January 2023 Line Rider Roundup
This past month in Line Rider has been dominated by messy, introspective art. Whether they will resonate with any individual viewer is hard to anticipate, but it’s very possible that something here will feel uniquely relatable for you. Many thanks to September Hofmann (formerly Ava Hofmann) for her lovely guest reviews!
Click here for a playlist of all videos in this roundup (in order). Titles also link to videos individually.
Nervous Young Inhumans - Branches
Guest review by September Hofmann:
It seems pretty clear to me at this point that the lasting legacy of Freaks is going to be the way in which it used the physical space of the drawn environment to represent a kind of psychological space—as the “psychological space” mode of Line Rider has exploded as a genre in the past 2-3 years, we continue to get more and more incredible tracks that take on this legacy. Nervous Young Inhumans takes this a step further by literalizing the drawn space as something taking place inside a drawn character’s head—as evidenced by the final zoom out. As a result, much of the track and its drawings take on a kind of personal dimension—drawings of various characters (such as pocke’s snail avatar), environments (such as a small drawing of Jade’s Mount Eerie), and text such as “FUCK I’M SO GAY” give us hints but not necessarily concrete answers to the psychological space Jade is exploring, and I don’t think looking for concrete answers in these drawings is necessarily the point. Instead, Nervous Young Inhumans is about the process of self-reflecting, of becoming aware of our thoughts—from the too-zoomed-in camera whizzing by scribbles at the start, to increasing awareness of certain concrete drawings, to the dismount at a moment of emotional slowdown, and, finally, to the ending camera sequence. We zoom out and leave the rider behind, looking at the scene of her previous movements, seeing the drawings that surrounded her this whole time. “Earlier in the song”, which had appeared several times earlier in the track is now finally sung. This is a moment of self-reflection—of no longer being taken up by one’s thoughts and feelings, but instead choosing to think-about one’s thoughts and feel-about one’s feelings.
And from those thoughts, we move further out, into, yes, a bit of self-editing and regret about one’s thoughts, but also active acts of fashioning one’s thoughts and feelings. All this ultimately coalesces into having a body and being a person. And although these feelings—this person we are shown—is chaotic and roughly hewn and maybe hard for us to parse, they are still full of light and beauty and humor and joy. This is maybe the final trick of Nervous Young Inhumans—that, in an exploration of only one internal world, it invites us to explore and think beyond oneself, to engage in empathy and recognizing of the internal worlds of others. There is a Nervous Young Inhuman inside each person, and we are all learning how express—and to see—that in ourselves and in others.
mother - September Hofmann
[cw: flashing lights, potentially painful high-pitched sounds]
mother is a difficult track to watch, partly due to a horrible high-frequency whine that underscores nearly the entire song, and partly due to the nonstop strobing visuals (created by zooming in and out extremely rapidly). This fits well with the painful themes September is exploring in the piece around aging as a trans woman. It’s also reflected in the music itself - the horrible high-pitched sounds are more distressing for younger people whose ears are typically less damaged. I’m one of the oldest people in the Line Rider community at age 30 (and also significantly damaged my ears last year attending a concert) and thus do not find listening to the song difficult. I’m not sure what this says about me, or September, or this track.
For most of its runtime, mother presents the viewer with cryptic lyrics, poetry, and text that vaguely gesture towards pain, loneliness, and the passage of time. I find it hard to write about cryptic work a lot of the time, because either I have no idea what it’s about, or I am close enough to the creator that I do know what it’s about - in which case it feels wrong to directly share information I have which the creator has intentionally obfuscated to the public eye. This is complicated by the fact that much of the most visually and thematically interesting Line Rider work these days is highly cryptic work made by people I know pretty well, which often leaves me uncharacteristically at a loss for what to say about a piece - such as September’s Untitled or pocke’s the border shatters between us, both tracks released this past month which I’ve opted not to review. However, mother breaks from this at the very end, dropping the obfuscation to deliver this devastating line:
you told me
“no matter how hard you try,
you will never be a
MOthER
I have a lot to say about this! As a transfeminine person myself, and having apparently just entered my 30s, this speaks to me. One of the biggest hangups I had about going on hormone replacement therapy was that I would likely lose my ability to be a biological parent. If I’m being honest, it still bothers me - but I have been working on reframing the concept of parenthood in my head away from the notion that it is inherently tied to biology. In my opinion, the concept of the nuclear family (the idea that a household should consist of a mom, a dad, and some biological kids) as some kind of ideal aspirational family structure is a deep and pervasive misunderstanding of what social environments help humans to thrive. How often have you witnessed a nuclear family that you would describe as healthy and happy? How often are the failings of the nuclear family attributed to the shortcomings of individuals, rather than a society-wide structural failure of the model as a way to raise children?
The nuclear family is not actually inherent to human nature, but rather comes from northern and western European cultures. Across the rest of the world, multi-generational households have been common for millenia. It’s not a coincidence that the northern and western European cultural diaspora is so hostile to trans people - under the nuclear family framework, if you can’t have biological children, you are, at least by default, useless to society. But, at least in the United States - a nation predicated on the enslavement of one continent and the genocide of another, that practices a kind of global autocracy founded on the fundamentally exploitative economic system of capitalism - I feel like we would do well to take a more critical look at the concept of family, especially motherhood. Instead of asking myself the painfully impossible question, “How can I be a mother?” these days I’m trying to ask myself questions like, “How can I help to raise the young people I find myself in community with?” I find this to be more rewarding, both for my own self-fulfillment and for helping me move towards building a better world.
The Retrograde Apparition - pocke
[cw: abuse]
Guest review by September Hofmann:
The cut is one of the most elemental—and most powerful—tools in all of cinema. The process of discovering, developing, and studying the cut in early film history was the single most important process that transformed early cinema from a glorified method of documenting plays or real-world environments into a cultural powerhouse of an artform, making films more emotional, emotive, and concretely-abstract than the continuous experiences offered in say, theater. The filmic cut is punctuation, it is storytelling, it is the linebreak in a poem.
Line Rider, for the longest time, lived without the use of cuts, in part because of a cultural taboo that developed around the use of video editing that is tied into tiresome concepts of “art” and “real Line Rider” that I don’t really want to get bogged down with here. The important part, however, is that Line Rider as a “continuous” experience has been the dominant mode, with video editing only recently interrupting that continuity in favor of cuts which even resemble the experimental collage techniques of early film-editors—look at, for example, UTD’s Unfold Reimagined or Ethan Li’s The Name Engraved in My Heart. The Retrograde Apparition, however, is unique in that it replicates the interrelational discontinuity of video editing in Line Rider itself, teleporting the rider (in this case, made to look like a line using the recently added square rider build) at high velocity into new, visually distinct areas. This is, of course, not entirely new—this kind of thing has been possible for a long time, ever since Ride Liner pioneered teleportation in HAM. But, like in HAM, Taro, or Frequency Hotline, Line Rider creators have tended to try and make these kinds of jumps or discontinuous forms of movement invisible or seamless in order to preserve the video-editing taboo, a trick hidden amongst other tricks, hidden from those not in the know. The Retrograde Apparition, meanwhile, leans into this jarring sense of the cut, a continuous discontinuity, in order to convey an emotional montage-narrative.
It’s important to me to emphasize that the theorization and development of the cut and of the montage was part of an inherently leftist project. Sergei Eisenstein and Lev Kuleshov developed a theory of video editing that showed how editing—and the way it can distort time and interrelated objects—was inherently political, and used these editing techniques in order rupture capitalism’s reliance on a kind of linear time: that of the boss’s clock, or the workweek. The cut is psychological politics, and The Retrograde Apparition’s use of cuts within Line Rider invokes this tradition. For me, the emotional core of The Retrograde Apparition is a moment of scribbled violence drawn in its heart: that of one character (drawn in red) ripping the headphones off of another character (drawn in purple) and demanding that they “talk like adults”:
Such a demand to “talk like adults”, after an action as immature as laying one’s hands on another’s possession and tearing it away from them, is laced with contradiction. It is hypocrisy and it is violence. This is where the cut comes in: it visually literalizes the disorienting physical and aural experience of having your headphones ripped away from you—being suddenly cut from one sonic landscape to another—which the abrupt cuts in the song also replicate. It is a representation of that contradiction and the inflicted pain which springs from it.
Like communist analyses of contradiction within a system of production, then, The Retrograde Apparition goes on to examine this contradiction through a series of emotional landscapes which wildly contradict one another, from a calming and peaceful fountain to tarrying seas of glitchy, abstract shapes. By cutting between these contradictory emotional landscapes, we are placed alongside the purple character into a site of psychological dissonance or disassociation, and as we explore each element or side of this contradiction, the clear-cut boundaries between them begin to break down. The abstract shapes and the moment of violence and the peaceful fountain take on a kind of Kuleshov effect and begin to hold one another—and at the end, the fantasy of the fountain has become glitchy, itself abstract and sharp and violent. The contradiction has become apparent, and it punctures the false consciousness, the excuses for violence, the disassociated fantasy—demanding another future.
The Shoemakers' Comet - John
I don’t know how John is able to make these starkly minimalist pieces that are so unique and powerful, but The Shoemaker’s Comet makes it clear that Just Far Enough wasn’t a mere fluke. Somehow, the most emotionally affecting Line Rider release I watched this month consisted of little more than rightward sledding past some generated text!
Part of the strength of The Shoemaker’s Comet is the writing itself, which starts out like a blurb about a comet in an astronomy book before taking an unexpected turn into an existentialist meditation on death. What really sells the text for me, however, is the way that the slow movement of the sledder regulates the speed at which we are able to read the text. This is something September Hofmann explored in her 2021 release at the doctor’s office - but while September used this concept of a “videopoem” to zoom past certain words quickly and briefly pause on others, John is more interested in using it to put space in between bits of text - forcing the viewer to sit with a thought or single piece of information for an extended amount of time as the sledder crawls forward, sometimes at an agonizingly slow pace. The latter two minutes of The Shoemaker’s Comet contains barely a dozen words, which gives them a weight I’ve rarely felt from words in a Line Rider track before.
The Shoemaker’s Comet reminds me quite a bit of vsbl’s Cold Death - there’s the incorporation of text, there’s the rider’s slow, bumpy, relentless, rightward path, and there’s the ending where the sledder collapses, but for me, more than any of these, it’s how it reinterprets Cold Death’s themes of death and meaninglessness. At the moment in the text of The Shoemaker’s Comet where the inescapability of death really sets in, the track ends and the sledder falls, before being caught by and continuing forward on an invisible line. After spending an astonishing amount of time with no lines on the screen at all, as the work threatens to instill us with despair and then provide no resolution, the next line of text begins to appear - so slowly that I found myself parsing each letter individually. The tension created in this moment made it clear to me that I want our lives to matter - that I care! And isn’t it true, that all it really means for something to matter is for someone, somewhere, to care about it?
wendy carlos - ∞
[cw: transmisia]
After making their presence known last month with Designated Male at Birth, a collaboration with their headmate UTD, ∞ has debuted their own channel with wendy carlos. The song choice alone is a far cry from UTD’s music taste, a hyperpop rap full of references to internet memes and trans culture, including Among Us, furries, hormone replacement therapy, and others that went way over my head. Most prominent are the references to Wendy Carlos (highly recommend checking out her website at that link, by the way), who is not only in the title but who’s name is also aggressively shouted over and over in the lyrics. Carlos is a trans woman most well-known for her work in early electronic music in the 1970s and 80s, such as the soundtracks for Stanley Kurick’s “A Clockwork Orange” and “The Shining”. To me, the repetition of her name feels almost like an invocation of one of the few well-known transgender elders in electronic music - the same creative field as queer song creators Fraxiom, Forget Basement, and Folie.
∞’s track is similar to their original version of Designated Male at Birth, with an offsled Bosh ragdolling their way through loosely-synced scribbles. There’s an admirable self-confident swagger to ∞’s choice to make stuff that’s the polar opposite of what might be considered “objectively” good Line Rider art, while clearly having a ton of fun doing it. It’s hard not to have a good time watching wendy carlos. But, for me, the real highlight of wendy carlos is during the section where Fraxiom delivers a scathingly condescending monologue pretending that well-known homomisic and transmisic electronic musician deadmau5 has just come out as nonbinary, while repeatedly misgendering him in the same breath:
I'm like deadmau5 if he had a soul and went by they
Yeah, he goes by they/them pronouns actually
You know deadmau5? Yeah, deadmau5?
I'm so proud of him he's nonbinary now, he uses they/them pronouns
Everyone say good job deadmau5!
(Good job deadmau5, good job deadmau5, good job deadmau5, good job deadmau5, good job deadmau5, good job deadmau5, good job deadmau5)
Hahaha, hahaha!
Well if you're listening to this deadmau5
On screen for this entire monologue are drawings of deadmau5’s signature “mau5head”, and an imported image of a transmisic tweet signed “-themmau5”, as Bosh slowly slides down a line, before resuming ragdolling. The juxtaposition of these visuals showcasing the horrible anti-queer views of deadmau5 with the hilarious monologue (which highlights how trans people are often infantilized rather than taken seriously by people who think of themselves as allies because they don’t say things as blatantly transmisic as deadmau5’s tweet!) is the most effective usage of humor in a Line Rider track to shut down transmisia I’ve ever seen. For that alone, I’m glad ∞ started making Line Rider tracks, and I’m glad wendy carlos exists.
3AM - pocke
All the way back in 2017, a few months before DoodleChaos’s first Line Rider release, Helios released 3AM. There’s very little to say about the track itself, but the choice to make a track in three hours, starting at midnight, to a song about being unable to sleep - to me, that hinted at some sort of unspoken personal meaning, though as Helios’s second-to-last Line Rider release this was never developed any further. Six years later, I was pleasantly surprised to get a remake of 3AM by pocke that’s everything I’d wished the original could have been. pocke fills what would have been empty space with doodles - a streetlight, windows, a bed, a train - plus the most striking part of the track, the scribbled cursive of an insomnia-fueled stream of consciousness. In them, pocke ruminates on their hopes and fears around an impending major change to their life which remains unnamed.
Watching pocke’s remake of 3AM, I’m struck by just how far we’ve come as a community - a community where people now feel comfortable expressing in a Line Rider release something as vulnerable as an internal 3 AM monologue. Helios was certainly working through something while making the original 3AM, but in 2023 pocke was able to share some of the actual content of what they were working through. It gives me a lot of hope.
from air - candyman
In my opinion, Conundrumer’s new square rider build (released on the cusp of the new year) lends itself well to abstract video art like Candyman’s newest, from air. Candyman released a few Line Rider tracks back in early 2022, such as the effects-heavy before abstract tech support schedule and the playful hyvät herrat (bowling alley), but from air is not just his first release since last April, but is also the first that I have found myself really enjoying. After beginning with breath-like inversions of a simple black square centered on a white background, followed by some music-synced square-Bosh quirk, we then zoom in until the square fills the screen, and it becomes a portal. Through this spinning-square portal-screen that continually changes colors, we see sledders with the traditional Bosh sprite ragdolling around in a static cluster of lines. After enough time that we’ve adjusted to understanding the square as a green-screened portal, we suddenly zoom out and the square becomes the active character again, now in a Crystal River-inspired environment of colorful scribbles. I find this transitioning of the square back and forth between active character and conduit for witnessing other characters to be a fascinating meditation on how we perceive agency in Line Rider. It’s difficult for me to put into words, but I really dig it.
Dance of the Sugar Plum Ravioli - NoodleChaos
[cw: misgendering, references to abuse]
Dance of the Sugar Plum Ravioli is the third upload to the anonymous YouTube channel NoodleChaos, after November’s Spaghetti King (which I reviewed when it came out) and December’s Beethoven’s 5th Serving of Lasagna (a head-spinning mashup of DoodleChaos’s Beethoven’s 5th superimposed over a lasagna recipe video). It starts out innocently enough, utilizing the new square rider build to create a “rider” that looks vaguely like a ravioli. Very quickly, however, text introduces a narrative of the square fighting against social pressures to conform, making this the first NoodleChaos release to amount to something more meaningful than a straightforward parody. If you think about it, the last few years of Line Rider history have been dominated by the humanization and personification of a kid on a sled in a flash game, so it seems only natural that the square would be immediately humanized and personified in turn.
Edit - Malizma
Malizma’s newest track feels like a dark, sinister version of Conundrumer’s OKAY. Visually, the movement in Edit is little more than slowly traveling from left to right, but there’s a sense that we might actually be travelling extremely fast at any given moment, that increases both as the video progresses and the more knowledge the viewer has about how Malizma might be achieving certain effects to create an unsettling atmosphere. For me, the techniques seamlessly employed in Edit (namely, 10-point cannons, farlands glitches, and video editing) evoke a powerful sense of dissociation that carries with it an enormous amount of narrative potential. I hope this potential is utilized at some point in the future, whether by Malizma or others.
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