Here we are, in the roundup for the last month of 2021! There were a lot of remarkable Line Rider releases in this past month, but easily the most noteworthy event was gavinroo538 dropping a 54-minute Line Rider piece set to an entire album with no warning whatsoever, apparently after having worked on it for over a year without telling a soul! It’s also the first roundup that includes a track I made - obviously I can’t review my own work, so I’m very grateful to Ava Hofmann for guest reviewing my track so it can be included (and for choosing where to order it in this post). I’m also grateful for Ava, pocke, Ethan Li, and Twig and Cabaret for returning to write excellent guest reviews for several other releases. We all certainly finished 2021 off with a bang!
In unrelated news, I should mention that this month I finally finished the newest Line Rider In-Depth video essay, a nearly 2-hour video on Toivo’s 2020 release I Can’t Ride These Lines Without You. If you enjoy reading these roundups, and you haven’t seen that video yet, you’ll probably get something out of it. Hopefully in 2022 there will be more of them and they won’t be quite as long!
And finally, I want to say that while it’s been a messy year for me, the one thing I’ve consistently enjoyed is writing these roundups every month, so at this point I have no plans of stopping! Thanks for reading, and here’s to 2022!
Click here for a playlist of all videos in this roundup (in order). Titles also link to videos individually. Note that A Rush of Blood to the Head is not available on YouTube due to being blocked by the music distributor via YouTube’s automatic Content ID system. As stated in the description of gavinroo538’s 10-second YouTube upload, the full 54-minute film can be downloaded in original quality on Google Drive here (1.6GB), or watched on Vimeo in slightly-reduced quality here.
[cw: abstract representations of intense emotions]
Guest review by Ava Hofmann:
Toivo continues to explore the creative potential of using quirk techniques in ways which serve artistic goals in It’s ok, You’re ok, Toivo’s first scened track since 2020’s excellent I Can’t Ride These Lines Without You. I Can’t Ride These Lines Without You placed first in Line Rider Review’s Top 10 Tracks of 2020 and received a massive video essay written by Bevibel Harvey that released this same month. So how does Toivo follow up on this success? Thankfully, by doubling down on the parts of his work that makes his voice unique within the Line Rider space: continued explorations of starkly textural line stylizations, the deployment of high-level quirk to express states of austere emotional intensity, and an emphasis on subtle storytelling which refuses surface-level accessibility.
And look, I mean, when you’re watching It’s ok, You’re ok, it fucking HITS. Bosh starts by moving backwards on a bumpy line, and Toivo uses his high-level ability to control Bosh’s movement to make this start feel at once like something arising out of random perturbations of Bosh’s sled AND an act of precisely synched choreography. This serves to propel us into the wilder heights of intensity the track provides as it reaches its climax, wherein bosh hurtles through bands or ribbons of these fluctuating lines, tumbling in ways which feel out of control but which convey a kind of technical coldness or distance that sends a shiver up my spine. Toivo is an expert at creating atmosphere in his tracks, as “Line Rider Nightmare” has demonstrated, and this is no exception.
Except this time, Toivo chooses to direct these talents towards more austere emotional ends. This is not like I Can’t Ride These Lines Without You, which, in its frank depictions of the human desire for connection to art and with one another, comparatively almost overflows with empathy and love for others. You can detect that even in the title of this track: “It’s ok, You’re ok”? Is it really okay, am I really okay? Why are you telling me how I feel? Is this language which is trying (and failing) to convince oneself of their emotional state, or is it language being directed at me with a concerning and detached tone? There are only two lyrics in the song which Toivo has chosen to sync his track to, hiddenly subtly in the atmospheric beginnings of the track: “I don’t love you any more,” and “It’s over.”
I Can’t Ride These Lines Without You contains in it the seeds of the artistic developments in It’s ok, You’re ok—Toivo is very clearly interested in how it feels when one is rejected or denied, and in his latest track, Toivo conveys with breathtaking intensity the vertigo of that first sense of backwards-tumbling betrayal when someone you loved and trusted suddenly rejects you outright. Beyond that, Toivo’s poetic and symbolic way of conveying emotion in his work refuses complete understanding—“Why is the title presented in reverse order within the track itself?”, “What is the eldritch creature right before Bosh’s tumbling really begins?”, etc.—but this is what gives his work its power, its atmosphere, and what makes it a powerful and personal work of art by one of Line Rider’s most unique voices.
Let’s start here: in It’s ok, You’re ok, the track goes to the left. This might seem like a trivial detail, but it’s far from a fun gimmick like it was in 2007 with Body Breakdown. It’s ok, You’re ok only works at all because of a key concept that is hard for me to believe nobody has utilized for emotional effect in Line Rider to anywhere near this extent before: when Bosh moves to the left, they are sliding backwards, specifically, away from the text at the start that reads “You’re OK”. Many of us probably played with the narrative possibilities of Bosh sliding backwards in some of our first experiments in Line Rider - I know I did in my very first attempt at making a track over 15 years ago - but in It’s ok, You’re ok, Toivo has expanded this basic concept into a fully realized work that is profoundly affecting while still remaining abstract.
It’s ok, You’re ok isn’t watched so much as it is experienced. We begin with Bosh backsliding away from the “You’re OK” text, in a way that manages to feel uncontrollable without feeling chaotic, picking up speed after the music and track both drop out as we hear the whispered line “I don’t love you anymore”. It’s an incredible representation of sensing that some truly awful feelings are coming, while being powerless to do anything to stop them - fully lucid, yet utterly helpless, watching in horror as the rug is ripped out from under your feet and you feel your stomach start to drop. And then, a tiny glimpse of a nightmare made visible as the full weight of what is happening hits you, and then we’re falling, falling falling… and then, the whispered line, “It’s over.” And then it’s just panic - rage and fear and pain and anguish in an unbearably intense, entirely uncontrollable mess that washes over you in waves, getting worse and worse and worse until it feels like you’re being slowly ripped apart, and you begin to wonder if it’s possible to die from sheer emotional agony. And then… it’s over. You’re still alive. You’re still here. It’s OK.
This is, of course, merely my own personal subjective experience with Toivo’s piece, but I want to use it as a starting point to highlight just a few choices Toivo has made that made the piece land in such a visceral way for me. First, Toivo has done it again, the madlad - after a squiggle aesthetic in I Can’t Ride These Lines Without You that was utterly unique, worked in concert with the track beautifully, and fit perfectly with the theme of inner turmoil, It’s ok, You’re ok has a new dashed squiggle design that is also completely unique, also works perfectly in concert with the movement, and also fits perfectly with the themes of betrayal and abandonment. He can’t keep getting away with it!!! Second, the intense visuals in the second half of the piece, a dense mess of twisted dashed squiggly lines, are brilliantly foreshadowed in the first half as tendrils connecting with Bosh to sync with the heartbeat-esque drums. Third, the choice to establish abstract visuals of bumpy earth and moody sky at the start pay off beautifully later on in the track, when Toivo can then have the ground abruptly fall away to get that visceral stomach-drop feeling. And finally, with It’s ok, You’re ok Toivo yet again shows how capable he is at taking high-level quirk techniques and putting them to use in a narrative context. Similar to I Can’t Ride These Lines Without You’s brilliant use of temp-stalls for the knife and hanging moments, It’s ok, You’re ok utilizes increasingly intense 6th-iteration techniques to get that gut-wrenching sensation of Bosh being ripped apart by a cloud of dashed squiggles for the emotional climax of the work.
It’s ok, You’re ok is minimalist in construction - it isn’t as wide-ranging or layered or complex as I Can’t Ride These Lines Without You, but that’s only a slight against it if you’re doing something highly inadvisable like directly comparing Line Rider works to determine which ones are somehow “better” - say, hypothetically, to determine a list of the ten best Line Rider releases from the past year. It’s far better to treat art as subjective, evaluating the worth of a piece by considering how it affected you and what you got out of that experience. I don’t know if I can adequately put what I got out of the experience of watching It’s ok, You’re ok into words, but it was something that no piece of art has made me feel before - a visceral gut-punch of a track that reminded me of what I felt during some of the worst single moments in my life. In a good way. Catharsis! 🙌
Scribbles have been in vogue this past year in Line Rider, in part due to the widespread influence of vsbl’s Freaks and Toivo’s I Can’t Ride These Lines Without You in 2020. We can see this trend manifest in works like DeafTab’s Everybody Asked About You and bitchenbitchenbitchenbitchenbitchen, UTD’s Headlock—and, admittedly, in tracks of mine (such as Bells). Bevibel Harvey’s latest full release, ASDFGHJKL, cements this trend by leaning headlong into the scribble tendency at a new fever pitch. With wild, whiplash-heavy camerawork, strobe-light scribbles created with layer automation, and expressive hand-scrawled typography set to Mitski’s “My Body’s Made of Crushed Little Stars”, ASDFGHJKL is one of the most viscerally overwhelming tracks I’ve ever experienced—one of the times I watched their track, it gave me an actual, real-life headache I had to take an Advil for.
And I mention this aspect of my experience as high praise! ASDFGHJKL manages the rare feat of making me feel both claustrophobic AND agoraphobic simultaneously, and it’s a testament to the way in which Bevibel Harvey is able to use movement, text, and image to make us actually feel the emotions both within Mitski’s song and within the track itself. This felt especially true at the end of the track, which served both as an important tonal contrast within the work and a final gut punch to send us reeling into 2022. As a bit of a warning: to talk about the track further will require spoiling that ending—so, please, go and watch it!
For those of us who have watched the track: that ending, huh? I think what strikes me most about the track is that moment where the scribbles stop being a textural miasma that Bosh careens through and become a kind of scribble-structure, an entity which has boundaries, which can be exited, which has form and structure. I think this aspect struck me because it reminded me of the ways in which I have experienced struggles with mental health, especially around gender dysphoria and disassociation, it has felt like that miasma – incredibly vast and pressing in on me tight, seemingly endless. But when I have excited those periods of my life, they have felt like those scribbles at the end of ASDFGHJKL—as forms with boundaries, parameters, and structures. Those years or months of difficulty become little knots in memory, little shapes of stress and pain—they persist, in their way, of course, but they also shrink as I try to make an effort to heal.
I think in a very straightforward way, yes, ASDFGHJKL depicts something like a suicide at its very end, of course—a lyric in Mitski’s song is “kill me in Jerusalem”, and Bosh’s moment of impact is depicted as being adjacent to a cross. However, as much as the symbol of the cross fills me with my own set of personal and complicated emotions, the crucifixion also remains a cultural symbol representing redemption and resurrection. I’ve found that exiting mental health struggles—exiting disassociation—can hurt more than actually being within the throes of mental illness, because you can feel like you have been hit, directly, with the sensation of things you have lost, things you have missed, because of that mental illness. You slam headfirst into the realization that you didn’t kill yourself, the world didn’t end—things keep going, and you have to learn how to pick up the pieces, to learn what it means to keep living. Often, it feels falling. Other times, it feels like dying. This is how I choose to interpret the end of ASDFGHJKL.
[not available on YouTube - can be downloaded in original quality here or watched on Vimeo in slightly-reduced quality here]
Guest review by Twig and Cabaret:
The other day, we were having an internal conversation about why we make things in Line Rider. We realized that the main goal of our tracks is almost always to make a work to communicate and recognize the individual experience we have when listening to a particular piece of music, meaning it’s more of a medium for musical visualization than storytelling. Similar, but not exactly the same. Oftentimes, we pick songs that we have a unique way of experiencing because it’s a great way of personalizing the piece, and we can help guide the viewer through a sonic landscape that might otherwise be difficult to listen to. Our Line Rider tracks show what images and worlds travel through our mind as the song plays in real time, but we’ve never sat down with the intention of telling a specific story before choosing the music, because everything in our life is so connected to music. Heck, we named one of our system members after how we interpret the world through a musical lens.
I suppose this is to say that due to our approach to Line Rider, we actually seem to have an easier time comprehending and summarizing A Rush of Blood to the Head than some of the other reviewers. It’s incredibly difficult to parse what the piece is about and what its overall narrative is from a perspective of using Line Rider to tell stories. But to me, the answer is crystal clear: this is what goes on emotionally inside Gavin’s mind when he listens to this album. I understand how this is bothersome to some people because this album doesn’t lend itself the most gracefully to a clear story; the Coldplay album is thematically a mess and is designed to throw as many emotions at the listener as possible without much regard for cohesion. But as a musical visualization that gives insight into someone’s musical conscience and how they interpret the songs and what they make them think about and feel, this is one of the very best ever made. This is not a track about Coldplay; it’s a track about Gavin, his emotions, and his unique, personal experience when listening to music — and honestly, what an honour to be a part of that journey for 54 minutes.
Guest review by Ethan Li:
Coldplay's “Amsterdam” was a song I often listened to late at night when I felt depressed and isolated as a middle schooler, when I needed an outlet for all the feelings I was bottling up and hiding from my parents and classmates, when I wished there was someone I could talk to who would understand me. These feelings and memories were brought back really powerfully for me by the final part of Gavin's film A Rush of Blood to the Head, which uses “Amsterdam” as its concluding song. My review will focus on this final part of Gavin's film, which is the part of the film that made an impact on me because of the specific emotional associations I have with the song and with Coldplay's overall album.
It begins as Bosh, having jumped off a bridge, lands in a cave which is made dark and cramped by its pitch-black walls and dim purple ambience. The camera follows Bosh at close zoom as they crawl and slide haltingly through a maze of jagged tunnels: often hesitating, tumbling down, or squeezing between the cave floor and ceiling. In one especially striking moment, Bosh goes down a hole but then, as if momentarily having second thoughts, holds on to the ledge and attempts to climb back out before giving up. After having descended quite far underground, Bosh finally stops at and jumps down the final chasm. As they fall, the camera gradually zooms out and the last remnants of light fade away, leaving a vast abyss around a small and lonely person. But then the song begins its climactic conclusion with the guitar and drums entering in full force, and an intense and beautiful high-speed music visualization fills this space, with a variety of patterns flashing by in rapid succession. As the song finally winds down from its cathartic section, Bosh is launched up through the void and somehow reaches surface level, suddenly landing on a tulip flowerbed under a sunny sky.
It's been a long time since I moved on from Coldplay's “Amsterdam”, but this part of Gavin's film uncovers those past feelings which had made the song feel so resonant for me. Gavin's visual expression here feels like an invitation to look more compassionately at that past version of myself which had wanted to die but kept going, which survived to somehow reach a better emotional place. At the time, it felt like I was lost and wandering alone through an endless dark maze, sometimes being squeezed under external pressure, other times wanting to stop living yet too afraid to take any suicidal actions, never seeing a real way out. At my lowest points when I was pickling my mind in the concoction of self-destructive thoughts I had learned to repeat - things which would be recognizable as abusive if voiced in an interpersonal relationship - I would listen to songs such as Coldplay’s “Amsterdam”, and I would experience the climactic section of “Amsterdam” as the peak intensity of all those thoughts cycling and spiralling, and also as the tearfully cathartic release of my thoughts about suicide. In the absence of any other ways to feel my feelings besides ruminating on those thoughts, it was through listening to those songs in order to give myself space to cry that I managed to hold on and that I eventually found myself somehow falling upwards and reaching the other side with the sun shining on my face. It's not clear to me what chain of events would explain that change in my life. Because of the parallels and the raw emotional expression, Gavin’s work here makes that adolescent version of myself feel deeply understood and affirmed.
This final part of Gavin's A Rush of Blood to the Head also hits me in a more complicated way, one which helps explain how I reached that better place. After I finished middle and high school and thus passed through that period of my inner emotional life where I was metaphorically standing on the bridge, my life didn't really become sunshine and roses/tulips. Rather, I fell straight into a new maze of squeezing myself with internalized pressures, filled with all sorts of second thoughts and fears and hesitations, making choices without knowing how to become a more emotionally well-adjusted person, running away from myself, looking for the way through without anyone to give me a personally useful "cave map" for my life, still beating myself up through my habits, still unable to treat myself as being worthy of existence. In retrospect, this is a very logical destination for someone who persevered to avoid the alternative of giving up on everything, but without enough support to learn or practice more adaptive coping strategies. It was only after several years of therapy that I've found myself more comfortable with exploring and navigating this endless tunnel network of choices to build a life worth staying for, a life I would enjoy living. It's taken years of learning how to safely revisit the dark subterranean caves of my past - to go spelunking in the deepest emotional chasms, to dive into the abyss - and reexperiencing those huge intense feelings I had thrown down the pit, allowing them to flash back up in more supportive environments and with healthier emotional habits. As I cut myself loose from more of the personal patterns by which I'd held myself back from living by my values, I'm starting to really notice, hold on to, and cultivate the sunlight and flowers that are actually around me, even from within the depths of this endless underground maze that is life. So Gavin's work also feels to me like a celebration of the pain and power in honestly and authentically facing our feelings in all their complexity and reality, not just how they seem from above ground; particularly as part of the messy, overwhelming, nonlinear, never-ending - but ultimately vital and transformative - work of healing, of growing a new life after having wanted death, of (like a tulip) surviving underground every winter in order to bloom in a new form every spring.
But does my interpretation of this last part of Gavin's film make sense in the context of the overall film, particularly the film's use of graphic symbols and its writing of lyrics in previous songs such as “A Rush of Blood to the Head” or “Warning Sign”? For me, it goes back to my personal relationship with Coldplay's album: I didn't listen to those songs as much, and whenever I listened to other songs on the album I'd automatically mentally rewrite or ignore any lyrics that didn't fit my own personal narrative - but even then, I'd usually skip the song “A Rush of Blood to the Head” because it was too unsettling even with my selective hearing. I'm too close to my own mental rewrite of Coldplay's album, and all the sadness I felt while listening to any song on the album, to be able to comment usefully on Gavin's visual self-expression for the other songs in his film, or on his film's overall narrative. What I can say is that I really, really love part 11 of Gavin's A Rush of Blood to the Head as a standalone video; that it's open-ended enough that other people will probably have different interpretations even if it feels powerful for them too; and that, for reasons that are about me rather than about Gavin, part 11 would lose some of its emotional power for me if I tried to watch or analyze it as just one part of the overall film. So please read the other reviews of this film!
Guest review by Ava Hofmann:
In the third section of gavinroo538’s newest release—a 54-minute line rider film titled A Rush of Blood to the Head set to the Coldplay album of the same name—Gavin writes “gavinroo538 vs SOCIETY” in a stylized font that whizzes by so fast you can barely read it. This moment, in my view, sheds light on what are the main artistic concerns of this Line Rider behemoth: the deeply personal expression of a specific individual on one side, the navigation of oneself and one’s artmaking within a social world on the other, and the moments wherein the two may come into adversarial contact.
In this vein, A Rush of Blood to the Head feels as if it is full of imagistic symbols that seem specifically created to have meaning to Gavin and perhaps Gavin alone, save for the way they get repeated and recontextualized throughout the track. Take, for example, this symbol of two trees which appears throughout A Rush of Blood to the Head, oftentimes accompanied by the word “place”:
What Gavin is specifically imagining or thinking about when he invokes the two trees on a hill is in some sense fundamentally inaccessible to me—it feels, to me, connected with some kind of memory or association that Gavin has with certain positive and nostalgic emotions that he would rather not communicate the full context of. But I do come to some sort of an understanding of the complex emotions this symbol has for Gavin, especially when we see this in section 10:
These trees—this place—become destroyed; the personal symbol is reduced to rubble. Although I don’t know exactly what Gavin is thinking about when he invokes this symbol, I do feel as if I feel what he is feeling.
This sensation of knowing/not-knowing occurs a number of times for me throughout this track: the image of parents pushing a stroller among desert dunes and black cliffs, the repeated clock motif, the visualization of the track’s album art as a portion of Bosh’s head with the top removed, the caves in part 11.
At the same time, I feel there is also this tension or negotiation with the fact that one’s personal imagery or iconography must navigate a social world. In part 4, “The Scientist”, gavinroo538 takes a previous collaboration with a great many others within the Line Rider community and recontextualizes it within the scope of his project, and it’s not a coincidence it follows part 3 and that “gavinroo538 vs SOCIETY” declaration within his so-called “mindscape”. Gavin is leading us to think about one’s relationship with one’s community, especially an artmaking community such as Line Rider or pop music.
I suspect other reviewers may articulate notions that A Rush of Blood to the Head may feel inconsistent or like kind of a mess in terms of its themes; there is also a sense that the track feels divided in two by its separation into “light mode” and “dark mode” sections. Gavin’s over-accentuation of this divide and the undercooked part 7 which marks this divide, I think, leads into many viewers’ senses of thematic disconnection. Like crossing a threshold, we forget the themes we were lead through, even as they continue.
This is my take: the dark relationship stuff in the second part of the track is also, still, about one’s relationship to one’s community: crawling back to toxic communities that may be the only groups that understand or appreciate your interests, growing increasingly obsessed with a community until it distorts your capacity to appreciate life, that these kinds of toxic community formations, navigations of the personal need to articulate to be understood, can easily go sour and lead to alienation, violence, or even death.
Part 11 is about the redemptive potential of art and artmaking even despite this. People may have discussed the cave and how it represents an emotional low point, suicidality, or even the afterlife. These were not the things I was thinking about when I first watched this track. When I first saw the cave, I instead thought about how beautiful it was: the purple’s contrast with black, the strange and almost graceful shapes it took. And most of all: the way in which these colors and shapes were arranged such that interior and exterior became ambiguous. It was an impressive optical illusion for me: I was unable to tell what was line and what was background. In the moments the cave branches, it absolutely looks like a cave, but, with an inverted perspective, it also looks like the classic triangular wipes and soundwaves of the music visualizers that appear elsewhere in the track (and, indeed, throughout many line rider videos):
The cave is beautiful. And the cave is Line Rider? The cave is art? The cave is pop music? Can art save us from our self-destructive tendencies? I’m not sure, but my sense of Gavin’s feelings in A Rush of Blood to the Head is an absolute yes: as we take a final plunge into the cave, in a moment that gave me such strange and surprising chills, we return to the music visualizer. This time, it curves with a hand-drawn quality that felt very clearly to me like a quotation of the ending of This Will Destroy You, the only other track which has dared to push past the 45-minute mark. And if this wasn’t enough of an obvious quotation, the careening-upward dismount should clue all of us in. It feels to me like a replication of art which has perhaps meant a lot to Gavin, a tribute that also serves as a thank you. The final twist of the knife in this dialogic ending is this: while This Will Destroy You’s ending concludes with that dismount, leaving us to ponder death and the open-endedness of finality, A Rush of Blood to the Head continues, placing Bosh within a field of flowers. Gavin turns the ending of This Will Destroy You away from finality and directly into life. It is as if Gavin is saying: “This didn’t destroy me, it saved me.” This quoting, reversing, and extending of another artist’s ending suggests to me a final vision of the individual's place within society: that of people with stark and unique visions in conversation with one another, building with one another, making art together.
So. Gavinroo538’s newest release is huge. At over 54 minutes, this juggernaut set to the entirety of Coldplay’s 2002 sophomore album “A Rush of Blood to the Head” is the longest Line Rider track ever released (that takes its own length seriously, anyway). There are only a couple other album-length Line Rider tracks ever made - Branches’s 2019 release 5 Centimeters Per Second and my own This Will Destroy You. These tracks are long, but they’re also minimalist slow-burns with few visuals, mostly relying on movement-based music syncing. A Rush of Blood to the Head is not simple, minimalist, or anything remotely resembling a slow-burn. With few exceptions, every minute of A Rush of Blood to the Head features dynamic movement, scenery and illustration, text and lyrics, and even animation. This work is not only ridiculously long, it’s also dense. It’s incredible that it exists at all.
In an experience that I suspect is true not just for me and Ethan but for many millenials, it’s impossible for me to disconnect Gavin’s track from my own personal relationship to Coldplay’s album. I also suspect that neither of us is alone in that relationship being an extremely complicated one. There was a time in my life when I felt a deep connection to songs like “Warning Sign”, “Amsterdam”, and even the titular “A Rush of Blood to the Head”, that I don’t know if I can begin to try to explain or unpack in this review. What I will say is, that was during the period of my life in which, having never been in a relationship before, I obsessively pined after a single person for many consecutive years. Another thing I will say: it’s probably a good thing I was never in a relationship during that time in my life. And finally, one more: when I first sat down to watch A Rush of Blood to the Head, I was not prepared for how ten years of not listening to or thinking at all about this album while accruing immeasurable life experience would completely change my perception of these songs, and my understanding of my past self along with them. I was floored by how uncritically I had sung along to lyrics about toxic self-destruction, emotional manipulation, and suicidality more than ten years ago. All of this makes A Rush of Blood to the Head an enormous challenge for me to critically examine. But one of the highest compliments I can give a Line Rider release is when I have a deep emotional connection to the music, and I can say I strongly feel that the track did it justice. By and large, all 11 parts are solid standalone pieces, each part fits the music like hand in glove - in both granular details and in overall structure and feel, and each and every part is, in my view, dramatically better in the context of the full piece.
Coldplay’s “A Rush of Blood to the Head”, as an album, is not particularly narratively-driven. I’m sure the choice to put the darkly self-destructive titular song in the penultimate spot before the cathartic album-closer “Amsterdam” was intentional, but what is the meaning of putting the sparse, abstract, driving “Daylight” right before the generic love-ballad “Green Eyes”, and then following that up with the regretful, pleading “Warning Sign”? The answer is simple: these are just pop songs! They were written separately and then tossed into an album together, in an order that helps the whole thing flow from top to bottom. However, I think it’s clear from the structure and framing that Gavin is clearly attempting to tell an overarching narrative with A Rush of Blood to the Head, the Line Rider film. The good news is: most of the time, it actually works. The times when the narrative is at odds with the music itself are often where Gavin takes the work in radically experimental directions, such as re-appropriating the sneakily-edited-in community collaboration The Scientist (which Gavin directed back in 2020 and I found utterly bland upon original release) by juxtaposing this deeply regretful piece of music with both the immediately preceding part 3 (where Gavin writes out his “mindscape”, joking and self-reflecting his way into ouroboros-like meta-commentary), and with the haphazard, flailing, disjointed manuquirk parts of collaborators who worked on The Scientist itself. I was stunned by how this section genuinely made me feel a strong sense of empathy and compassion towards members of the Line Rider community who, for whatever reason, struggle to make anything lastingly meaningful.
It doesn’t always work though. Part 7 and the first half of part 8, in particular, don’t quite fit into this narrative, because there isn’t much in the music for Gavin to grab onto narratively, and he isn’t bringing any radical experimental re-interpretation to the table. If you have to take a bathroom break and for some reason can’t pause the video, you won’t miss anything important during part 7. (The only noteworthy choice here is the annoyingly literal choice to make the track green because the song is called “Green Eyes”.) It’s too uneventful to be interesting, but not quite slow or repetitive enough to inspire reflection or encourage meditation. Part 7 and much of part 8 feel like they were made with all the creativity sliders in Gavin’s brain set to default settings. And look, I get it - A Rush of Blood to the Head is reaching for heights no Line Rider creator has ever dared to before, so there’s bound to be some stuff in here that drags a bit. But the problem is, Gavin also struggles with the opposite issue in this piece. There’s nothing wrong with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it effect inherently, but when key narrative information is completely unparseable without hitting the pause button and frame-stepping back to see what you missed, as many of the text and illustrations are, that’s when I start to get confused about how this film was meant to be experienced. Am I supposed to be pausing every few seconds? Should I watch it all the way through and then do a close-read on my second pass, pausing to parse everything? Should I then do a third rewatch of this 54-minute piece so I can full appreciate it at full speed with the information I missed the first time around? The good news is that A Rush of Blood to the Head has a ton of rewatch value, but the bad news is that the time commitment to really appreciate the piece is actually quite a bit longer than the already-intimidating 54-minute runtime.
This isn’t the only foible of Gavin’s present in this piece. He’s very drawn to a certain speed (around 30-50 ppf), and a specific type of curve-flip-curve movement, for one, and sometimes I find myself wishing he would throw style curveballs at us more often. For another, he has a habit of drawing lyrics and text in a certain way - a “font” that’s somewhere between minimalist and just plain bad - that was quite effective in …is this it? but feels highly out of place in the self-flagellating climactic title-drop of part 10, to use one example. And for another, while after this stunning release I would never dispute the undeniable fact that Gavin is an incredibly creative and brilliant artist, the moments in A Rush of Blood to the Head that land most like a wet fart for me are some of the poorly-drawn illustrations. There are plenty of stick figures I could point to, but the one that sticks in my head is the tiger in part 5 - I can see that Gavin’s trying to draw the outline using a continuous line to fit with the swirling lines around it, but when I first saw it, my reaction was similar to a parent trying desperately to figure out what their child has proudly presented to them is supposed to be a drawing of. When I encounter an illustration in A Rush of Blood to the Head, I’m sometimes unsure if it’s supposed to be cryptic, or if it’s just so poorly drawn that I can’t figure out what I’m looking at. It’s worth mentioning that there’s nothing inherently wrong with a simplistic art style - up to and including stick figures - but if it’s a good idea to avoid trying to depict anything that’s hard to draw unless you have drawing experience under your belt that Gavin unfortunately lacks.
And finally, A Rush of Blood to the Head has many of the same issues as Gavin’s 2019 release Innuendo - sometimes it feels like Gavin can’t figure out when he wants to depict the lyrics literally, when he wants to allude to a deeper meaning or overarching narrative, and when he wants to write out the lyrics as text. Gavin’s desire to have a work be everything it could be all at once occasionally translates to haphazardly flipping between several different ideas that absolutely work in isolation, but feel separated from each other when placed side by side, such a narrow passage with a ticking clock animation for the line “Closing walls and ticking clocks” in part 5, surrounded on either side by swirling, fluid lines and movement, that is again studded with the occasional random literal image, like Bosh crashing abruptly into an apple on top of a large drawing of a head seemingly just because Coldplay vocalist Chris Martin sang the line, “Shoot an apple off my head” before resuming the fluid movement. Sure, that’s the lyric in the song! But it doesn’t really gel with anything around it. Thankfully, the imagery never gets quite as pedestrianly literal as the worst bits of Prospekt’s March/Poppyfields, but it’s still groan-worthy when a lyric like “Give me real, don’t give me fake” in part 1 sees Bosh zoom past a cluster of three drawings: a UFO, a piece of paper with “news” written across the top, and a TV with a fox on it. A Rush of Blood to the Head is never quite a lyric video, never quite a music visualizer, never quite creates a strong sense of place or travel, and never quite embraces a full iconographic approach. Not that I think Gavin should have picked one of these approaches for the entire piece - but in a 54-minute piece, it would be nice if the track didn’t keep changing its approach multiple times in the span of a few seconds when the music doesn’t.
AND YET!!! I could provide a genius creative decision as a counter-example for virtually every criticism I’ve listed. I can,and I will!!! Let’s break it DOWN!!! The structure of part 1 is absolutely brilliant, juxtaposing sections of stark minimalist flat-line music visualization contrasting with a section where Bosh floats past illustrations in space and a gorgeous section with smooth, flowing lines and curves, before combining the flowing lines with the visualizer to conclude a stunning opener. After that barnstormer, part 2 is just a good ol’ manual track that sticks to its guns, never trying to be anything more than what it is - a perfect palate cleanser - and that makes the large drawn “YEAH”s land as good-natured japes. Part 3 and 4, as previously mentioned, take us in a radically unexpected direction, and never get bogged down by trying to mix in anything conventional. And then part 5 is jam-packed with amazing moments, including the best animations in the entire work. When the lyric “You are” first appears animated in that half-hearted overlapping …is this it?-esque way before being unexpectedly animated as a cursive drawing when the vocal harmonization comes in, I got chills. And Gavin doesn’t stop there - animating fast-moving lines that resemble sparkles, confetti, fireflies, and more. And then everything but piano drops out and Gavin hits us with a curveball - an explosive animation of the non-lyric text “WELCOME TO YOUR IDEAL WORLD” that sounds like a dramatic radio announcer in your head despite being entirely visual - right before everything slams back in with the rest of the instruments. And then, finally, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, Gavin animates “YOU ARE HOME” on-screen - a direct response to the repeated lyric “Home, home / Where I wanted to go”. I missed this on my first two watchthroughs, which meant that on my third it hit me like a ton of bricks. This moment literally made me gasp and put my hand to my chest. I’ve listened to “Clocks” hundreds of times and it always felt like it ended on a longing note, and somehow with one half-second animation Gavin gave my 15-year-old self the closure I didn’t know I needed.
Holy shit we’re not even halfway through!!! Part 6’s “Daylight” was always my least favorite song on “A Rush of Blood to the Head”, so I was delighted that Gavin represented this relentlessly driving, yet utterly desolate song with barren desert landscapes that feel like driving down a long highway in the middle of nowhere, brilliantly conjuring a sense of place and travel that I earlier said A Rush of Blood to the Head never did like the fucking hypocrite that I am!!! Gavin also capably re-employs swirling lines from parts 1 and 5, and remixes the motif from part 1’s “Open up your eyes" for the lyric “Slowly breaking through the daylight” in a stroke of genius. Part 7 is uninteresting, yes, but it’s worth noting that the font is carefully chosen to be smooth and pleasant, a choice made almost nowhere else in the piece that reflects how “Green Eyes” is the only truly wholesome song on the entire album. Much of part 8 is basically part 2 but in dark mode, but after thinking about it for two seconds I realized it totally fits - what is “Warning Sign” but a sadder and more reflective “In My Place”? And then the ending absolutely floored me on first watch - the last seconds of part 8 feature the lyrics “I should not have let you go” and “So I crawl back / into your open arms” drawn out in a disturbingly shriveled font that made me realize, for the first time in my life - after hundreds of listens to “Warning Sign”when I was a teenager, that this song most likely represented a toxic, abusive partner spinning a tale of regret and emotional manipulation. FUCK.
Continuing in the vein of me being a fucking hypocrite, part 9 is largely a music visualizer - in fact, it’s the best flat-line-based music visualizer I’ve ever seen in Line Rider. From the stellar animations of the title, “Whisper” when it appears in the lyrics, to the minimalist visuals that expertly depict the relentless, steady music, to the brillant animations like Escher-esque arrows for the line “Should I go forwards or backwards”, or white expanding to fill the screen for “Night turns to day”, to the effortlessly perfect movement and visuals for the coda that’s so well-executed it makes me jealous. Then, in yet another direct refutation of one of my earlier criticisms, Gavin has made the brilliant iconographic decision to draw increasingly large shriveled hearts throughout most of part 10, which emphasize how utterly toxic and self-destructive the lyrics are. Given that I used to listen to this song completely uncritically as a teenager (like I said earlier, it’s probably a good thing I never got to date the girl I was obsessed with!), the first time I saw this part I got full-body chills as the horrific realization dawned on me that I had had the potential inside me to be an abusive partner all along. And then - Gavin hit me with the sequence of drawings for the third verse. They’re still poorly-made drawings of stick figures, yes - and they still go by a bit too fast to get a good look at them, but in the moment, that didn’t really matter - that sequence fucking ruined me. I could describe them - in fact, I started to write it out just now before changing my mind, because honestly, if you’ve seen it you already know what I’m talking about, and if you’ve read this far and haven’t watched A Rush of Blood to the Head all the way through yet… I recommend turning all the lights off, curling up somewhere comfortable, and giving it your full attention. You might not catch every detail, but I’d be shocked if you didn’t get something meaningful out of it. I haven’t even gotten to the last 8 minutes of A Rush of Blood to the Head, but other reviewers have discussed much of it above already, and I don’t know if I could even do it justice anyway, so I think I’ll stop here. Suffice it to say: they’re wholly enthralling. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they make you cry.
And this is where I think to myself: this track, this Line Rider film, that I have so many criticisms of that I can talk about them for as long as I did - how the fuck does the end of A Rush of Blood to the Head hit so fucking hard??? To be brutally honest with myself, I don’t think I know. But my best guess is that maybe it works because Gavin, instead of trying to make what he imagined others would like, instead of doing what others told him he was good at, focused on expressing himself. Perhaps Gavin focused on making something that wasn’t trying to be “good”, just trying to be as uniquely Gavin as a Line Rider work could possibly be. Maybe it’s a good thing that Gavin doubled down on everything that he wanted to make - after all, A Rush of Blood to the Head itself is vastly more meaningful than anything I could ever write about it! In the end, I can at least say one thing for sure: only gavinroo538 could ever have made anything remotely like A Rush of Blood to the Head. 🙌
Live Like a Baby, as the title suggests, reflects on the common joke of returning to our primal form, based upon an almost universal experience of feeling upset by how civilization constricts us. The track lines themselves are crudely drawn but fairly synced, which is likely done to emulate the process of making a track carelessly (without negative connotation). The movement is better than how a young child would execute it, and honestly I can’t blame OTDE for not following through with how one would. If I made this track, I wouldn’t be able to help myself from keeping the movement as precise as it is, and I don’t think that comes as a detriment to the track.
OTDE draws simple illustrations that cycle between two forms using layer automation. Though the way they’ve done this with multiple colors is likely ingenious (my guess as to how it’s done is using a modulo function in the script), that’s clearly not where it’s most focused. It’s in style, with the silliness in the track, and the shapes represented are in line with the track’s simplicity.
One moment that particularly struck me was about a minute in, where the song says “rolling around on the floor,” and the rider seems to touch a line during each syllable. When I first saw this moment, I was put off by the mismatch between the amount of syllables and lines touched. Upon further reflection, though, I believe my discomfort rejects the ethos of the track. Why should I care if there’s one extra line? Abandoning that care would make me happier. I also noticed that I am likely looking into it too much, as it’s possible that the line I perceived as being synced to “floor” is actually synced to one of the guitar strums.
Regardless, I think returning to primal form is a twisted wish. We often assume that life when we were younger was better just because we theoretically don’t have the problems that we currently experience, likely as a result of nostalgia – we only remember the good elements. I’ve noticed that close-minded adults often project their problems onto younger people because of that. I could easily see someone saying, “you kids today have it so good, I wish I could just cancel my insurance and stare at my toes, abandon my sled, and throw my computer in a lake.” This neglects the fact that there are problems with being younger that we simply don’t think about because we see our current lives as worse. Personally, I intellectually know that my experience as a child was extremely traumatic in many ways, but for some reason I can’t help but forget that when I reflect on it because of my current stresses. That’s why I think it’s okay to feel discontent with those uncomfortably synced lines in the track. Our criticisms of the world around us is the price that we have to pay for gaining knowledge as we grow as people. Even if a baby or a young child doesn’t have to worry about those problems, that’s not necessarily a good thing.
Live Like a Baby manages to be full of creative ideas while remaining simple and childlike in appearance, like a really terrific children’s book. The track is slow, basic, and simple, while maintaining just the right amount of playfulness in the music sync, as well as the general aesthetic of someone’s first attempt at making something in Line Rider. Add on top of this some delightful animated illustrations, clever camera work, and some three-rider offsled action, and you’ve got a fantastic little comedic Line Rider piece. OTDE does an excellent job parsing out when to use illustrations, when to draw the lyrics on screen, and when to just draw arrows, musical notes, or colorful shapes.
There’s a number of subtle comedy gags in the piece, but the best moment by far is when, after a long, slow zoom-in on an offsled Bosh over lyrics about self-reflection (where it feels like the singer is maybe getting a bit too real trying to sell you on completely abandoning adulthood), a sudden zoom-out reveals that Bosh is now on a computer screen submerged in water for the line, “Throw your computer in a lake,” delivered with over-the-top seriousness. The piece is then capped off nicely as our offsled Bosh is joined by two other sledders, who also abandon their sleds and join in chaotically bouncing around to the music. I don’t know if any kids will wind up actually watching Live Like a Baby, but it encapsulates the best kind of children’s media - lots of fun for kids, with a subtle edge of black comedy to entertain the parents of said children. 🙌
Easily Anton’s most abstract and avant-garde release yet, surrender is absolutely best watched knowing nothing about what you’re about to see, so if you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend watching it before reading this review!
The opening of surrender is one of the strongest I’ve seen in recent memory, with an ultra-slow zoom out to reveal more and more and more Boshes, all falling in sequence in slow motion, before one suddenly flies offsled, then another, then another, and then all of the rest of them at once as the bass kicks in. I got chills watching this for the first time - it’s one of my favorite moments in any Line Rider track, period - taking the concept Ethan Li first explored in A Fleeting Life and expanding on it brilliantly. The second section of surrender is also strong, with Bosh suddenly speeding up to zoom around concentric circles reminiscent of Hanuman’s Centrism but with something like a black hole at the center. The third and final section is a stunning visual that fits beautifully with the established themes - Bosh’s body parts very slowly break apart and drift away from each other, visualizing a kind of metaphysical disintegration.
However, in my opinion (full disclosure - I helped Anton with the recording and editing of this piece) this last section drags on too long without pushing or developing upon the concept enough to make it hold the viewer’s interest. It’s highly compelling, but with 90 seconds of nothing else happening on screen it really starts to drag by the end - at the very least, I wanted Bosh’s body parts to spread out to the point where they started escaping the camera bounds or necessitating a zoom-out, but there’s so much more Anton could have done with the concept instead of stopping here. I suppose that’s a job for future Line Rider creators. Ultimately, surrender is a solid piece with an incredible base concept and brilliant ideas that doesn’t quite stick the landing, but I think it still holds together quite well. And man does that opening sequence slap. 🙌
It’s been 9 months since Mashcake’s third and most recent release, and I was starting to wonder if those three tracks were all we were going to get from him. What a delightful surprise it was, then, to see a new release from him that I would consider to be his best work yet. Magic Lantern Days features pleasant, imaginative scenery and simple yet deeply compelling movement. The song’s lyrics mix religious imagery with references to nuclear power and machine learning, and Mashcake chooses to represent this first with metal platforms that appear old and worn down by nature, and then, as the music picks up, with a refraction of scenery first used to depict hills into either side of a tunnel, taking on a resemblance to vines or cords. In a series of extraordinarily simple choices that are nevertheless strikingly creative and evocative, Mashcake studs this tunnel with drawings of trees that seem to be growing from the top to the bottom of this tunnel just as much as bottom to top, before the vines refract again to abstract, swirling lines, as the side Bosh is sledding on shifts into clouds, before an explosive sunrise turns both sides of the tunnel to clouds, then stars, and then… the track abruptly ends.
As with all of Mashcake’s previous releases, Magic Lantern Days has an incredibly strong sense of place - a sense that Bosh actually is somewhere, and the combination of this with the track’s sweeping movement and poignant use of lightly abstracted visuals makes Magic Lantern Days uniquely compelling in ways that are extremely difficult to describe, as much as I’m trying my best here! I find myself longing for more, though, not just because the piece was cut off abruptly halfway through the song, but because it really felt like it was going somewhere, and in less than two minutes Mashcake had somehow managed to get me completely invested in wherever we were headed, which made the abrupt ending almost feel like a betrayal. I hate it! Which is to say, I love it, and desperately wish it was longer. 👍
At once a direct sequel to UTD’s previous release Silhouette[cw: abuse] and a work that blends that piece with OTDE’s June release where a garden once grew, Where a Silhouette Once Walked all but requires the viewer to have watched both of those works to have any clue about what’s going on. That said, Where a Silhouette Once Walked is a surprisingly good sequel, allowing the poor traumatized main character of Silhouette some closure after the harrowing domestic abuse depicted in that track. UTD does this by taking the collective trauma of humanity’s attempts to codify nature as something separate, malleable, and exploitable as depicted by OTDE in where a garden once grew, and relating it to the experience of a victim of abuse struggling to make sense of the traumatic experience - coming to terms with how little control and autonomy they ever actually had in the relationship.
The construction of the piece itself is shockingly simple - our main character remounts the sled and very slowly sleds along a bumpy path, overlaid with translucent footage of the static from where a garden once grew and punctuated by distorted clips from Silhouette, until Bosh catches up with a third character, and the static finally fades as they join them on a smoother line and the two slowly ride off the screen together. Where a Silhouette Once Walked might be a bit of a challenge for some to parse, especially given the context required to fully appreciate it, but if you found meaning or resonance in where a garden once grew and Silhouette, it’s very likely you’ll find it here too. The difference is, instead of being disturbing or unsettling, Where a Silhouette Once Walked is a piece that might perhaps bring you some peace. 👍
You can always trust pocke to take an idea and run with it, experimenting and iterating on it in endlessly imaginative ways. The core idea in Forever - fill the background in black and put on top of it a four-frame animation cycle of white lines using layer visibility automation - is a fantastic one, evoking animated neon signs, but pocke takes the concept to another level, giving us dashed circles moving like gears, spinning clocks, raining storm clouds, beating hearts, a trippy fast-moving grid, and even track lines that animate to appear as Bosh sleds on them. It feels perhaps a tad unfocused at times, and drags a bit here and there, but, much like pocke’s February release New Machines, Forever is a delightful potpurri of brilliant ideas, all based around a central concept, tossed together into a delightful salad. 👍
Xavier’s first major release using the Linerider.com build in almost two years naturally makes full use of colored layers, as well as video editing to fade between multiple recordings, to make the most Christmas-y Line Rider release of 2021. Not only does it have red and green lines and ribbons throughout, but also dual rider choreography featuring red-scarf and green-scarf sledders, and even delightful full-color illustrations of Christmas trees, presents, stockings, mistletoe, and more. At first blush, it’s a lovely little piece, but upon closer critical examination, all of the appeal of All I Want for Christmas is You is surface-level.
For one thing, this track is full of sudden jerks, tumbles and high speeds, not to mention manuals, made more jarring by often being invisible, that seem to be Xavier’s default whenever he isn’t sure what to put on screen - which, incidentally, is most of the time Mariah Carey isn’t singing a word for an object you can draw - an issue that gets worse the longer the track goes on. Comparing this with Xavier’s last release, And the day goes on, it seems that he struggles when the music isn’t throwing something new at you every second - but Mariah Carey’s ubiquitous Christmas pop anthem really only has one core thought, spelled out plainly in the title of the song. You can see Xavier having a hard time with conveying this single overarching concept with how virtually all the lovely illustrations - the presents, the stockings, the toy train, the snowman, the christmas list, and even the reindeer, are all depicting things Mariah Carey is singing that she doesn’t care about, and doesn’t want. Maybe that would be ok if the dual rider choreography came in whenever she sang about what she does want (“you”), and this does happen a couple times - most notably when Mariah Carey mentions mistletoe directly - but it seems inconsistent at best. “I just want you here tonight / Holding on to me so tight”, for example, sees red-scarf sledder alone, relentlessly stunting of a bunch of plain lines in superficial sync to the music.
You can almost feel Xavier getting tired of the piece when the lyric “All the lights are shining so brightly everywhere / And the sound of children's laughter fills the air” is represented by the two sledders coasting along a flat line in nose manual formation as red and green lines move around the screen, and text reading “All I Want For Christmas Is You” flashes from black to yellow as it zooms by at speeds that make it borderline-illegible. I can see what Xavier was goingfor here, but it’s a moment that feels painfully rushed and showcases a number of the flaws in All I Want for Christmas is You. The ending, though, is the real nail in the coffin. After the sledders continue to ceaselessly stunt around each other near the end of the song (on red and green lines, so technically we haven’t completely abandoned the Christmas theme), when Mariah hits her final high “youuuuuuuuuuu”, our red-scarf sledder takes this moment to zoom - at the highest speeds of the track yet - away from green Bosh, as we slowly fade to black. I guess all they really wanted for Christmas was to get as far away from “you” as fast as possible. 🤷
Before I started this review, I knew nothing about the Minecraft YouTuber and Twitch streamer known as Dream, and hooooooooo boy do I regret learning all of the information I did in the last hour. For the sake of those who are blissfully unaware of this song’s origins, like I was before tonight, I’m going to skip right past a whole lot of cursed knowledge that makes me feel very strongly that internet celebrities, generally speaking, were a mistake, to the only piece of information that is actually important: This song became a meme because it’s an attempt at emotionally vulnerable art by an e-celeb who I think is fair to describe as a toxic fucking mess. From what I can tell, the Line Rider piece by Xavier was originally conceived as, “I’m gonna make a bad Line Rider track to an internet meme,” and then at some point it became… something else. Before I had any context for the music, it came off to me as a bit childish, but also completely genuine in the emotions it was portraying. In the autism community, the term “masking” means pretending to be neurotypical, faking that you’re not autistic. It sucks and it’s exhausting, but it can be necessary in situations that might be unaccommodating or even dangerous to alienate non-autistic people in, such as school, work, the doctor’s office - you get the idea. I genuinely find deep emotional meaning in the metaphor of wearing a mask for so long that the mask itself starts to feel like the “real” me, rather than the person underneath. After learning more of the context, the song has taken on a much more cynical and manipulative hue, but it’s impossible for me to discard the emotions I still feel listening to it.
Xavier’s Line Rider piece does a surprisingly good job matching all the layers in “Mask” - from the weirdly immature surface-level lyrics like, “But the fact is / I need help I’m failing all my classes / They think that I need glasses / I just really wish that I could pass this”, depicted with half-hearted hastily-drawn illustrations, to the cynical branding in the deeply hostile landscape of internet culture represented by low-effort pencil track, to the undeniably real emotions at the core of the music with surprisingly affecting animations for the lyrics, “And it just keeps on piling / It’s so terrifying / But I keep on smiling”. It’s, perhaps unintentionally, an interpretation that accurately captures the song on every level. When it comes to the question of why this was made, and whether I think people should watch it, however, I’m conflicted, and I suspect Xavier is too. The second chorus literally re-uses the same video clip as the first, much of the piece feels rushed, and, most tellingly, this is the first time Xavier - someone known for uploading weird short glitch clips and multi-hour joke tracks to his main channel - has posted a track to his second channel that doesn’t really feel like a joke. Maybe it started out as one, but it doesn’t feel like it came out that way in the end. Ultimately, though, I don’t think any of the disturbing things I have learned about the song should lead me to see to the creation of this track as regrettable, or worthless, or even questionable. Not all art is primarily made for an eventual audience. In my experience from this past month, sometimes you start out making art for reasons that aren’t at all clear, even to yourself, before the product itself eventually provides you with those answers - and the separate question of what to do with art like this once it’s done isn’t as consequential as the messy process of creation itself. 🤷
After El Loco Invisible’s fascinating October release Descenso del Monte Rascaestrellas, Barranco de la Gran Leche (loosely translated as “Great Milk Ravine”) feels like a bland, watered down version of the same concept. Bosh still descends a mountain here, but there is no unconventional camera angle, no creepy original audio, no multiple riders, no rewinding, and instead of a nearly 15-minute runtime this new piece is barely more than a single minute. Additionally, the premise is way less interesting - Bosh sleds down a mountain towards a cliff (that, according to the description, falling off of would be certain death), and then… doesn’t fall off, at which point the video abruptly ends. The unique sketchy drawings are still there, but everything that made them interesting is lacking. I wonder how much of what made Descenso del Monte Rascaestrellas interesting was done with intention, and why El Loco Invisible backtracked. Did he not understand what made it interesting, or did he just feel like it had failed to resonate? Was Barranco de la Gran Leche made the way it was because of lack of confidence in his work, disappointment with a lack of response, or another reason entirely? These are questions I suppose only he can answer. 👎
This one is perhaps DoodleChaos’s most gimmicky and uninspired Line Rider release to date. Following up on his October release I recreated Line Rider in 3D and the result feels cursed, DoodleChaos has taken the same concept of putting a Line Rider track in a 3-dimensional space with a new made-from-scratch track, and some other additions. For one, the amusingly cursed 3D Bosh model has been replaced with a Snowman on a sled, a choice that seems largely based on the title of the song the piece is set to, an instrumental cover of Sia’s “Snowman” by Vitamin String Quartet. Additionally, the most noticeable and also weirdest addition are the hundreds of other snowmen that come flying onto the screen, each slamming into the ground with a poof of fireworks next to our sledding snowman as they go by. I’m pretty sure they are based on a MIDI roll of the music, which would mean the colors of their hats and fireworks are supposed to correspond with which instrument in the quartet is playing, and their positions are supposed to correspond with the pitch of the notes being played, but with the camera constantly swinging around it would be difficult to tell that this is what was happening if it wasn’t implied in the video’s title - not to mention the fact that this slow, lyrical string quartet piece is a terrible choice for a MIDI visualizer, let alone one with so many flying objects impacting the ground. Making all of this worse, the graphics still have all the weird blocky edges and dark shadows typical for simple 3D visuals created in Blender, and instead of embracing the janky, cursed look - an approach that worked well for I recreated Line Rider in 3D and the result feels cursed - I combined Line Rider with MIDI Visualization seems like it’s trying to downplay it, but it’s not quite visually pleasing enough to work. The choreography is much more restrained, presumably to avoid the weird tunnels and lines floating in the sky, but this also gets rid of any suspense or excitement in the piece, and it doesn’t help that the music is pretty bland and uneventful. It’s perfectly fine as background music, but why would anyone want to make a visualizer to this?
Well, if you open the full YouTube description you can see a note that the video was “sponsored by” Vitamin String Quartet - or, in other words, they paid DoodleChaos to make this piece. It might surprise some people to learn that Vitamin String Quartet is not actually a string quartet, but “a series of string quartet projects developed and produced by CMH Label Group”. Put more bluntly, they are a large music company that hires a vast array of musicians to play string covers of popular music, putting out several albums of cover songs every year. Full disclosure: I worked with Vitamin String Quartet in 2019 on Kill This Love, and they were one of the worst clients I’ve done work for. Communicating with them was consistently a struggle, I had to explain to them how YouTube’s Content ID system was using their music to claim the video I was making for them, they had a very tight turnaround in which they kept asking for major revisions that repeatedly and thoroughly misunderstood both the capabilities of the tools I was working with at the time and what I was trying to do with the piece artistically, and to cap it all off they recruited DoodleChaos as a collaborator for the sole reason that he had a channel with a lot more subscribers, the result being most people assumed DoodleChaos had made the whole thing as opposed to just adding the musical-notation-themed decorations (Vitamin String Quartet themselves have played into this by mentioning “collaborations with DoodleChaos” in promotional material afterwards, long before I combined Line Rider with MIDI Visualization, without any mention of me). I’ve enjoyed working with DoodleChaos on other projects, but when he asked if I’d be interested in working with Vitamin String Quartet again I declined. I’m glad I did! 👎
