February 2021 Line Rider Roundup
Welcome! It’s not truly the first roundup, but it’s the first published roundup, so it all feels very exciting and official now. Since this is the first one, I want to warn you that I have Very Strong Opinions that you might totally disagree with, and also that if you disagree with me that’s totally ok. We’re all different people so it’s only natural for us to have different tastes in art!
Click here for a playlist of all videos in this roundup (in order). Titles also link to videos individually.
🙌 = highly recommended
👍 = recommended
🤷 = neutral
👎 = not recommended
The Little Lab Rat & The Big Escape - OTDE
OTDE’s first release of 2021 is an absolute juggernaut. Combining some of the most engaging parts of some of their most engaging previous releases such as Shortcuts, The Junkyard, and Dangerous Cargo, The Little Lab Rat & The Big Escape is a fully-scened 7-minute epic synced to Binky by Snarky Puppy in which Bosh finally rejects humanity and returns to nature, featuring sections that are distinct not because they feature different technical genres, but because they look and feel like different environments, and because Bosh moves through these environments in different ways - a delightful subversion of the “omnitrack” genre similar to Condundrumer’s completed version of Omniverse II. If you took the philosophy that Conundrumer embraced while scening Omniverse II, and, instead of repurposing an old track, make a new one from the ground up, you might get something like Little Lab Rat & The Big Escape - which not not to say it looks or feels anything like Omniverse II, because it’s entirely its own thing. The most striking way it differs is in its approach to techniques - gravity wells, manuals, flings, and multilining are all frequently utilized, but take more of a back seat instead of hogging the spotlight, keeping the focus on the endlessly creative ways Bosh traverses each new space. The result is the most immersive track I’ve seen in a very long time, culminating in an extended sequence of music synced scenery buildup that - if you’ll forgive one more Omniverse II comparison - feels a bit like the end sequence of Omniverse II, if, instead of escaping the matrix into the void, Bosh was escaping civilization into the wilderness. If you can’t tell by all my comparisons to Omniverse II (my favorite Line Rider track), The Little Lab Rat & The Big Escape is staggeringly good. An absolute must watch.
🙌
Run Away With Me - Andrew Hess
It says a lot about someone when they’re comfortable enough with who they are and what they like that they chose to make a Line Rider track to a Carly Rae Jepsen song that’s most well known from a Vine of a seal playing a saxophone with surprisingly high production values and not a shred of ironic distancing in sight. Run Away With Me, Andrew Hess’s first release of 2021, isn’t just a bold statement in defense of unapologetic enjoyment of mainstream pop music, it’s also a Line Rider track, one that’s an absolute joy to watch. Combining the rock-solid execution of Brain Power, the emotional heft of Formation, and the earnest vulnerability of Release Me, this track completely blew me away. Run Away With Me is jam-packed full of breathtaking moments, from the exquisite dual-rider choreography that feels like watching figure skaters, to the splendor of the recurring starry night skies motif, to the smashing title drops that make you feel like you’re at a live concert and should start singing along. The joy of this track is infectious, and I challenge you to tear down any personal inhibitions you may have around shamelessly enjoying a romantic pop song and appreciate this track with your whole body. Put this up on the biggest screen you have, crank the volume, and throw your very own one-person dance party. I dare you!
🙌
A Fleeting Life - Ethan Li
Ethan Li’s debut is possibly the track that most accurately captures a feeling nearly everyone who has messed around in Line Rider has considered at some point: the existential nature of Bosh falling endlessly through a white void. I’m reminded of the line from the “Tribute to Line Rider” that long ago some anonymous legend wrote on the Fandom.com Line Rider wiki that described this void as the “infinite chasm” of “the chalk-white matrix”. What really stands out about A Fleeting Life is the absolutely stellar cinematography. The camerawork is shockingly good, the offscreen manipulation of the other two riders to get them to float across the screen in just the right way is seamless and beautiful, the postproduction is a great touch without becoming distracting, and the pacing!! The pacing is nothing short of stunning. A Fleeting Life is similar to Chuggers’ recent work, especially in its ambivalence about whether it’s a Line Rider track or an experimental video art piece, but the undercurrent of tongue-in-cheek humor in a track like Stairs has been replaced with a genuine encouragement towards pensive self-reflection. A Fleeting Life scratches an itch I didn’t know I had and leaves me wanting more.
🙌
New Machines - pocke
Pocke’s work has always been consistently unique and creative, but A Fool Moon Night, his first attempt at something grandiose from back in November, while a very enjoyable track, struggled with a case of too many ideas without enough glue to hold the piece together as a whole. In New Machines, there’s definitely still a lot going on, but each idea lingers just long enough to be seen and absorbed before pocke hits you with a new one. The theming is also much stronger - visuals of computer circuitry and macro-generated animations punctured by the occasional analog or semi-organic element create a vibe of an artificial intelligence struggling to understand things like stars and cities with nothing to go on but clip art. There are a few times when Bosh’s interaction with the track feels a bit disconnected from the visuals, like they’re two separate things slapped together, but New Machines is consistently brilliant, endlessly creative and totally unique. Grab a friend, shout, “Dude check this out!”, and watch it together, and I guarantee your friend will be like “Dude I have no idea what I just watched but that was sick!”
🙌
A Love Most Ardent - OTDE
Minimalist multi-rider tracks choreographed to vaguely classical-sounding music have started to feel almost passé since the genre became so saturated by DoodleChaos and Matthew Buckley’s work, but A Love Most Ardent manages to stand out. OTDE’s first proper dual-rider track feels more like a choreographed dance between two riders than any prior track of this genre, which is achieved primarily with the combination of three elements: First, separate paths for the two riders that perfectly mirror each other; second, heavy use of the same space and the same lines by both riders; and third, frequent use of downward motion, rather than the standard of left-to-right. All three of these together help A Love Most Ardent feel like something fresh and new, despite an aesthetic that superficially resembles that of DoodleChaos and Matthew Buckley’s greatest hits. This also helps me look past the last third of the track becoming largely indistinguishable from their work as the music swells - it feels more like a return to a familiar place than an imitation of someone else’s work. In the end, A Love Most Ardent is a sweet little track that you’ll probably like.
👍
Wishing On You - BeljihnWahfl
Of all of the love-themed tracks this month, this one has the most swagger. I’m always a sucker for smooth manual choreography in service of music sync, and BeljihnWahfl’s debut absolutely delivers on that front. It’s pretty standard manuquirk fare, but Wishing On You keeps everything feeling fluid by letting gravity and inertia do most of the work, keeping the quirk tastefully limited in a way that never threatens to overshadow the chill vibe with exhibitionism. It’s also nice to see a manuquirk that isn’t allergic to flatsledding, which helps keep the choreography from feeling forced, and the use of scenery to extend and connect track lines in the faster section helps on this front as well. The weakest part of the track is its inclusion of the lyrics, which are occasionally written out on screen in the first third of the track, in a variety of inconsistent styles that are never developed, an idea that doesn’t really detract much but doesn’t add much either. Ultimately it’s not much more than a chill well-executed manual track, which makes it rather forgettable, but it’s still a fun watch.
👍
Futile Devices - Ava Hofmann
Like Falling in Love With You (reviewed below), Ava Hofmann’s second Line Rider endeavor also takes on the aesthetic of one long squiggly line in an attempt to capture vulnerable feelings, though this track has a lot more substance under the surface. In Futile Devices, Bosh meanders, falters, and struggles through this track in a way that nicely reflects the struggles of the singer to communicate their feelings of love in words, a connection between track and song made more explicit by the scribbled drawings throughout the track that range from the abstract (sine waves to represent guitar music) to the literal (a clock to represent time). A recurring sound wave motif to represent piano notes was also a nice touch. Sometimes the vague ideas in this track feel like they are only loosely held together, and there’s nothing here that really grabbed me, but it does make me interested to see whatever she does next.
👍
Descend - Malizma
Malizma’s newest release is definitely the most disorienting track release this month. Most of the track features Bosh at an uncomfortably close zoom moving at an extremely slow speed, slowly descending shallow stairs precisely synced to plodding, monotonous piano music, until a jarring middle section when Bosh abruptly starts falling through the ground that’s reminiscent of Hanuman's work Delirium. The moment that stands out the most is Bosh sledding very quickly around a large clock for an extended amount of time, which thematically fits the clocklike music quite well. Unfortunately the clock and the shallow stairs are the only two memorable visuals in the track, and neither are ultimately developed. The elements of a cool trippy piece are here, but the lack of a clear artistic direction, the limited visual ideas, and jarring movement leaves me a bit underwhelmed.
🤷
Amélie Theme: Comptine d'un Autre Été - Matthew Buckley
Matthew Buckley’s newest work, as he continues to hone his craft of simple understated Line Rider tracks impeccably choreographed to vaguely classical-ish music, sees him returning to a single rider for the first time since Schindler's List from last October. As per usual, the track as a whole is inoffensive and unchallenging, but a reliably satisfying experience. The main highlight of this one is when multilined rolls are used to visualize the piano arpeggios. It doesn’t depart much from the rest of Matthew Buckley’s body of work, but if his work is something you appreciate, it’s worth a watch.
🤷
Falling in Love With You - Squiggly / FridayFlareon
As someone who has been pushing for emotional vulnerability in Line Rider since 2016, I always like seeing Line Rider tracks that are unapologetically sentimental, like this one made for Valentine’s Day and set to one of the many, many covers of “Can’t Help Falling in Love”. Squiggly’s debut has a nice visual theme of one continuous squiggly line that links all the track lines together into a pleasant aesthetic, and the lyrics branch off this line into cursive lyrics in a way that feels natural and cohesive. Where the track falters is with its almost religious adherence to the idea that it must contain manuals. My complaint isn’t primarily that the manuals are poorly executed (whatever that might mean), but that they are 1) tonally dissonant with the other elements of the work, and 2) treated more like tricks to be executed than a choreography tool. As demonstrated by other tracks released this month, the act of balancing Bosh can be used to massively open up choreographic possibilities in Line Rider, but this track frequently sees Bosh dropped unceremoniously into manuals on relatively flat lines, as they move rightward at a largely unchanging speed. With relatively static movement and almost no development on the central concept throughout the track, this work is sweet but a bit boring.
🤷
Slidey - Megan Von Dreau
I believe this is an upload by an educator who had her students make original music with a program called BeepBox and then make a Line Rider track in it. I wish I could have been in that class as a kid! But seriously, it is super cool to see educators using Line Rider in the classroom. After over a decade of kids messing around in Line Rider in class instead of doing whatever they are supposed to be doing, it looks like some teachers have adopted a mindset of “If you can’t beat them, join them!” You love to see it. This track itself doesn’t have anything uniquely interesting going on, but it’s whimsical and eclectic and reminds me of some of the first stuff I made in Line Rider.
🤷
KillerBeast - CrazyGameMaster
CrazyGameMaster recently hit 39 major track releases in 15 weeks, a volume of output that is unprecedented in Line Rider history to the best of my memory, with my desire to see them slow down and spend some more time on a project steadily growing over that time. I’m not going to say I haven’t seen any improvement - their ability to maneuver the rider, sync the track to the music, and utilize visual motifs continues to slowly improve, but virtually all their track releases follow the same basic formula. Pick a song that’s somewhere on the spectrum from “probably a big deal on newgrounds” to “could be a soundcloud meme”, and make a track as fast as you can that syncs to it in a superficial way. It’s the YouTube channel that most resembles a Line Rider content farm. Out of the 10 CGM uploads this month I had to choose from, KillerBeast has the most going on visually, and is probably the most watchable. Despite the occasional cool moment, I wouldn’t recommend it.
👎
Seen and Never Heard (Cover Track) - MrBlueSky
It’s very funny to me that one time Lukking made a wildly uncharacteristic quick experimental track to try something different than his usual “serious” work (read: a nonstop stream of largely monotonous hyper-intense manuquirk for several years) that he gave up on halfway through, which then inexplicably became what is arguably his most enduring legacy. A major part of what made Lukking’s original 2016 track entertaining was, to use the most historically divisive term in Line Rider history, flow. In the original Seen and Never Heard, Lukking’s control over Bosh feels loose in a way that lets gravity do a lot of the work and makes the movement feel fluid, spontaneous, and fun - which is why MrBlueSky’s “cover track” of Lukking’s work feels so stiff, lifeless and overproduced in comparison. Bosh’s every move is controlled with an extreme precision, something that feels super cool when you’re watching human bodies do it, but falls flat when you’re watching an animated sledder do it. MrBlueSky clearly idolizes Lukking’s track, and the vast majority of his work has been attempts at refining and perfecting the style of slow quirk synced to hip-hop, but in the process he’s refined all the playfulness out of the work, which in my view renders it little more than an an empty husk.
👎
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
Support Bevibel Harvey (Rabid Squirrel) on Patreon