic movement, while we ourselves are stuck in a world where the movement of our physical bodies is grievously limited, not to mention controlled and policed in all manner of ways. But there’s a reason why capturing this results in a piece that’s boring to watch - much like walking through a city in real life, there’s no development. Nothing happens, save the slow passage of bland landmarks, and our disappointment steadily increases as we realize very little is going to happen in this video. There’s a reason that I (and perhaps you too) listen to music or podcasts while walking to and from work - the walk itself sucks! walk/rain does an excellent job of accurately capturing the drudgery of the commute, and the ways our minds wander during it, but, like Ava and S, I don’t hugely enjoy lingering on the most boring and dull parts of life.
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FROWNLAND - it’s banky
As the first track released under the alias “it’s banky” by the artist formerly known as OTDE, FROWNLAND is… well, of all the thousands of Line Rider videos I’ve ever watched, FROWNLAND is definitely one of them. First off, it’s set (synced?) to a chaotic nightmare of a piece of music that is essentially the joke answer to the question, “What song should I sync a Line Rider track to?” Trackwise, FROWNLAND is a spiritual successor to banky’s 2015 release COME TO DADDY, with plenty of chaotic, unpredictable multilining, but this time with fewer story beats and more scenery and post-production. In addition to the mind-melting audio, a sketchy mass of rocklike shapes creates a claustrophobic feel, and some clever multi-video overlaying causes Bosh and some (but not all) of the scenery to phase in and out of focus whenever the camera moves, and the result is a video that is hard to watch. In a good way. I think. FROWNLAND is a writhing mass of a brain-scrambling work that refuses to coalesce into anything meaningful. It’s not exactly fun or entertaining, let alone moving or impactful, but if you’re into really weird shit, it’s probably worth checking out.
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Silver and Gold - Branches
Silver and Gold is perhaps the clearest example I know of Line Rider art as a process of personal expression rather than something made for an audience. A scribbled mess of unfiltered thoughts and feelings, Silver and Gold is entirely uninterested in structure, communication, or polish, which means that it’s impossible to parse most of the time, for better or for worse. It’s a testament to the shared human experience, then, that there are so many evocative little moments that jumped out at me once I stopped trying to find a narrative or structure or concept and just let it wash over me. The businessman in a top hat saying “trust doesn’t exist”, the radioactive juice box, the scrawled “Someday… we’ll all be free”, the two figures singing a song on a rooftop - raw expressions of feelings without much in the way of mechanisms to convey them to the viewer, but capable of resonating all the same. Hang on, I want to go scribble some feelings in my journal now.
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Gladiator - Malizma and Hypersonic Pineapple
It seems like there is this tendency of Line Rider projects to slip into an assumption that the ambition of a project directly correlates with its value. To be clear, I’ve been extremely guilty of this in the past (more than most) and I often stress about whether I’m slipping back into this mindset - that I might be confusing my dedication to something that’s worth finishing with the sunk-cost fallacy. So I have a lot of sympathy for the creators of Gladiator, even if I don’t know exactly how the project was originally conceived, what they were going for, or why it wasn’t completed in the end. It’s the kind of project I imagine would have looked really cool in your head, but in the end turns out to be a ludicrous amount of work for something that is going to create a reaction along the lines of, “wow that must have taken forever”, and not much more. The main thing Gladiator struggles with is the lack of a guiding narrative - there are a few exciting moments in the animation that hint at some kind of boss fight with a Giant Shadow Bosh, but this never really materializes. Most of Gladiator winds up being flashy full-screen animated visualizers that undeniably look cool, but don’t really follow any kind of pattern or purpose, punctuated by sections of slow unscened music-synced manuquirk. It’s not a bad watch, but the abrupt joke ending is probably a better conclusion than anything that could have been produced by pouring more hours into another sequence of dramatic but vapid animation.
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Sense - Yester
With perfectly balanced manuals, seamless integration, fluid scenery that seamlessly connects to the track a la Namtlade’s Trance, and simple animations that feel vaguely reminiscent of SethComposerGuy’s Funspiration, it’s unsurprising that Sense was made by someone who first dabbled in Line Rider back in the late 2000s. My favorite bit involves a large wall of animated squares dancing to the beat a la Selee (though I obviously have some personal bias here). It’s also unsurprising that Yester seems to be content with a track that is simple, satisfying, and well-executed, but uninterested in communicating much or experimenting with new ideas. There’s nothing wrong with that - it’s a perfectly enjoyable piece - but 2022 is a far cry from 2009, and Line Rider is rapidly evolving into a medium with increasingly potent possibilities for telling compelling stories that get people thinking and feeling about themselves and the world, and Sense doesn’t have much of anything in that department.
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Scared of the Dark - Bucky29
Scared of the Dark has a strong opening, with Bosh jumping from rooftop to rooftop on skyscrapers in an enormous nighttime cityscape, before plunging down a steep fall between two supernaturally tall buildings. It seems like the city scenery was perhaps added after the track, as some of the tops of buildings have bizarre curves necessitated by the track lines, but that’s a minor quibble. A less minor quibble, however, is that the majority of the track does away with this potent imagery, replacing it with little more than some highly forgettable movement-based music-sync. Sure, the skyscrapers come back later, but with virtually no other visuals or ideas or development on the concept that the track opened with, Scared of the Dark leaves me wishing that Bucky29 had more to say.
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