April 2021 Line Rider Roundup

Featuring guest reviewers UTD and Ava Hofmann

Welcome back to the third monthly Line Rider Roundup! I’m very excited that we have two guest reviewers on the roundup this month! My original idea was they could write reviews and then I would add any additional commentary I felt like adding, but as it turns out I often had a lot to say that wasn’t mentioned in their reviews so in the end you’re basically getting a guest review and then a review from me after it. Actually, this month I seemed to have a lot to say in general, so if you’re reading this in email form this message will probably be clipped and you’ll need to click through to see the whole thing. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m like this. I guess sometimes I just feel like writing 1600 words on a 50-second Line Rider track to accidentally become the Tim Rogers of Line Rider. (As always, the ones I recommend the most are at the top of the post so don’t feel obligated to read all the way to the end if that’s all you’re after)

Anyways, our first guest reviewer is UTD, who you may know as the creator of Cradles, which was #4 in Line Rider Review’s Top 10 Line Rider Tracks of 2020. He’ll be reviewing at the doctor’s office by Ava Hofmann, …is this it? by gavinroo538, here comes the sun by TheMatsValk and BeljihnWahfl, and Mission Imboshable by Roaxial. He would like to introduce himself:

Hello. I'm UTD and I'm an avid Line Rider enthusiast, track-maker and reviewer. I just started a monthly video series called "My Line Rider Watch History" which goes over 9 tracks that piqued my interest in any given month. I love pretty much any Line Rider track though some a lot more than others as you will see. I am also a huge fan/contributor to the non-track genre. That's basically all you need to know about me.

I would recommend UTD’s video series if you like this blog and/or his guest reviews. His reviews here are ones that didn’t fit into his video essay planned for this month, so if you subscribe to his channel now, when his video comes out there won’t be anything in it recycled from this blog post - it’ll be all new content.

Our second guest reviewer is Ava Hofmann, who you may recall as the author of Unkillable from March’s roundup and Futile Devices from February’s, as well as two new releases covered in this month’s roundup. She is a self-described visual poet who just started creating with Line Rider in 2021. She’ll be reviewing The Fall of Mr. Fifths by DeafTab.

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

Line Rider Race - DoodleChaos

Well, he did it, the absolute madlad! Two and a half years later, DoodleChaos’s latest Line Rider release has finally usurped Beethoven’s 5th as my favorite DoodleChaos track. I had long ago settled on the idea of Beethoven’s 5th forever remaining my favorite - after all, it was virtually unrivalled for years in it’s particular blend of dramatic storytelling and slapstick comedy through deceptively simple music-synced choreography. But with Line Rider Race, DoodleChaos has absolutely outdone himself. The slapstick comedy and music synced multi-rider choreography remain impeccable as always (with an impressive eight Boshes this time), but the idea to sync the William Tell Overture to an epic sled race is nothing short of a stroke of genius, allowing DoodleChaos to milk the over-the-top drama already present in the music choice for all it’s worth. The remounting mechanic in particular is utilized to create many moments of controlled chaos with several riders swapping sleds on screen, keeping the video engaging the entire time and even adding quite a bit of rewatch value. This is especially heightened by DC continuing to avoid letting any of the sledders visually collide otherwise, even when all eight are on screen at once. My favorite moment is a sequence where one of the blue riders sleds downward while winding back and forth, continually zipping past a poor unfortunate offsled green rider who keeps ragdolling past the screen, tragically missing the available empty sled over and over. However, the showstopper is the finale, which, depending on which color team you picked at the start, will either make you more angry, pleased, or amused about the outcome of a Line Rider sled race than you would have ever thought possible. Overall, while Line Rider Race isn’t doing anything fancy with technique, choreography, visuals, or wild artistic concepts, and it isn’t gonna blow your mind, it is arguably the most straight-up entertaining Line Rider video ever made. It’s a crowd pleaser that totally sticks the landing. A rollicking great time. An absolute blast.
🙌

The Fall of Mr. Fifths - DeafTab

Guest review by Ava Hofmann:

Oftentimes, language is an evil art-technology which tries its parasitical best to keep us from directly engaging with the world—all too often, a piece of language may stand in for our own thinking in such a way that spares us the burden of having to articulate it in a grounded, reality-focused way. Language like “evil” “love” or “freedom” is often used to interrupt dealing directly with the messy consequences of reality—what is ethically objectionable? what actions actually constitute affection? what do my notions of “freedom” or “liberations” actually consist of, and are they actually free?—and thus trap us in abstractification-pitfalls which keep us from directly engaging with the endlessly complex and fascinating material-social world which surrounds us. The most complete and pervasive trick language has ever pulled is to allow us to forget that language itself is a set of material phenomena—ritualized perpetrations of the air and depictions of lines on an incredibly vast array of physical media, from animal skin to motherboards. This is the hallucinatory trick that symbolification plays on us to make art a thing – that we somehow believe that the application of paint on a piece of wood means something, that the weird animal sounds we make with our mouths could testify histories real or imagined.

This is a danger I am often wary of, but DeafTab’s The Fall of Mr. Fifths presents a case for ecstatic potential of internalizing these ways in which symbolic representation functions. In this track synced to the WHY? track of the same name, Bosh flies through a sea of rapidly shifting typography set to the song’s lyrics. This is itself a well-thought-out match with the music, which deploys frequently offbeat imagery in its deployments: images like paddleboat rides and Montessori schools. These typographical shifts do a lot to match the tone and pacing of the music, but they have another function: to continually make the reader/watcher/listener aware that they are encountering something which has been artfully and ecstatically constructed. This is something the song also does, proclaiming to us that it has been “set in fat chords in modern English,” making us aware of the musical labor that goes into the construction of music and reminds us that “Modern English” is itself a historically and materially constrained category, even if it feel to many like something as eternal as the ether. DeafTab, meanwhile, does something similar in their evocation of mid-20th century typography—a set of artforms and styles which have started to decline since the invention of digital typesetting—drawing from neon signs and print advertisements to dictionary entries and street signs, The Fall of Mr. Fifths makes apparent that written language itself is mutable and can stylistically shift and contort under the artistic deformation of letter-forms. Words slip incoherently by into abstract symbols just as the language of the song itself descends into the power of rhythmic vocalizations, the symbolic content emptied out.

This is in stark contrast to the typeface-constrained text which appears in all too much digital art/writing, and especially appears disappointingly frequently in Line Rider, a medium where all text has already has to be hand-drawn but which has nonetheless given in to constraining ideas about “precision”. In contrast to this, the final moments of DeafTab’s track depicts letters becoming the very architecture of the cities around us, becoming physical systems which inhabit space with us. The final litany of questions the lyrics of “Fifths” asks: “But could your anger be mapped into an interpretive dance to a trip hop track? Could it be bowed out on strings or strung into a pattern […]?” What is being described here is a question about the artmaking process. There’s two challenges suggested here: first, a suggestion to turn your anger into art, to engage in that ecstatic alchemical process of “setting” a song or “setting” a track into kaleidoscopic symbols. But there’s also the more fundamental one: is it possible for us to map our pain into art, or are we just kidding ourselves? Neither the track nor the song bothers to answer, instead allowing us to grapple directly with the distance between reality and symbol.

I’m a bit of a pessimist in this regard—even as this track grapples with the kaleidoscope of language, we still also find areas where giving in to symbolization leads directly into the violence of our assumptions of nondisclosure “I never said I didn’t have syphilis, miss listless”, for example, evokes issues with regards to sexual inequality which the language deploys in a concerning rapid-fire method. But The Fall of Mr. Fifths provides a vision of why people go to the trouble of making art, be it music, or writing, or a Line Rider track: not only because we are tricking ourselves with symbols, but because there is pleasure to be found in playing with the symbols themselves.

”The Endless Ecstatic Horror of Language” out of 10

As arguably the first people to take a crack at creating a Line Rider lyric video (with Hard Times), I’m here to tell you that it is hard to do well. Just getting the speed that the text moves past the screen right can be a huge pain, and that’s not even accounting for framing the text with the camera in ways that won’t make it feel superfluous to the movement of Bosh or the track they’re riding on. And we haven’t even touched on typography, which is literally an entire field of study unto itself! Considering how few examples there are of Line Rider lyric videos before 2021, and how virtually none of those would be worthy of attention as a typographical work on their own merits outside of the novelty of being done in Line Rider, we might begin to see how remarkable The Fall of Mr. Fifths is - especially as only DeafTab’s fourth Line Rider release - because this piece is almost entirely typography, and the typography is not only incredibly creative purely as standalone imagery, but is arranged into something that seems to make a case for Line Rider as uniquely good medium for depicting this kind of constantly-shifting symbolic wordplay in music. It looks absolutely fantastic in motion, and Bosh’s movement, while largely controlled by lines on an invisible layer, moves so fluidly from word to word in ways that just seem to make sense, that it’s usually easy not to notice that Bosh is rarely actually riding any lines. Ultimately, The Fall of Mr. Fifths is far better than it has any right to be, DeafTab has become one of my favorite Line Rider artists in a shockingly short amount of time, and I eagerly await whatever they decide to try next.
🙌

gnever-in-the-gnight.mp4 - DeafTab

Before I get into the review, I want to offer a disclaimer that the status of whether gnever-in-the-gnight.mp4 is a published and/or completed work is… ambiguous. It was briefly made public and posted in the releases channel of the Line Rider Discord server but then almost immediately made unlisted again, without any public comment on why from its creator. So it’s possible it will get extended and re-released later, but for the time being I’m reviewing it as a standalone work, because I love it. I love how the opening titles are done within Line Rider through panning the camera up until Bosh is offscreen. I love how crossfading to and from an entirely-filled-in layer is used to create the effect of a light flickering in a dingy hallway. I love how said hallway is full of delightfully surreal things that for me perfectly captures the bizarre and occasionally disturbing vibe of being alone in the backrooms of an empty school at night, and how the slow descent of Bosh down a staircase adds to this creepy feeling, underscored nicely by the music. gnever-in-the-gnight.mp4 feels like a liminal space, like we’ve discovered some kind of portal in the closet of our 3rd grade teacher to another dimension at the start of a novel, one that we’re not sure whether is adventure or horror yet. Bosh unexpectedly falling through the floor as the title reveals is a fantastic resolution to this tension on its own, though as an intro it makes for an incredible hook that could get the viewer interested in practically anything that might come next. gnever-in-the-gnight.mp4 is a fantastic watch on its own, albeit one with enormous potential for expansion, so if it does ever get expanded you can bet I’ll make sure you hear about it.
🙌

BELLS - Ava Hofmann

The first words that came to mind when I watched Ava Hofmann’s release BELLS were “queerpunk riot grrrl Line Rider”, which is remarkably significant when I thought about it and realized that I struggle to think of any prior Line Rider release that I would confidently use any of those descriptors for. BELLS doesn’t just feel like a queerpunk riot grrrl Line Rider piece because Perfect Pussy’s music is heavily reminiscent of 90’s feminist punk rock aesthetics (though looking into it I learned that, fittingly, the band rejects association with the riot grrrl movement, calling it transphobic), but also because the video captures the essence of punk shockingly well, with mostly-illegible scrawled lyrics that perfectly match the mostly-indecipherable vocals in both aesthetic and tone. Adding to the tone is a delightfully horrendous video bitrate, some delightfully tongue-in-cheek, aggressively confrontational flavor text “f--k craft. f--k quality. f--k music. f--k your eyes. f--k you!!!! 😉” in the video’s YouTube description, and numerous aggressively messy shade-tool-gone-wild abominations loosely synced with guitar feedback - a tone of a defiant, grounded, powerful, rage-filled declaration of one’s right to find love and joy and truth on one’s own terms, an unapologetic embrace of self-expression that spends no time preoccupied with how it might be interpreted by some imagined viewer. Perhaps I’m biased, but that feels pretty queer to me, not in the alphabet-soup sense, but in the “fuck you” sense, and I totally dig it. The dissociative use of invisible lines from Unkillable is absent in BELLS, replaced with visuals often furiously drowning out the presence of the lines Bosh is riding on, and sometimes even Bosh themself, most prominently when one of the shade-tool abominations expands to fill the entire screen, which combined with the absurdly low bitrate, creates an effect close to visual white noise - an effect closest to TV static that I’ve ever seen achieved in Line Rider. My favorite part is when, after a slower section where the largely-illegible lyrics and blobs of static feel suspended in space, we fly into a tunnel with walls made of said static, creating a palpable sense of physical space often lost in other Line Rider works (e.g. just about any track with any type of cannon), with all of this coalescing into a strikingly potent mix of rage and controlled chaos. Indeed, while Bosh is mostly a vehicle for the often overwhelming and explosive visuals in BELLS, the movement itself is never jarring or disorienting, and the goal is clearly one of unleashed self-expression, and the result is something aggressive and loud, yet also grounded and fun, unlike the tiresome self-serious showmanship of a track like Devourer of Gods. BELLS is a fantastic watch, and comes highly recommended to anyone who isn’t too uptight to enjoy art that gets in your face a little.
🙌

Pizzicato (Léo Delibes) - Matthew Buckley

Matthew Buckley’s latest piece continues to refine his signature style of simple yet precise visualizations of classical music in Line Rider, this time syncing to some plucked strings. In this piece, Matthew absolutely nails the difficult art of syncing to fast rhythms that are constantly speeding up and slowing down without anything feeling mechanical, keeping the organic feeling of a physics simulator as well as deftly balancing consistency with creativity. Pizzicato establishes core motifs that are continually revisited throughout the video, but that are also iterated and expanded on in a slow-burn buildup that primes you for the eventual intricate, gripping finale, and the result is possibly the most satisfying Matthew Buckley release yet, and the most entertaining since Waltz No. 2. Similar to Waltz No. 2, one highlight of Pizzicato is when the choreography goes non-linear, with one Bosh slowly tumbling downwards to the titular pizzicato while another slides back and forth across the screen to a lyrical flute line. This one doesn’t have anything like Waltz No. 2’s delightful plot twists, but it’s absolutely worth checking out, even if you’re not typically a big fan of Matthew’s work.
👍

at the doctor’s office by Ava Hofmann

Guest review by UTD:

at the doctor's office is Ava Hofmann's newest... track??? Yeah, even for non-tracks, this one is pretty... non... but the ideas it offers, like most of Ava Hoffman's tracks, have a lot of potential. Through proper positioning of the camera and most likely intricate movement on Bosh's part, Ava Hoffman manages to use Line Rider, not for its usual functions, but for the purpose of making a statement video with presentation similar to that of something you'd see in your average PSA. Because of this, I can't really judge this as a Line Rider track. Luckily, I'm a graphic designer, and I love what this video does. It has its own style when it comes to the presentation of text, such as how words will be crossed out or explained or awkwardly added in odd places, which contributes to an authentic feeling, and on top of that, the visuals are also really neat throughout. Sure, said stylization might get confusing when the camera zooms by too fast for me to digest everything being shown on screen, but this doesn't prevent the general message from being conveyed across. If anything, it also contributes to the message of conformity, perfection, and how to confront these obstacles. Let me be myself in; messy, unorganized, chaotic; and let the human out; understandable and empathetic. All in all, this video is an unorthodox yet effective use of Line Rider as a software and something tells me we're gonna have more... "tracks"... like this in the future. Great job, Ava.

at the doctor’s office feels like some kind of weird awkward analog Prezi, and I mean that in the best way possible, because it’s an excellent medium for conveying a poetry piece by Ava Hofmann, a self-described “visual poet” turned part-time Line Rider artist. As an… *ahem* ((gender)queer) trans(itioning/-femme) person myself, the poem’s themes of systemic medical transmisia, voice “training”, the absurdity of “passing”, and ultimately the assertion of one’s humanity in the face of it all, I found to be very, shall we say, #relatable. The poem and the typography is good all on its own but the video presentation format adds a lot for me. I often struggle with reading poetry because I’m chronically unsure how I should be reading it, but this Line-Rider-as-typography-tool format allows Ava to control which parts get skimmed over and which parts we are forced to linger on. My favorite moment of the piece is when the camera very slowly pans to reveal the text “to make your voice sound like…” to which my brain automatically added “a woman” only to be undercut by “the voice of someone next to you” in an interrupting speech bubble, which made me chuckle, shake my head, sigh, and then nod and make a face like “well, you’re not wrong”. This is just how the piece landed for me, and it might land completely differently for you, but I’m willing to bet that if you give it a chance, it will leave an impression on you of some variety. So in short, though it might initially strike a typical fan of Line Rider tracks as strange and confusing, the lack of both sledders and music in at the doctor’s office shouldn’t deter you from giving this thought-provoking piece your full attention.
👍

Overture - Interstellar_1

While not technically Interstellar_1’s first release, Overture definitely feels like his first attempt at a proper Line Rider project. My educated guess is that he watched a whole bunch of Line Rider videos until he eventually finally felt comfortable creating one of his own, and the result is a surprisingly solid blend of choreographed sync, lyric video, and music visualizer, especially considering it comes from someone with no prior releases worth mentioning. It’s difficult to pick out anything unique or specific that makes Overture stand out, but what it does well is synthesizing a wide variety of ideas and inspirations to create a work set to a piece of music with sections that often wildly differ in tone. The most prominent inspirations that I see are Run Away With Me by Andrew Hess and Level of Concern by gavinroo538, but a lot of bits and pieces are incorporated from numerous different sources, presumably because Interstellar saw it in another track somewhere and incorporated it, figuring it would work. And while Overture can sometimes feels like it’s playing it safe, on the whole it all really does work, deftly flipping from style to style with the music’s sudden tone shifts, seamlessly flowing from section to section while utilizing recurring motifs in a way that holds together quite well. The camera zooms are slick, the big black bars on the downbeats feel great, and it even got me to enjoy an all-10-point-cannon section, which if you know anything about my taste you’ll know is quite a feat! My only major criticism is that the drawn-out lyrics feel rather pedestrian - generally speaking, they’re all perfectly horizontal block letters in the same highly-legible font in all caps, which makes them easy to read but can also make them feel slapped onto the rest of the track - like the lyrics are happening around everything else going on, rather than serving a key role in an integrated work. But in the end, I had a great time with this one and you’ll probably enjoy it too!
👍

A Stranger’s Dead - CrazyGameMaster

CrazyGameMaster, as per usual, released a whopping seven Line Rider videos this month, and A Stranger’s Dead is arguably the strongest of the seven. The track begins with slow sledding along jagged lines uncharacteristic for CGM, which helps contrast with the more intense sections and emphasize the drops. As always, CGM’s syncing is improving all the time, and the visual syncs to the dubstep in A Stranger’s Dead are absolutely spot-on, as well as consistently creative, and the result is arguably their most r/oddlysatisfying work yet. My favorite satisfying moment is when the tempo slows down to make the wub extra heavy and CGM slows down the track to match it and slow-rolls Bosh while keeping the visual motifs consistent. They’re all pretty bare-bones though, with the exception of a couple quick animations that don’t really gel with the rest of the visuals, and a lot of the sections in between drops mostly feel like filler. Personally, I’m a sucker for well-synced music visualizers, so I absolutely enjoyed A Stranger’s Dead, as well as the similarly well-synced but less varied and creative piece Idols, released a few days earlier, but I have to admit that when you get right down to it, it was essentially Brain Power on a budget. This particular type of Line Rider track, with Bosh moving left-to-right while quasi-animated scenery precisely visualizes complex music, seems to have become a Line Rider subgenre, complete with its own tropes, some of which are starting to feel a bit stale. If, like me, you never get tired of this stuff, you’ll totally love it, but there’s probably nothing here you haven’t seen done just as effectively - or more so - elsewhere.
🤷

Glacier Galaxy - pocke

I’m torn over pocke’s newest release. The entire first half of the piece feels to me like filler while the music slowly builds up to the drop. The sync is fine, but it’s a bit all over the place technically and stylistically, there’s really nothing memorable about it, and it didn’t even get me particularly hyped for the impending drop. But when the drop arrives… well, it’s still a bit all over the place, but it’s also visually dazzling, reminiscent of the best moments in Bug Thief, but with that particular pocke flavor of messy and creative. It’s a ton of fun, which makes it disappointing when about ten seconds later pocke seemingly got tired of the project, finishing the piece with an offsled section with some phoned-in shade-tool visuals. This seems to be a trend with a lot of pocke’s work - parts of a piece will be nothing short of stunning, while other parts will feel straight-up unfinished, or the work itself will feel entirely incomplete. In related news, pocke also released Earth on his second channel, a piece with a lot of similarities to this one and its own share of fantastic moments, so if you like Glacier Galaxy I would absolutely recommend it, but it’s a lot longer and there’s even more areas that feel desolate, unfinished, or phoned-in. My selfish personal hope is that in the future pocke will be able to either spend more time chewing on a project, to graft all of its ideas into a cohesive whole, or shrink the scope of a project down to a more manageable scope, so that all his brilliant ideas can be better structured, contained, and conveyed in a smaller package. In the meantime, I’m going to keep greedily gobbling up all the gorgeous little morsels I can find for as long as pocke keeps posting Line Rider videos.
🤷

…is this it? - gavinroo538

Guest review by UTD:

Ok, let me get my bias out of the way. Gavinroo's newest track features the song "Is This It" by The Strokes... the same song Ride Liner used in his iconic track we all disagree; one of the first tracks to heavily experiment with recycling and camera syncing, as well as a track I'd take heavy inspiration from for most of my early tracks back in 2018, and a track that would set the foundation for my own trackmaking style. Gavinroo ain't gonna beat that, but whatever. I can look past my own personal bias the same way I did with DeafTab’s We Don't Wanna Die and express the positives of this track, right? Well, the thing is, even looking past my bias, this track is otherwise uninspired. It's decent enough, don't get me wrong, but it's all over the place. Most of the track is generic flatsled to generic lyrics and when it's not that, it's a mish-mash of ideas that don't really have any association with other parts of the track. The background color changes rapidly, but that goes away. There's this cool part showcasing messy quirk that matches the feel of the busy instrumental... but that goes away too. There's invisible lines... but that goes away until the end. It's a shame because I know this track means something to Gavinroo and I don't wanna take that away from him and I know it sucks when people don't understand the point of your art... but I'm just not getting a lot out of this track. I don't know, if you're curious about this one, go ahead and give it a shot, but it's not one I'm gonna come back to again and again. I give it a meh.

gavinroo538 tracks come in two flavors. Flavor one is the epics: tracks like Kitchen Sink and Innuendo that have a lot of thought and effort and time put into them, and are clearly intended to make a splash and impress viewers. Flavor two is what I like to call the mixtapes: tracks like Truce and Anathema, where halfway through you might find yourself wondering, “Is Gavin making a Line Rider track, or is he using that premise as a cover for telling the Line Rider community exactly how he’s feeling?” I call them the mixtapes because it feels like the type of communication where actually talking to your crush feels impossible so you make a mixtape CD and give that to them instead. (I’m probably dating myself here - I think kids nowadays make Spotify playlists? Back in my day we made mixtape CDs.) I should mention that I say this without any intended disparagement - Truce is actually my favorite gavinroo538 release - so when I say that …is this it? is almost entirely flavor two, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. And while on first blush it might seem like a bafflingly low effort piece, there are moments that speak to that being an intentional choice, most obviously the brief but disorienting opening involving invisible lines and rapid background color changes. This is a work with a lot of meta to it, most obviously the choice to recycle the song from Ride Liner’s 2017 release we all disagree. I would argue that Ride Liner’s work is hardly influential - the most memorable aspects of it were a gravity well chain recycled 15 times for no apparent reason (other than perhaps to dunk on Cephyric’s extremely-2008 release Leap of Faith), and music syncs with the clunky and largely outdated legacy camera left over from the flash days of Line Rider - and is well-remembered primarily because of how much it contrasted with Ride Liner’s technically groundbreaking and hyper-frenetic prior release HAM. In we all disagree the song seems more incidental, like window dressing for a couple of loose ideas, while …is this it? is more of a music video that centers the song in a more direct way. For me, this created a strong feeling of deja-vu within the first few seconds, a sense of “Oh, I know this song!” that took me a while to actually place. I had never paid much attention to the lyrics watching we all disagree, so …is this it? created a sort of unveiling effect, a discovery that there was more beneath the surface to explore in a piece of music that I had casually encountered in the past. And I’m not afraid to say that I think the simple, direct style of …is this it? actually fits the simple, direct style of the music much better than we all disagree. My favorite moment of meta-commentary was Bosh dropping into one of the most half-hearted quirk sections I have ever seen in Line Rider as Strokes vocalist Julian Casablancas sings the line “Said they'd give you anything you ever wanted”, which felt to me like a pretty blunt commentary on Gavin’s feelings toward the Line Rider community right now, and made me laugh out loud the first time I watched the video. Not everything here is as easy to parse as that moment though, and this is maybe the weakest aspect of …is this it? - for a gavinroo538 mixtape-flavored track, it’s remarkably ambiguous, even cryptic, and at times it can feel like something Gavin is making more for himself than for an audience. As you can likely tell from the sheer length of my review, I have really enjoyed ruminating on this track and digging into the possible meanings behind Gavin’s unconventional artistic decisions, but I don’t think it would be wise - or responsible - to speculate about Gavin’s personal life, so in the end I’m left just catching a vibe. And that vibe is, as best as I can tell, Gavin is tired, fed-up, and struggling with where to go from here. I think the ability of …is this it? to clearly communicate that vibe to me is definitely worth something, but in the end I’m aware that nobody is likely going to get as much out of this piece as I did, so it’s probably not a work I would actually recommend to anyone. But, in the spirit of the mixtape, if I could take a moment to imagine Gavin is reading this so I might speak to him directly… Hi. I can see that you’re trying, and I know what it’s like to feel tired. I hope that this isn’t it, but more importantly, I hope that things get better. Best wishes.
🤷

here comes the sun - TheMatsValk and BeljihnWahfl

Guest review by UTD:

Here comes TheMatsValk's newest track... doo doo doo doo. Wait, wrong song. Anyways, this track is a bop. It is pretty short, but enjoyable nonetheless. I said this is TheMatsValks newest track but BeljihnWahfl also worked on half of this well, and I think the work these two are doing in general really go to show the evolution of quirk. Back in 2017, Rabid Squirrel made a video talking about quirk as a whole and how a lot of quirkers have grown an impeccable knack of controlling Bosh, and this track uses that advantage of quirk to sync to movements that would be near impossible if it were just regular flatsled or manuals. We see this, literally, right at the beginning, and at more eccentric parts as well. Obviously, nothing revolutionary is on display here, but it's the application of these tricks that elevate this track. I just think the use of quirk is fitting since quirk is... well, quirky, and this is a quirky song, so why not make a quirky track. Sure, you're not gonna get a buttload of highlights from a 50 seconder... actually, I did like that visual sync of the stall towards the end... but what you do get is valid on its own merits. I recommend this one.

When I first saw Rider Liner’s 2016 release HAM, as OTDE can attest having been there when it happened, when the gigaquirk kicked in I started cackling uncontrollably at my computer screen, and didn’t stop until after the color playback was over. In the nearly 5 years since, I have watched with growing disappointment as the Line Rider community perpetually fails to understand what really made HAM work, perpetually copying the surface layer instead of building the apple from the inside out. Post-ironic jokes about “dethroning” HAM, the most prominent being 2018’s HAM-dethroned-joke-in-track-release-form BACON™, were boring and exhausting from the beginning, stemming from a long-running in-joke between OTDE and myself lampooning Sorvius’s claim to have “dethroned” TechDawg’s Transcendental in 2008 with Manual Mayhem X-Treme, a track inferior to Transcendental in virtually every way except for a slightly higher linecount, an event that I feel comfortable calling the most cringeworthy event in Line Rider history. Nowadays most people in the Line Rider community don’t remember Sorvius (a grown-ass man at the time, might I add) putting “I hereby officially dethrone TechDawg” in the titles of a video while ultra-serious music plays underneath, so it seems that more and more people have been post-ironically or even unironically talking about “dethroning” other Line Rider tracks, the most common among them being, of course, HAM. But what made HAM so good is far more than the groundbreaking techniques people are trying to “dethrone” - though don’t get me wrong, that was definitely a crucial ingredient (some techniques took years for the Line Rider community to fully understand, such as hyperpulls and 6th-iteration techniques). But the other crucial ingredient in HAM was Ride Liner’s thorough understanding of the utter absurdity of what was being shown on the viewer’s computer screen, and how that was not just accepted but fully embraced, something most readily evident by the song choice. Midori’s post-hardcore punk-jazz music is the best fit for gigaquirk that I’ve ever witnessed - instead of being completely silly or exhaustingly self-serious, it manages to be both totally absurd and also wildly, intensely earnest at the same time. The music choice, as well as the track’s incredibly frenetic pace and surprisingly short runtime (Would you believe me if I told you HAM is only 43 seconds long? And that half of that is just the intro? It’s true!), demonstrates the kind of self-awareness that appallingly self-serious releases like Inhibitions C, Well Tempered Kramual 2, Resurgence, or even Devourer of Gods entirely lack, and is a major factor in why people are still talking about, referencing, and drawing heavy inspiration from HAM nearly five years later. What so many people in the Line Rider community struggle to understand is, even when it comes to gigaquirk, the memorability of a track is never wholly about the techniques - but that actually, how you present them and how you use them to get people to feel something will always be an incredibly important factor. So with that extremely long preamble out of the way, let’s talk about how here comes the sun is the one of first heavy-on-the-gigaquirk tracks since HAM that piqued my interest for reasons actually related to the gigaquirk itself. here comes the sun is another release in a line of bite-sized gigaquirk tracks synced to meme music that in my educated opinion traces back to Dapianokid’s 2016 glitchquirk release granddad memes.exe (which - fun fact - actually predates HAM), a subgenre of Line Rider that I must confess has baffled me for nearly all of its existence. When I first watched he by tofu, for example, it struck me as primarily a way for them to learn gigaquirk by syncing to some silly music for kicks that wasn’t worth any closer examination, and when I first saw the completed Crystal Dolphin, I wrote it off as roughly the same thing and didn’t give it my full attention. (I was also put off by Crystal Dolphin being recorded in edit mode to showcase that it was all blue, a tiresome esoteric detail to show off about a Line Rider track that has felt played-out to me for close to a decade now.) But 2021 has brought some releases in this subgenre that I find to be… intriguing, if perhaps not actually something I enjoyed watching or would recommend to others. One was Blinky’s March release E (not to be confused with Xavier’s mind-numbing 10-hour-long release titled with the lowercase version of the same letter), which takes the contrast between self-serious music and absurd glitchy Line Rider physics to its hilariously extreme endpoint, “syncing” the track to Billy Joel’s melancholy character-driven american-dream-skewering power-pop anthem that is one of those songs that will immediately get a crowd of drunken Gen Xers and/or Millenials singing along to the chorus, Piano Man. If gigaquirk synced to a dubstep Skrillex remix is exhaustingly dull, syncing gigaquirk to Piano Man, for me, lands as a Gen-Z skewering of the self-serious Millennial gigaquirkers syncing to dubstep Skrillex. I’m entirely unsure how intentional this is, and I’m not sure it even landed for me - I opted not to review it last month because I didn’t want to give it too much credit, and ultimately felt it was probably a throwaway joke that wasn’t actually worth commenting on, but I wanted to comment on E before talking about here comes the sun because the latter takes an almost entirely opposite approach to framing gigaquirk, and it was while watching here comes the sun that I think this whole subgenre actually kind of clicked for me. While E dredges up what little diminishing returns of humor it’s possible to wring out of the absurdity of watching gigaquirk, here comes the sun takes a different tack than trying to either “dethrone” HAM with techniques or attempting to replicate its style of humor. Rather, here comes the sun seems to me to be actually interested in creating gigaquirk not to blow anyone’s mind, or out of a sense of boredom-driven nihilist grinding, but in an effort to entertain the viewer, a development of such gravitas that in an attempt to adequately convey it I find myself writing this review of a 49-second Line Rider track of a length approaching the ludicrous. It’s very possible this shift has been happening in gigaquirk-land for a long time now and I’m late to the party in noticing this, but it’s the first gigaquirk-heavy track since HAM that didn’t either bore me out of my mind or cause me to make the Withered Wojack face on the inside, which means it’s the first one successful at actually conveying that intended goal to me. The silly and absurd, yet earnest and genuinely fun Bill Wurtz is actually a really good match for gigaquirk in 2021, not just because his music is full of little surprises and flourishes (“quirky”, as UTD put it) while maintaining a groove and a sense of fun throughout, but also because Bill is one of my favorite examples of someone doing his own weird fringey thing so well and for so long, constantly improving on his own terms, that eventually his work found an audience and now he’s a cult celebrity. It’s a choice that, like HAM, and unlike so much of the gigaquirk that came after HAM, steers clear of the dead-end post-irony humor of E or BACON™ while also avoiding the insufferable self-congratulatory self-seriousness of Resurgence or Devourer of Gods. Not that this hasn’t been done before - on a surface level here comes the sun might seem like virtually the same track as tofu’s March 2020 release don’t go to school - another gigaquirk-heavy sync track to a bite-size Bill Wurtz music clip - but while don’t go to school’s sync feels mostly superficial - a vehicle to decide where the tricks go more than a piece of music attempting to be captured in a Line Rider track - in here comes the sun it feels like there was a bit more thought put into when certain tricks are used and why. don’t go to school’s most dramatic syncs are to the vocals, which to me makes it feel obnoxiously over-synced, but while here comes the sun still syncs to the vocals, it keeps those syncs subtle, reserving the dramatic gigaquirk moments for Bill Wurtz’s characteristic colorful musical flourishes. And I have to say that while not every moment in this track worked for me - I felt like there was an over-reliance on flings and chains to move Bosh around, and some of the sudden speed boosts seemed a bit like unnecessarily gratuitous showmanship that bordered on the jarring - for the first time watching a gigaquirk-heavy track since HAM, some moments really did click for me, and I could see what TheMatsValk and BeljihnWahfl were going for, and felt like I could finally see past my anti-quirk bias born of the trauma of being a non-quirker in the Line Rider community from 2010 to 2018, to why people might genuinely dig this sort of thing. My favorite moment is probably the pop out of the temp stall at the 7-second mark, but I also liked the little micro-jam moment at 28 seconds, the fling synced to the line “falling in love” at 35 seconds, and of course the stall synced to “stop! times up” at the end. Did I enjoy watching it? Eh, maybe. Did it blow my mind? Nah. Would I recommend this track to others? Probably not. Did it give me an epiphany resulting in a newfound appreciation for all the tracks in the bite-sized-gigaquirks-synced-to-meme-music subgenre? Yes. Will I be paying more critical attention to tracks like this in the future and giving them more benefit of the doubt than I have in the past? Absolutely.
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Mission Imboshable - Roaxial

Guest review by UTD:

Guys. I made Cradles. You damn well know I'm gonna love a track like this. Technically, this track was actually released last month in the Discord server and posted to Youtube just this month, but... I don't care, I wanna talk about this one. For starters, the Discord release didn't have any music, and I find that the Mission Impossible music Roxial decided to use in the end is so fitting, syncs well with Bosh's movement, gives leeway to some of the still movements or establishing shots in this track, and is overall a charming addition to an otherwise charming track. Once more, this track... like Cradles... tries to tell a complex story in Line Rider through visual concepts other than through lyrics or words. Unlike Cradles, however, this track achieves that feat; not through controlling Bosh in any particular way or through any experimental techniques; rather, through scenery that presents a universal representation of things like banks or treasure. Now, although the base story is nearly identical to Cradles; criminal does evil thing, good guy is on the pursuit to stop criminal, show results; I find that as an expansion to the concepts I offered in that track, this track succeeds in areas that I wanted to explore but didn't due to lack of necessity or interest or time, and consequently, gives us another spiritual successor to the great Omniverse II. Furthermore, it really shows how far Roxial has come as a trackmaker, and how much farther he has to go. I feel as though Roxial is just starting to develop his own style and that this track is a stepping stone towards that, which doesn't undermine the value of this track by any means, but it does make me all the more eager to see where Roxial goes from here; what he'll take from this track and what he'll leave behind. While I can't say what he should or shouldn't do, I can say one thing for certain: It sure is an exciting time to be in the Line Rider community.

One thing I never expected was a Line Rider video in 2021 that would so strongly remind me of Chih’s 2007 classic Line Raider, given that there haven’t really been any heist Line Rider releases since then. They’re so incredibly similar that it would be impossible for me to review Mission Imboshable without comparing and contrasting it with Line Raider - they both are plot-heavy works involving our red-scarf sledder breaking and entering and then escaping to the Mission Impossible theme, somehow even both including sneaking through vents in the floor! And I have to say, Line Raider is still better than Mission Imboshable in some ways - it better conveys the space the sledder is sneaking into (the enormous Hak’d Labs of the evil Professor Phisher in this case) as a physical space, Agent Rider’s mission and motivation are much clearer due to some more explicit exposition, the ending lining up with the music’s climax works remarkably well, the characters have more memorable names and personalities, and the screen recording of notepad to convey the hokey plotline will always be charming as well as hilariously 2007 to me. Mission Imboshable, meanwhile, has no named characters, Bosh’s mission isn’t clear until after it’s over and their motivation is never known, the end of the video doesn’t correspond with anything in the music, the locations are given generic names such as “BANK” or “PARK” (or in one baffling instance, a vehicle has “TRUCK:)” written on the side, maybe because Roaxial was worried we couldn’t tell what it was otherwise?), and a strangely close zoom and uninspired 2-D scenery make the environments feel cramped and flat. But there are also places where Mission Imboshable shines while Line Raider falls flat. The music might line up much better with the plot in Line Raider, but the pacing of the story beats was downright atrocious. It takes nearly a minute of exposition and another extremely boring near-minute of Agent Rider sledding through a laggy underground cave (with a lot of gravity wells for no good reason) before we finally get to the actual break-in. Meanwhile, in Mission Imboshable Bosh breaks into the bank in the first 25 seconds, a vast improvement. And while much of the sneaking around Hak’d Labs in Line Raider is well paced, there’s an agonizing 15 seconds between when we see the “self destruct” button and when Bosh finally flails his way up the… well, up whatever that thing is - to pressing the goddamn thing. And that’s another issue - most of Hak’d Labs is super cool looking and really effectively conveys a sense of this massive evil lab, but there are parts towards the end that are totally baffling and even blatantly unfinished, an issue that Mission Imboshable’s bank, despite lacking a lot of what makes Hak’d Labs feel so cool in other places, does not suffer from. Yet another issue is that Line Raider ends on a cliffhanger, which is fun in an extremely cheesy sort of way, but I personally much prefer an actual resolution to the story like Mission Imboshable has, even if it does feel a bit abrupt. And finally, the really cool thing that Mission Imboshable has that Line Raider could only dream of, is multiple riders - in this case utilized extremely well. Red-scarf Bosh popping down a vent exactly as green-scarf Bosh busts into the room looking for the intruder is easily my favorite moment of Mission Imboshable, and the chase scene at the end is also super fun. iBagel would have killed to be able to do this back in 2007 for his unfinished Mission series. From a plot-focused analysis even, each has their own strengths and weaknesses. Line Raider’s tropes are more familiar and it’s plot is more defined, and it’s all delightfully over-the-top cheesy. But the story beats that happen inside Mission Imboshable’s track itself, rather than in exposition, are far superior. The break in, the duck into the vents, the arrival at the secret destination room, and the dramatic escape all land without anything needing to be made explicit, even if we imagine the other riders aren’t there, and I think that without the exposition those beats would all be far weaker in Line Raider, which speaks to Mission Imboshable’s superior ability to tell a story within Line Rider itself. In the end, I’m not sure which I like better, but I find myself wishing that with modern tools Roaxial could have been able to make Mission Imboshable something definitively more entertaining than Chih’s video from over 14 years ago, made with Line Rider Beta 2, Unregistered Hypercam 2, Windows Movie Maker circa 2007, and freakin’ Notepad, and it speaks to the strengths of Line Raider that I can’t say that Mission Imboshable is obviously better. UTD says Mission Imboshable succeeds where Cradles fails, but in my opinion the best part of Cradles wasn’t its ability to effectively convey story beats - One Eyed Giant has been the reigning champion on that front in my book for close to 15 years now - but the music-video-esque editing choices and creative use of multiple riders and the remount mechanic to create a very specific trippy vibe, and frankly Mission Imboshable has almost none of that. There’s things I really like about Mission Imboshable, but I feel like there’s so much more potential for what could have been done with the idea that I can’t say I would recommend it - unless you’re curious what Bosh pulling off a bank heist looks like, because it does have that, even if it isn’t as compelling as it could have been. Ironically, despite the existence of Line Raider, I think Mission Imboshable might be more remembered for its novelty than for its entertainment value.
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Jackpot - Lollyface

When Lollyface released the incredibly boring piece Reunited last November, I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, it was his first release attempting to be something more than Unity, a baby’s-first-Line-Rider-track that got picked up by the algorithm because the music is by ubiquitous EDM artist TheFatRat, whose music was used by DoodleChaos in Monody (mostly due to it being unshackled from YouTube’s Content ID database, thus making videos using his music monetizable). Sure, it heavily featured trees obviously copy-pasted from the tree repository (a collection of trees drawn in Line Rider compiled by part of the community via inter-track copy-paste without much thought around the consent of the original artists). And sure, it was a wildly inconsistent watch that, despite sharing a title with the calm, cheerful, yet emotional song from the Undertale soundtrack it was paired with, and implying at least some synchronization, constantly flipped between slow flasled and hyperspeed kramual cannons without any noticeable shift in the song. And sure, maybe the “sync” when the music swells into the theme was a jarringly sudden zoom out to reveal the word “HI” that made me mutter “what???” under my breath in bewildered exasperation. But I thought, hey, maybe Lollyface was just testing out what worked and what didn’t - maybe this track was more about him learning how things like singularities, kramuals, and zoom triggers worked, and perhaps he would work on developing what he actually wanted to make in Line Rider with future releases. Unfortunately, with the release of both 10000 and Jackpot this month it has become clear that he has decided to double down on all of the least interesting aspects of both Unity and Reunited, with a continuation of the most superficial sync possible, as well as the continuation of even more baffling kramual shenanigans, again right alongside uninspired flatsled, set to even more bland EDM music similar to Unity, presumably in the hopes of triggering the YouTube watch algorithm again. Jackpot has flings, which is technically a development, but I actually can’t decide if it makes it more or less insufferable. As I write this review, I keep trying to watch the whole 3-minute video in one sitting, and, to be perfectly honest, my eyes keep glazing over.
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