April 2024 Line Rider Roundup
April is a difficult month, because there is a lot of really good stuff, but good in ways that are challenging to describe or unpack. You’ll have to forgive me for this roundup coming out quite late yet again — I moved out for the first time and got a new job position this past month and have had very little time for Line Rider. This may need to be my last roundup that I run by myself — sorry, readers. It’s hard to motivate myself to put days and weeks into articulating all my thoughts about Line Rider when I receive so little feedback and additional thoughts. It does not make me too happy. Maybe that’s just what writing is like. We’ll see what the future of this newsletter looks like but currently running it by myself is proving unsustainable.
Interestingly, my two favourite tracks this month (and of this year so far) are tracks that were both shared privately in previous months but were made public due to community members convincing the creators to post their work. Please, share your creations, folks. “Don’t smother it, the concept of ‘perfect’ is banned, call it good, trust your instincts”, says Phil Elverum in his songwriting guide.
A big thanks Bevibel and September for their insights on it’s time to give up on being human and Crystallized.
Click here for a playlist of all videos in this roundup (in order). Titles also link to videos individually.
it’s time to give up on being human - UTD
Review by Bevibel:
The first half of UTD’s it’s time to give up on being human perfectly captures that feeling of a small, sad, miserable failure that feels a lot like a death. That feeling of lying on the floor in the dark, feeling completely alone, feeling like you should probably be crying but you’re too numb to actually cry, feeling like you’ve failed at some fundamental aspect of being a human being. A series of creative cutaways and other post-production effects perfectly captures a sense of intense dissociation - wanting to be anywhere other than where you are, wanting to be feeling anything other than what you’re feeling, your mind compulsively drifting away from the present moment only to snap back to reality when you find that every daydream leads back to where you find yourself - alone, numb, trapped, worthless, dysfunctional, a failure of a human, a waste of space. It’s powerful stuff all on it’s own - “I know how you feel” - but UTD has more to say.
A couple minutes into this, after music artist quadeca sings,
You tried
you triеd
now you're done
and both track and song shift. A beat kicks in as we start to freefall through space. Over repetitions of “I’m gonna be something else”, hints of color gradually increase until the screen is pulsating with a mass of rainbows and lines. Finally, we come to a stop next to a waterfall, which appears to be floating in a void. After a few beats, we vanish into a gorgeous landscape as an orchestral flourish builds into a rainbow reading “you are-“ before the video abruptly cuts off.
it’s time to give up on being human is the first artwork in quite a while that reminded me that one of the main reasons for artmaking is to express and communicate and unpack emotions during times when language is inadequate. The piece itself, in fact, explicitly telegraphs this by refusing to finish the tantalizing start of a sentence at the end of the video. It leaves me with the feeling of missing a step on the stairs. I am….????? What??? WHAT AM I???? Oh, wait. Right. That’s the point. You kind of have to discover that yourself, don’t you.
Most of the time, when I have found myself in a state of mental paralysis, feeling like a miserable waste of space, in retrospect I would say there were invisible tethers holding me there that I couldn’t see. The suffering I was dealing with was absolutely real, and the obstacles I was facing were real, but there was also this overwhelming sense of being stuck - this feeling of “I can’t” repeating over and over in my head on infinite loop, because the resources I had at my disposal were inadequate for dealing with anything that was in front of me. In the end, what I’ve always found to be most helpful in these moments was working to recognize where that felt sense of “I can’t” was coming from - to begin to actually notice those invisible tethers to concepts or rules that were no longer helping me, and to let go. “Letting go” is maybe deceptive phrasing here - it sounds simple, like ceasing to cling desperately to something that wants to be free already. Usually that’s part of it, but in order to let go, you have to first untie yourself, extract yourself, and escape from the concepts you’re all wrapped up in, and that’s the hard part, because the problems are ingrained into your standard practices for solving problems, so you have to interrogate everything you would normally use to make decisions and figure things out. It’s slow and infuriating, and it can be painful and exhausting, even debilitating, and there’s no way to know how long it will take, how well it will go, or what beauties or horrors you might uncover along the way. But as I get older, and my toolbag for dealing with this kind of thing gets larger and more robust, more and more see these periods of psychological paralysis not as curses but as gifts. Gifts to my future self, who will have more resources, more resilience, more confidence that we will survive and be happy again one day.
Artmaking is a fantastically useful and oft-overlooked tool for this kind of thing, and sharing that art (both/either the process or the end product) can be even more powerful, because it allows people to share ideas and resources for healing ourselves and each other. And then you get art like it’s time to give up on being human, which is both about healing in this specific way and also serves as an example of healing in this specific way by creating and sharing art about it - art that speaks to me about the inherent value of everyone as a human, the value of creating art, and the value of sharing that art, all in one - and I’m struck with an overwhelming sense that we’re all going to be okay, even though I may have no idea how.
Personal Protocol - Ray
Review by Jade:
I really need to write a review of Personal Protocol. But how are you supposed to write about Personal Protocol when you know that no one else cares about this track — not even the creator, who you had to ask to upload the track publicly after it was discarded as an unfinished entry to the Line Rider Detective contest? How are you supposed to write about a track no one cares about when you’re seriously convinced that it’s the greatest movement track of all time? How do you describe a track that feels so careless and so caring in execution at the same time and leaves you in a state of prolonged bewilderment as you watch? How do I write about this track when my face is sore from having my eyebrows scrunched in said bewilderment and having my jaw dropped in confused awe for twelve whole minutes?
“Why are you making that face? What are you doing?” our partner system asks us.
“I’m watching Personal Protocol again.”
“What’s that?”
For context, the Line Rider Detective competition was an event hosted by Autumn/gavinroo538 in which several creators submitted anonymous tracks and participants had to try to correctly guess the creators of as many tracks as possible. The video compiling all ten entries was 22 minutes long, over half of which was glaringly occupied by a single track, which would turn out to be Ray’s submission set to the first five songs of 8485’s Personal Protocol EP. Most people were able to accurately guess the creator because Ray didn’t try to strategically impersonate anyone, and let’s face it, who else would submit a weird 12 minute movement track for the competition?
In the September 2023 roundup I wrote a sort of long-winded, weirdly technical review of William017’s So You Are Tired, which prior to Personal Protocol, was the best movement track ever made. So You Are Tired showed us what a Line Rider visualizer could look like when Bosh isn’t being treated as an object in a rhythm game, but as a person passively listening to the music, dancing along in movements that are loose, unchoreographed, and remarkably personal and sincere. These days, besides just being an art medium for self-expression, Line Rider is often particularly used for expressing someone’s experience of listening to music. How the creator feels about the song they are syncing to and how they connect that music to their life/world will always show itself in the track. For example, based on Outside, XaviLR clearly thinks “Outside” by Bill Wurtz is a fun and silly time that appeals to their sense of humour and play, and based on Centralia Fire, September Hofmann clearly feels that “PERPETUAL FLAME OF CENTRALIA” by Lingua Ignota is a song that allows her to draw connections between her experiences of religious trauma and ongoing environmental crises. But the thing is that for a lot of music — even most music, what it does for us and how we feel about it isn’t totally clear or defined. Maybe you play some music on your smartphone as you wash the dishes, or though your earbuds while taking public transportation to school or work. Maybe you bob your head as you listen, or softly sing along to that one part you know the words to, or even break into a mini dance if you start getting into it. Those songs you passively listen to in your morning playlist — you probably don’t know all the lyrics or specific instrumental configurations, and you don’t understand everything you feel about the song. But the music is nice, and something about it connects to you.
I feel that nowadays, this sort of vague, passive musical conversation is the most common way people interact with music that they enjoy — it definitely is for me — yet I feel like there hasn’t been much room in Line Rider to explore this kind of listening experience. When Line Rider creators make movement, there’s a silent pressure to make the movement as involved with the music as possible due to the inseparable connection Line Rider “sync” currently has with rhythm game culture, so people automatically assume that tighter sync equals better track. Likewise, when Line Rider creators tell stories set to music, there’s a similar pressure to make the music as relevant and involved with the story as possible — to make a statement about every lyric or verse.
Now all things considered, this definitely isn’t a bad standard for track creators to put on themselves and each other — it makes sense that increasing your track’s interaction with the music would be more interesting, appealing, and memorable than non-interaction, or making a track in silence and picking music for the background afterwards. But it also significantly limits the number of tracks creators might feel “able to make a track to”, because people think they need to know how they feel about about a song or what it’s about before they are equipped and ready to represent it in Line Rider.
The result of this standard has been a lot of tightly-staged, gorgeously-choreographed crossovers of simulated dance, comic strips, and animated music videos that feel totally complete. Some shining examples from last year are Cirno’s Perfect Math Classroom, Centralia Fire, Gaia, and lived. Obviously, these are all really amazing tracks that I love. They’re all very well-planned and tightly executed so that the music is acting in service of the story or message of the track as much as possible.
But for me, tracks like these will never quite access my heart or reach the level of raw humanity of a track like… 4U. Or… To See the Next Part of the Dream. Or, dare I say, The Name Engraved in My Heart.
Seriously, let’s talk about The Name Engraved in My Heart for a second — that track works because it isn’t 100% engaging with the music. Think of what that track would be like if Ethan tried to directly involve every single lyric or verse to an idea they wanted to separately express through the art, or if the riders were precisely synced to every vocal melody or guitar note. It wouldn’t be the same. I find that The Name Engraved in My Heart, though incredibly eloquent, profound, and meaningful, represents a very real kind of passive music listening experience — one where a song plays that reminds you of something… a certain time and place, as well as a meaningful piece of queer Chinese film in Ethan’s case, and you just keep thinking about those things as the song is playing, the music acting not as an instruction booklet for what thoughts to have, but as a gentle friend being there for you as you reflect, reminisce, and cry. The Name Engraved in My Heart is a piece of art about Ethan Li gaining autonomy from their parents, and having autonomy from the music — not being handcuffed or glued to the song, but just being a listener — is vital to that.
I know that it isn’t necessarily people’s goal to represent how it feels listening to music — a lot of the time, Line Rider creators are more focussed on making their tracks into visualizers or music videos, which fundamentally carries with it a different set of goals. However, I still believe music videos and visualizers are meant to be representations of people’s experience of listening to music, and so I find it disappointing how few Line Rider tracks have managed to capture the beautifully average day-to-day mundaneness of coexisting with music. Vibing. The mini dance parties of life. Not fully understanding it, but connecting to and enjoying music nonetheless.
When you start thinking of Personal Protocol as the definitive Line Rider representation of an average passive music listening experience, it becomes absolutely perfect. So perfect that I cannot look away and my jaw falls to the floor for twelve minutes straight.
Personal Protocol has a remarkably lacklustre opening. In the first 25 seconds, Ray barely moves Bosh around despite there already being quite a bit in the music to move Bosh to. When the singing starts, Ray tosses the rider around with a bizarre gentleness and looseness, making no attempt to marry the song and track. Bosh is sort of just absent-mindedly dancing, not really paying attention. However, the first really interesting moment is about to come up at 47 seconds where Bosh slowly slides down a hill on her back as 8485 (the musician) sings about “falling back” and “sinking underneath the grass”, but on the line “lifting halfway through the atmosphere, go down for air again”, Ray frees Bosh from the squishy confines of two converging lines and perfectly lines up her little bounces to the vocal inflection of the lyric, and my satisfaction is immeasurable. When Bosh does a lil jump on the word “again”, a connection between rider and song is established. The rest of the first song is just as brilliant, going into an all-x section with feeble little hops, and then a slightly faster section where Ray alternates in a pattern between straight lines and pencil-drawn lines. Then we slow to a stall as the first song ends, and as an existential monologue plays between songs, Ray pans up above Bosh and lets us look at the blank whiteness of the Line Rider canvas — the perfect choice, if you ask me.
The next song is entirely offsled tumbling, mostly on straight acceleration lines, giving this section a chaotic, bumbling feel. If you’re not paying attention, it may feel like this whole track blurs together, but in terms of how Ray moves Bosh, Ray does a great job making the second song feel rhythmically and stylistically distinct from the first, and a great job smoothly transitioning between those different feels. At 3 minutes and 50 seconds we get a really beautiful moment where 8485 sings about doing the “same tasks” over and over, and Bosh organically responds in the moment by throwing themselves into the same wall over and over, and leaving the loop once 8485 breaks from the repetitive melody and rhythm. When we’re absent-mindedly dancing or stimming to a repetitive catchy beat, our brains gravitate to repetitive motions we can naturally perform in cycles, and this part along with many other parts of Personal Protocol, represent this experience, once again, perfectly.
The transition out of song two is so good. Throughout the offsled section, we’ve passed by the separated sled a few times, but now as the song ends, the camera pans down to show the sled slowly moving away from Bosh and back towards her as she sluggishly inches towards the edge of the line. Watching this part is so satisfying because you know right away that they’re going to remount right on the song transition, but it takes so long to get to that payoff.
The entirety of song three is a total head-scratcher and is where my face really contorts into a frozen state of bewilderment— “why are you making that face?” It doesn’t sync. It barely even tries. Most of it is just straight lines going slowly back and forth, and some long stretches of pencil squiggles later on. But we know Ray understands very well how to sync shit in Line Rider, so we know that this is an intentional choice, and I think this part is essential for creating a contrast with what’s soon to come. When thinking about Personal Protocol as a representation of a passive music listening experience, I imagine that Bosh put on the EP on her phone while doing laundry or dishes, then finished his task at the end of song two and got up to go pee during song three, leaving the phone in the other room as the song plays in the distance. Then he comes back as song four begins and is like “wait a second, this is a banger!” and starts getting a lot more into it. I say this because going into the fourth song, there is a palpable spike in the sync-o-meter as Bosh’s movement immediately becomes more engaged with the music, because let’s admit it, this song is just a lot catchier and danceable than the previous. I like the last two songs of this track the most and the track seems to validate that opinion; it seems like Ray agrees. Compared to the non-movement of the first three songs, we are now racing forwards, but it’s in no way a tonal change as the curved lines that toss Bosh around here are stylistically very similar to the curves we saw in the track’s opening. At 8 minutes and 40 seconds, there is a moment so beautiful I had to stop myself from exclaiming “Wow!!!” in a public library when I first watched this — Bosh falls down through the air, then suddenly hits a bunch of straight lines in rapid succession timed to a hammering bass kick, and then gets quickly flipped onto a long flat line when the chorus continues as normal.
As we enter the final song of the track, it becomes clear that this is no longer just music Bosh is listening to in the background — she is throwing her own one-person dance party. We get these huge spirals right out of This Will Destroy You and these euphoric sweeping curves that feel similar to those of Run Away With Me; of course, these lines feel much more unrefined and rough and human because remember, Personal Protocol is not a choreographed stage piece — it is an utterly average journey of someone gaining confidence to dance or stim alone in their apartment. I also want to point out these acceleration line tunnels at the eleven-minute mark — as 8485 starts spitting bars and her vocal and rhythmic delivery become palpably tighter, Ray cleverly responds in the moment by tightening two lines around Bosh, making him speed up under the pressure.
Personal Protocol is about finding little moments of musical joy in times of solitude. 8485 sings lines like “I’ve been alone and it’s bad for me” and turns it into a fun time, and Ray does the same through his trackmaking. Sorry Toivo, but I don’t think the average hermit dancing alone looks as smooth and hypnotic as your track Dance Alone — it looks like Personal Protocol.
I’ll end this review by addressing the fact that this track is considered to be unfinished/in-progress by its creator, probably because Ray didn’t use all the songs on the EP — there’s technically still two more. But I think that’s an arbitrary standard of “album tracks” that you need to make the entire album. I’ve listened to the rest of the EP and honestly, I think it makes total sense for Personal Protocol to end where it does given the completeness of the track’s emotional journey, and it also captures the incredibly relatable experience of not quite listening to an entire record, either because you run out of time or you run into a song that’s so good that you now don’t want to listen to anything else. I think Ray’s allowed to call it finished knowing that they’ve already made the greatest movement track of all time, and I hope they keep sharing the weird, beautifully mundane things they create in the joys of musical solitude.
how it feels to chew 5 gum - pocke
Review by Jade:
In a Line Rider world of tightly synced tracks, tracks that go somewhere, tracks that try to do everything at once — this strange quiet painting of a track is extremely striking to me. I could spend hours with this track.
There’s a Mount Eerie documentary where Phil Elverum touches on his life in Anacortes, WA, where Mt. Erie is located. He mentions at first how it’s “pretty inherently Nordic — wet, mossy, picturesque…” but he also talks about how near his home, “there’s a couple of big oil refineries and the tankers come from Alaska. If it wasn’t there, I feel like this place would be a little bit too perfect and almost fictional, so looking out at the oil refinery and smelling the chemicals sometimes… that’s what I like about living in Anacortes — that it’s somehow in both worlds.”
how it feels to chew 5 gum captures this experience of being “in both worlds”. The way pocke frames this setting means the two trees are revealed first, and then as the track ends, only then do we see the lights of the city beyond. The world slowly fades into view with subtle post-production colour shifts, like gradually waking up from an afternoon nap next to some trees to find that dusk has begun to fall. The way the rider interacts with the environment makes no logical sense, riding along a bridge in the far distance and then immediately riding upwards along the sides of trees that are much closer to the viewer. It feels oddly magical, and the nuanced tones of the colours carry an earthy, atmospheric depth.
The scribbly, painterly style of how it feels to chew 5 gum is very distinctive to a certain time period in pocke’s Line Rider career, used in tracks like Crystal River, The Retrograde Apparition, and the border shatters between us, but he hasn’t employed the visual style in over a year since the release of SLITHER, so seeing it here feels like a rare and welcomed occasion. (It’s very, very pretty.) Shortly after pocke seemingly retired this style of trackmaking, they released To See the Next Part of the Dream, which was my favourite Line Rider track of 2023. By mashing together samples of various other Line Rider works from many generations of artists in messy ways that intentionally fail to cohere, pocke managed to beautifully capture these weird in-between times that make up most of our actual lives — these times of being between stages of your life that don’t fit together well. how it feels to chew 5 gum feels like it is about similar in-betweennesses and nuances, so it feels simultaneously like an stylistic epilogue to the late 2022-early 2023 saga of tracks that used its scribbly style, as well as an epilogue to the emotional themes of To See the Next Part of the Dream, like we’re slowly waking up from the dream we are struggling to see the next part of.
I recently moved out and I now live on a very steep hill in a strangely remote forested area in Metro Vancouver, and the view in how it feels to chew 5 gum reminds me of the view I see running down the hill to my home, with a distant community of people between the nearby trees. The arrangement of nature and signs of people in this track gives me a generous little moment to reflect on all the changes that have happened in my life, as well as my changing feelings towards the weird in-betweennesses of Line Rider. I don’t really know what I want to do with Line Rider at this point, and watching and writing about Line Rider brings more stress than it does joy. I think I love this track so much because it’s not trying to impress a viewer or even be about anything specific — it just puts me at ease and lets me look at the world for a little bit.
Perhaps the track being called “how it feels to chew 5 gum” is an intentional subversion of expectation, since chewing 5 gum is often advertised and memed to be this hyperbolically explosive experience, but in reality, chewing some gum is as simple and relaxing and nothing of an action as breathing.
When I’m outside, I’m often gravitated towards weird little nooks in parks and forests that veer slightly off the main path, and I can spend hours in those spots because I know other people don’t usually go there, but I can still see people around, which helps me reorient my perspective on the world and be a plant again for a bit. In a way, how it feels to chew 5 gum is the Line Rider equivalent of that, because I know no one else will talk about or care for this track since it’s not really a definable destination or a place that someone would recommend visiting. But I think we all need personalized places like that, in the physical world and in art, and I feel that how it feels to chew 5 gum will be one of my favourite little spots to visit in the Line Rider world for a long time.
Change My Name - September Hofmann
Review by Jade:
A few years ago, September showed me the 1969 Japanese drama art film Funeral Parade of Roses, which interviewed trans women living in Japan at the time. There’s one particularly striking interview that goes like this:
“Can you tell us what you’d like to do or be in the future?”
“I don’t want to be anything.”
“Is there anything you want to do?”
“I’m doing this right now, so…”
“So you’re happy being a gay boy right now?”
“Right now, yes.”
“What would you like to do from now on?”
“I don’t have a plan.”
“Are you happy being a gay boy?”
“Not so happy.”
“Not so happy? Then, why did you become a gay boy?”
“No particular reason.”
“No reason?”
“Yes.”
I feel that September’s new track Change My Name is about this lack of any “real reason” behind transitioning and changing your identity. When Roberta Flack sings “I Told Jesus” she does not give any reason to Jesus about why she will change her name, just that it will be fine if she does, and Jesus responds with rebuttals and arguments for why she shouldn’t change her name, but she just keeps insisting “it’ll be alright”. September beautifully uses this musical conversation and its quiet, burning intensity to tell a story about her own coming-out experience in a religious environment, and to capture an insane sort of resilience around coming out to a transphobic society. First they give you these reasons for why it wouldn’t be safe to transition, that “the world will turn away from you”, but when we still say it’s what we want, that’s when the true reason comes out — that they will turn away from you. The golden cloud representing “THE DIVINE” tells Bosh, “you are not my child”, and “I gave you that name. How dare you change it.” The political becomes personal.
I think Change My Name is September’s best work since mother & Voice in Headphones — a lot of her more maximalist artwork like Love Like You & Javelin don’t quite resonate with me, though I know that’s very much my personal preference. The way the detail builds in this track with the yellow branches slowly sprouting and then blossoming at the end is gorgeous, yet very subtle, and visually captures the slow intensity of the song, giving space to reflect on both the incredible resilience of black and trans people, and how those experiences are intimately linked in the south of the United States.
Denmark / Van Gogh & Gone - Malizma
Review by Jade:
In the description of faults, Bevibel describes it as a “2018-ass line rider track” but truly, in disguise, the 2018-ass line rider track of this month is Denmark / Van Gogh & Gone. This track is one of Line Rider’s deepest and slowest burns yet, with its progression reminding me of some of Andrew Hess’s original tracks like Release Me and Formation, but with much more advanced programming and techniques, and an even bigger climactic payoff. Pay close attention to the rider in the slow falling section and the way they just barely miss the curved lines on either side — it’s wonderfully excruciating. In a few words, Denmark / Van Gogh & Gone is an exhilarating rollercoaster for the senses.
Crystallized - Arglin, Leonis, Alexdaguy, TheMatsValk, Anton, Malizma, Tofu, Instantflare, BeljihnWahfl, Draveyar Le Stars & Aera Cura Luna
Review by September:
Here’s the story, as far as I understand it: Seven and a half years ago—late 2016 or so—Leonis started making a highly technical quirk track set to Camelia’s rhythm-gamer classic Crystallized. A while after that, around 2018, she handed over the files for the unfinished track to the line rider community, who got to work making it into a big ol’ ultra-mega-hyper-giga quirk collab spearheaded by Arglin. As the years went on, the track got more and more dense and technical to an almost comical degree, and progress slowed to a crawl—a crawl slowed all the more with the slow decline of the quirk community, including Arglin’s own pseudo-exit from the community. But with a final push from the quirk community, Crystallized was finally released in April 2024, complete with a 10-minute runtime and an additional 45 minute slow-mo trick breakdown of the track. Beyond the specifics, it’s a familiar-feeling story when it comes to the quirk community nowadays. Over the course of 2023 and 2024, a number of the longest-running quirk collabs from the 2016-2021 era have suddenly found themselves completed—including Lingus, Interrobang VI, and If It's Good To Ya, It's Good For Ya, among others—in a process that I feel compelled to describe as “Arglin wrapping up loose line rider threads.” Perhaps that’s an unfair characterization, but when they’re dipping into the barrel to release things like The 1 Hour Collab, there’s a certain sense of finality to it all. And in this capacity, perhaps Crystallized is the most most final.
Since Crystallized has been “in progress” since before most of us even joined the line rider community, I’d developed an impression of Crystallized as something that was nigh-unreleasable, a technical slog that would take a sisyphean effort to complete—and any potential finished result was probably not worth the effort involved. I remember watching the 2021 Crystallized preview (which has since been privated) which ends a few mere seconds after the big drop™ and feeling utterly baffled. The quirk was going by so quickly and Bosh was moving at such a high velocity, it didn’t look like that she was moving anymore—instead, the world was moving around them, frame by fame, as a series of disconnected images. And as each major quirk collab began to reach completion, Crystallized felt like it stood apart, an ecstatically unfinishable mess. And now that it, too, is complete, what’s even left when it comes to these kinds of highly technical collabs? I can’t think of anything. And no one’s really making new collabs (or solo tracks, for that manner) in these quirk styles that were so much more prominent and popular in the 2016-2021 era. It feels a bit like a last hurrah.
And yes, Crystallized is a big-energy ecstatic mess of a track that honestly I’m kind of glad exists even just as a kind of “extreme endpoint” or “logical conclusion” of gigawork technical aesthetics. But it is… still a bit of a mess. Malizma does his best to try and make the track readable with the use of camera controls and the occasional sections with lines that appear and connect Bosh’s positions on each frame. But it is still hyper-dense, hyper-quick, and hyper-illegible. As I alluded to above, not only does Crystallized include the standard color-playback quirk nonsense, but also features a second, 45 minute video in ultra slow motion just so that you can actually register every single detail of what’s going on in the track. It’s technically impressive yet, but leaves a bit to be desired when it comes to impact for a viewer. Honestly, I wish Crystallized had done a little bit more with scenery like in Work or Frequency Hotline just to add a bit of nonsensical narrative flavor and keep the whole thing more memorable on a section-by-section basis. As it stands it all just kinda… blends into each other. Crystallized demands so much prolonged, intense focus from even people are are fairly familiar with quirk that it becomes very simple to just space out for a moment and lose your place. The end result is a rather inhuman impression, like a highly efficient TAS. It feels as if we are simply witnessing a machine execute its code.
But perhaps that’s kind of the point of Crystallized. This trick is also the debut for the hilariously-named “DETERMINISTIC OVERRIDE,” a technique which seemingly allows one to adjust Bosh’s position and momentum so precisely that it’s possible to return Bosh to their exact state at a previous frame in the track, resulting in an infinite loop. That’s new and exciting! Well, okay, we could already make tracks infinitely loop using kramuals and singularities and such but this one, uh, doesn’t need kramuals. Still kind of new. Kind of. The big thing the Crystallized team does with this track is to loop the ending of the track all the way back to the very beginning. This is honestly a pretty cool effect—except for fact that, in the video, Crystallized loops the music too, taking us through another entire loop of the track…as the color playback begins to fade in alongside a sort of “trick display” dialogue box in the lower left, seemingly painstakingly edited to precisely display the name of each trick as it appears in a kind of “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” combo format:
And while this is OBJECTIVELY hilarious as a stopgap measure to try and make the track more legible to broader audience, it also falls prey to the standard issues of color playbacks: namely, that it’s making us watch the thing we just saw for a second time and feels kind of like a boring retread of what just happened. So while I can’t say that Crystallized is a “good” track and I can’t really recommend people to go watch it, I do have a kind of bizarre soft spot for it. Its artistic and technical choices are so highly specific and bizarre that I can’t help but respect it. Its inhuman, unwatchable qualities are the logical aesthetic conclusions of the predispositions of this era of quirk in this sort of avant-garde way. Somehow, the whole thing made sense to me when I opened the track file for Crystallized on linerider.com and saw it for myself. It was more exciting, more present, more real, something I could touch. These quirk collabs are never about making line rider videos (even if quirkers sometimes insist that they are)—this shit lives on in the editor, as a thing happening live in the software, as a file floated between collaborators. The video is just a TAS verification, an act of documentation which is a pale shadow compared to where the real ‘art’ lies: within the process itself. And as these processes draw to a close more and more frequency, so too does the “art” of these tracks. Perhaps that’s why Crystallized is an endless loop, as a kind of symbolic gesture towards an impossible Crystallized, one that never truly ends, but is immortal and everlasting in its unfinishedness. But despite this, entropy still prevails; Crystallized died the moment it was posted, and another chapter of the line rider story draws to an end. Gigaquirk is dead. Long live gigaquirk.
Exploration - Backwards Pi
Review by Jade:
When you watch this track, turn on captions and read them aloud as the track goes by. This is an interactive track that you get to commentate as it plays, and it’s executed really well, using its narration to create moments of drama, suspense, humour, boredom, and subversion as we follow Bosh through a multitude of worlds where there otherwise wouldn’t be a clear story. The narrator reacts to the track in ways we as viewers can connect to, by asking questions about where we are, warning Bosh of an oncoming danger ahead, or reacting in surprise and shock to something unexpected happening. It’s clear the commentary was created alongside the track, and it makes for a very fun experience with lots of comical reveals. I recommend watching this track at least once.
7 Years - Alt-Key_Here, gavinroo538, MoonXplorer, Nonexistant, Interstellar_1, pocke
Review by Jade:
I do not like this song, and that dislike can be pretty succinctly represented by this hilarious moment made by gavinroo538/Autumn in response to the lyric “my Daddy told me ‘go get yourself a wife or you’ll be lonely’”:
What I really like, however, is MoonXplorer’s final part that lasts for the entire final minute of the collab, and it hard carries. MoonXplorer is presumably one of the youngest currently active Line Rider artists at fourteen, and there’s something surreal about seeing a child exclaim in bubbly cartoon letters, “soon I’ll be 60 years old!” There’s this excitement and innocent wonder and immense fear around growing up that comes through in how MoonXplorer represents vocal inflections and lyrics with the doodling sincerity of a child. For me, this part brings up a lot of emotions about time.
I remember distinctly when I was maybe twelve or thirteen, my behavioural interventionist was pregnant. I knew vaguely of climate change at the time and how the world would likely be far less hospitable in a hundred years due to rising temperatures and extreme weather, and so I was confused as to why my interventionist thought it would be a good idea to have a child if the world wouldn’t be able to accommodate them. As a child myself who was already fearing for my own future, I didn’t understand how maternity would be desirable or worth the risk. I remember thinking, “isn’t that kind of cruel to your kid who now has to live in this world?” I was a very normal child, I swear.
When MoonXplorer, at a similar age, asks, “will I think the world is cold, or will I have a lot of children who can warm me?”, it feels like a direct response to my twelve-year-old self’s quandary around raising future generations, and I’m overcome with emotions. MoonXplorer depicts an Earth on fire, a stump to represent deforestation, and then in bold contrast, stick figures running up and hugging another stick figure exclaiming: “Dad!” These questions and quandaries aren’t solved or answered, but so beautifully acknowledged by MoonXplorer who effortlessly connects feelings around climate change to the concept of family. Whether it’s biological or not, people need family for support and warmth and hugs in difficult times, and the ideologies of the climate movement are built on creating a better world for future generations, because bringing children into this world shouldn’t feel like an act of cruelty. So find and build your families, because soon we will actually be 60 years old, and whether we want to share our world with younger people or not will be in our hands.
I Swallowed Shampoo - September Hofmann
[cw: depictions of vomit and food]
Review by Jade:
When I was a young child, my sibling and I were home alone once and had to cook dinner for ourselves. We decided to make Kraft Dinner, the quintessential Canadian mac ‘n cheese knock-off, since it’s really easy for kids to understand how to make… except for measuring how much butter to use. You see, we didn’t really understand the metric of tablespoons, so we just used like, a solid third of the block of butter in the fridge. It was only while we were eating that we realized that that was definitely too much butter, but what I distinctly recall is that we then started individually Google searching how much butter consumption would be fatal. “Do you think we’ll die?” we genuinely asked each other. Yes, it was a dumb mistake to add that much butter, but it’s funny how we both got totally in our own heads about it.
I Swallowed Shampoo is a wonderful track that captures this particular experience of being convinced that you are going to die because you did something stupid. In hindsight, swallowing shampoo isn’t the end of the world at all and pro Tetris player Alex Thach has done it before [cw: gagging], but in the moment, you feel everything that led up to this, the timeline of your life coming to an end… it’s very emotionally intense and silly and September executes it in concise, TikTokkable fashion.
Speed Round!
Dear Pet Rock by MoonXplorer is the most precious thing ever created.
the boshaneers and the search for the red line by HypersonicPineapple, XaviLR & Malizma is a neat, quirky treasure map made in Line Rider.
Trapped by CatAtKMart is a high energy track with a low energy mood — hyped yet hopeless.
If you enjoyed This Will Destroy You or Formula, faults by Bevibel is a welcome return to form. This wouldn’t have felt out of place as a main channel release with a little more time and polish.
Thanks for reading!
Line Rider Review YouTube Channel
Support the Line Rider Artists Collective on Ko-Fi
Apply to Join the Line Rider Artists Collective