Welcome back! I was busy with a work gig at the start of the month so this roundup is a little later than usual. It’s also a heavier one than usual. It feels to me like Line Rider is maturing as an art form especially quickly lately, and this has merited a major increase of thought not just on how to grab the viewer’s interest, tell a story, or convey an emotion, but also what exactly we should strive to convey and evoke, and why. Much of this roundup explores what is being evoked and conveyed by different pieces, not just to assess whether they succeed at doing so, but also to examine the messages themselves, to explore the much more complicated questions around whether they are things we should want to evoke and convey, or not.
We have a remarkable slate of guest reviewers this month. In order of appearance: OTDE, Ethan Li, pocke, gavinroo538, and UTD. As always, a huge thank you to all of my guest reviewers for their thoughtful engagement. I’m glad I’m not doing this alone.
Click here for a playlist of all videos in this roundup (in order). Titles also link to videos individually.
Here is a truth you will understand by the time you’re done watching Reckoner: gavinroo538 has a lot on his mind. Go to the video’s description and you’ll see what I mean – there’s content warnings for “Politics, Capitalism, Classism, and Colonialism.” It’s a track that’s “dedicated to all human beings.” What is less clear, and what makes Reckoner such a frustrating thing to grapple with, is what, exactly, gavinroo538 has to say about all of these things.
Reckoner is framed, composed, and executed gorgeously. A lot of care has been put into matching Thom Yorke’s high, breathy vocals, which gives Bosh’s motion a gentle, repetitive tenderness, the kind of slow, rocking motion you might use to soothe a baby. The camera’s fixed x-axis reinforces this feeling – Gavin modulates its intensity from moment to moment by adjusting how close Bosh gets to the top and bottom of the screen. Eventually, Bosh completely disappears from the screen, and the big dial that says “ABSTRACTION” is cranked way the hell down. We’re treated to this Bosh-less vista of nature, almost Thomas Kinkade-ish in its squeaky-clean purity, and then we slam on the brakes and reverse all the way back through the last three minutes of track.
By the time Bosh surfaces again, there’s new takes on our old friends (wavy lines and landscapes). The lines are a bunch of different thicknesses and intensities, and they no longer seem to be moving in any kind of harmony. The forest gives way to a city that claims to be a welcoming place, but displays its most prominent enforcers of violence and isolation – police who kill at astonishing rates, prisons that rob people of decades of their lives, corporations that exploit and underpay the working class, religious institutions that demonize queer people. Standing in opposition to these, there’s a massive clustering of signs, shouting for safety and survival and the right to live with dignity. By the time the video ends, we’ve arrived at the same forest, stripped and discarded, with a sign that reads “SOLD.”
That’s… a lot, isn’t it? And I don’t think it leaves much to the imagination – the diverging styles of lines are a pretty cut-and-dry proxy for political disagreement, especially when paired with the obvious destructiveness of Gavin’s depictions of capitalist sprawl and colonial exploitation of nature as a resource. What really feels like it’s missing here is synthesis.Reckoner is so passive as to almost dip into voyeurism at times. Once we see the lines diverge in style, Bosh, the track’s primary source of agency, sticks with the boldest line the entire time. Our “main character” has an opinion of some kind, but outside of dialogue with the other lines, there’s no actual expression of that opinion. By the time we get to the city, the people that live in it, and the institutions that govern and act on those people, Bosh has completely disappeared. As viewers, we are asked to sympathize with the people who are struggling to make ends meet, but the contrasting levels of Bosh’s involvement in the narrative (from active participant to passive observer) really prevent the piece from actually inviting the viewer to empathize with any particular subject, to step into their shoes and imagine where those beliefs came from. There are signs, but no people holding the signs, and that makes the depiction of the protest feel a bit empty. These are not beliefs that are held in the abstract – they’re held by real, actual people, born out of and shaped by the ways those people interact with the world around them, and by divorcing these ideas from the people that hold them, Reckoner lost a real chance to be more incisive and radical in its messaging.
There’s a bit of text in Gavin’s 2021 film A Rush Of Blood To The Head that just reads “gavinroo538 vs. SOCIETY.” I think a lot about how that frames pretty much every gavinroo538 track – how each one is a distilled take on an experience centered around Gavin. At its best, this means Gavin makes personal, expressive art that can be riveting and emotionally fraught. My frustration with Reckoner’s approach to politics is that it views systems and institutions as interacting with and acting upon everyone but the viewer. It does not dare to imagine the viewer as a participant in the world, as a person who can act in concert with the people around them. It doesn’t see the people behind the systems. I don’t think Reckoner spends enough time thinking about how choosing to observe instead of participate is itself a form of participation, one that enforces the status quo. The track makes a useful observation – that much of human suffering and exploitation is marked by disagreement – but it loses me when it juxtaposes disagreement and suffering in such a way that it establishes a causal link, implying that disagreement is what leads directly to suffering. If, for example, humanity all agreed to chop down the forests of the world until there’s nothing left, we’d still suffer greatly for a number of reasons directly related to that decision. It’s actually really important to think about what’s being agreed upon, not just that an agreement has been reached.
Reckoner does a fantastic job of highlighting existing conflict without digging into its roots beyond “look at this disagreement.” The closest we get is the “SOLD” sign at the end of the track, an acknowledgement of the ways in which the earth is commodified and turned into parcels of territory. I like this! I wish it felt less detached, that it felt like Bosh was involved in the story, that this loss, which is a real and meaningful thing, was connected to someone, somewhere. The bulk of my critique exists because Gavin is completely unafraid to try exploring new things, new thoughts and feelings, and the harshness of the critique stands in complete contrast to the actual execution of the track, which is top-notch. I cannot wait to see the shift in tone if (hopefully when) “gavinroo538 vs. SOCIETY” becomes something less detached and more participatory, when Gavin does something more than just reckon.
In gavinroo538’s album-length epic A Rush of Blood to the Head, there’s a cryptic recurring piece of imagery - two trees on a hill - that comes up over and over, often when the word “place” is mentioned in the lyrics. Near the dark climax of toxic masculinity in the album’s penultimate song, this “place” is depicted with the trees chopped down, having now become a site of destruction and despair. The trees at the extreme left and right ends of the canvas of Reckoner seem to possibly be loosely quoting this motif, symbolizing nature itself this time. Symbolism is a powerful tool, and Gavin wields it with much more blunt force in Reckoner than usual. The advantage of heavy-handed symbolism is that it’s harder for people to completely miss the fact that you’re trying to say something, but the disadvantage is that a work can start to feel ham-fisted or even preachy.
Reckoner is direct in its more overt messaging - greed, capitalism, industrialization, criminalization, incarceration, and apathy are destroying humanity and the Earth. The subtler aspects of the messages, however, are a little more confusing. Why are the protestors invisible? Why is Bosh pointedly absent during both the sections featuring physical environments? Why is nature represented by trees, standing alone, apart from each other? And the question that troubles me most: how does Reckoner deal with agency? The agency of Bosh, of the invisible protestors, of the viewer - what is Gavin attempting to say or imply with regard to these things? I’m genuinely not sure, and I’m not sure how I feel about it all either. I empathize with the feeling of watching helplessly, seeing what is happening while feeling utterly powerless to do anything about it. But it makes me a little queasy when I ask myself if Reckoner is implying that there’s nothing that we can do except watch.
What I can say with confidence, is that Reckoner is an intelligently crafted, beautifully structured, thought-provoking piece, utilizing the vertical camera lock feature to give me all the narrative meaning that Coyote spectacularly failed to in 2019. It packs quite the punch - but I’m not sure if I learned or felt anything new from it. Does it have anything to say beyond “oppressive forces are destroying humanity and the planet?” Because I think most of us knew that already, and to be perfectly honest, being told it again just makes me depressed. 👍
In January 1992, twelve containers fell off a cargo ship into the North Pacific, with one container spilling 28,800 rubber ducks and bath toys being shipped for sale in the US. They were made famous by oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who repurposed them along with other flotsam (such as a container-full of Nike shoes which were spilled in 1990) into ad hoc Lagrangian drifters for characterizing and monitoring ocean currents:
Many of these plastic animals remain in the Great Pacific garbage patch, which is a gyre in the North Pacific Ocean estimated to contain six pounds of plastic - mostly microplastics - for every pound of plankton. These microscopic particles come from a variety of sources, including industrial production of microplastics and subsequent release into waterways; the breakdown of plastics on land into microplastics which then pass through rivers and lakes before entering the ocean; as well as the breakdown of larger debris which may enter the ocean in a variety of ways, such as litter, flotsam, or through extreme storm and flooding events.
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The IPCC's April 2022 Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate includes a chapter on Sea Level Rise and Implications for Low-Lying Islands, Coasts, and Communities, which cites research showing how land use planning for urban adaptation to climate change has exacerbated sociospatial inequalities. The peer-reviewed analysis, published in May 2016 in the Journal of Planning Education and Research, highlighted patterns of unjust outcomes on low-income and minority groups from technocratic (as opposed to justice-focused) land use planning interventions, in post-Katrina New Orleans, Dhaka, Manila, Medellin, Santiago, Jarkata, Boston, and Surat:
Let us not forget the suffering implied by such outcomes. For example, Bong Joon Ho's May 2019 film Parasite features a scene in which the Kim family's semi-basement apartment becomes completely flooded with rain and sewage during a heavy storm which inundates their working-class neighborhood in a low-lying area of Seoul. They only manage to rescue a few items from the rising water as it contaminates all manner of floating objects, making belongings toxic while forcing people out of their homes:
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The exact effects of microplastics on human health are not fully understood, but their pervasiveness and ability to concentrate endocrine-disrupting chemicals are well studied, and there is evidence of ecotoxological effects on marine plankton, invertebrates, and plants, as well as agreement that the risk to human health requires further investigation. Indeed, a March 2022 peer-reviewed article in Environment International reported their detection of microplastics in the human bloodstream; and an April 2022 peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Hazardous Materials presented a meta-analysis of published scientific data concluding that thresholds of microplastic-induced toxic effects on human cells are at environmentally-relevant levels.
From another perspective, plastic pollution is the long-lasting material afterlife of those millions of tons of plants and animals which were violently ripped away from eons of underground rest in order to be transformed into disposable products thrown away as part of capitalism and colonialism (not to mention their forced transformation into fuels and then into some of the greenhouse gases accelerating global sea-level rise). As a toxic-(o)-logical endpoint of colonial land relations, microplastic pollution circulates throughout our planet, our food, and our bodies; clean-up is impossible for the microplastic particles which have already infiltrated every corner of our world, making it permanently altered. Our only alternative is to dismantle the power relations and infrastructures that naturalize the discarding of certain people, places, and things - to build our accountability to human and more-than-human collectives.
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OTDE's July 2019 release "The Junkyard", set to a soundtrack of quiet post-classical piano, features a rider tumbling down a tower of large, futuristic-looking debris. After the descent, this work reveals an icosahedral spaceship, establishing continuity with OTDE's previous work "Dangerous Cargo" - which had used that ship as its setting for an escape soundtracked with excerpts of clipping.'s Splendor & Misery, an Afrofuturist album about the lone human survivor aboard a cargo ship carrying human slaves. "The Junkyard" reminds us of one stage of the afterlife of (nonhuman) cargo in a society structured around human and nonhuman disposability - a literal trash heap in the process of fragmenting into smaller pieces (though it's not clear to me if "The Junkyard" has any deeper critical connection to Splendor & Misery's retelling of the Atlantic slave trade or to "Dangerous Cargo"'s representation of a ship carrying human beings as the eponymous cargo-which-became-dangerous):
While "The Junkyard" shows a person tumbling down a wreckage pile, the September 2021 open-world exploration video game Sable includes many environments which encourage the player to climb up ruins and heaps of wreckage by paying close attention to their structures:
The planet of Sable, known to its inhabitants as Midden, has been suggested as an example of salvagepunk: between all the ruins littering this planet carrying the history of a failed attempt at interplanetary colonization by the Atomic Disposal corporation, hope remains in the people and objects who were shipwrecked as flotsam on the desert oceans of Midden, as they breathe new life and meaning into their existence by reusing, reconfiguring, and reassembling each other for communal, post-capitalist pleasures and responsibilities.
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OTDE's March 2022 release "flotsam", set to a soundtrack of quiet ambient/post-rock(?) with quiet piano, features a rider surfing towards and then tumbling playfully across a garbage patch of abstract boxes floating on the surface of a body of water:
After this traversal, the rider dives into the water, joining the other particles - bubbles, microplastics, and plankton - which fill the water. In this way, OTDE's "flotsam" artistically imagines "staying with the trouble" (to quote Donna Haraway) in our natural/cultural world and diving into our microplastic pollution problem, rather than wishing for a simpler "escape" from culture to nature of the sort depicted by OTDE's earlier track "The Little Lab Rat & The Big Escape". After all, this situation allows no satisfying escape: the human-and-beyond-human natural world is already pervasively and irreversibly altered in the cases of microplastic pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, PCBs and PFASes, and other long-lasting consequences of our society's violent transmutation of our ancient plant, animal, and mineral relatives.
Rated risk to human health:
alterlife is the condition of having already been altered, but still being open to alteration...some of those alterations are incredibly injurious...but [the] alteration isn’t only negative - so we live in community, we might persist despite colonialism, we take hormones on purpose in order to alter ourselves. So alteration's both already happened, but it’s ongoing. And sometimes it’s consensual, sometimes it’s non-consensual...So alter life is about thinking about that, but trying to think about that in a way that doesn’t stigmatize for being altered. You know, in Canada, in the conditions we live of capitalism and colonialism and white supremacy, we tend to stigmatize and render disposable or as a site of further injury, any being or land that’s already been harmed. If you’ve been hurt, then we’ll pay you cheaper. If this land has garbage on it, let’s put more, then let’s concentrate the garbage there. We live in a world where certain people are rendered disposable...So alterlife also has an ethical commitment, which is to value altered life, to have a loving relation, to think as sacred [those] wasted lands, injured life, life that has had to come into existence in relationship to colonialism or white supremacy.
(from an interview with Max Liboiron & Michelle Murphy on pollution as colonialism)
I’m sure that most people watching flotsam weren’t particularly thinking about pollution, climate change, or colonialism, and thus Ethan’s interpretation may feel like a bit of a stretch. It’s possible that their review provoked a reaction in some minds and hearts along the lines of, “Why are we talking about these things, it feels barely relevant to this simple little Line Rider piece?”, or even “Why are we bringing politics into Line Rider, it’s just a fun little game/toy?” You may have noticed, however, that in recent years Line Rider has begun to shift away from being understood as “fun little game/toy” and toward “art medium capable of tackling serious topics”. If there was any doubt around this shift, Ava Hofmann’s My Pal Foot Footshould have definitively sealed the deal, utilizing illustration and storytelling techniques uniquely suited to Line Rider to tell a complicated and challenging story about parental abuse - a work that holds up not just as a Line Rider piece but as a work of art, period, created in a medium that supports its intended message. This shift is extremely exciting for the vast possibilities it opens up, but there are growing pains too - namely, now that it’s undeniably possible to tell these kinds of stories in Line Rider, we are forced to consider the sociopolitical messages that any given Line Rider work is sending, intentionally or not. The implications of this new way of considering Line Rider art are deep and challenging. We’re no longer simply asking, “How can we effectively convey a narrative in Line Rider?” but also “What sorts of narratives do we want to convey in Line Rider?”
flotsam is a calm, reflective piece with Bosh in silhouette that matches the colors of the lines, which are in turn merely a darker shade of the teal background color, making it seem like we are observing the entire track through a translucent pane of colored glass. Bosh floats along the surface of the water at first, and then bounces on floating rectangles to the music, before diving into the water as we shift into slow motion to close out the piece. What messages does this piece convey? Well, the teal colors suggest water that’s polluted or toxic, rather than a blue color which might suggest pure, clear, water and a cloudless sky. Indeed, this was the effect created by the sky blue color scheme and smooth curves of currents, an ostensibly similar piece released by OTDE this past month that’s a lovely watch but ultimately a lot less interesting. The side-scrolling cross-section view, box-jumping movement, and elegant music sync of flotsam evoke a platformer video game, and imply Bosh is jumping from box to box with purpose. However, the minimalist wireframe scenery style and pane-of-glass effect evokes a strong sense of calm or serenity. Together, this creates a sense that Bosh is moving with purpose and serenity through an environment filled with pollution. It’s all extremely subtle, and OTDE has intentionally left their intentions unclear, but all these elements are undeniably there - capable of evoking thoughts and feelings for anyone willing to sit and contemplate for a bit.
What stories do we want to tell with Line Rider? How direct do we want to be? Who do we want to tell stories for? Whose stories are important to listen to and amplify? Is there value in simple stories told effectively? Is there value in important, complicated stories told poorly? When is it best to be subtle, to be loud, to be inviting, to be combative? What other questions should we be asking that we haven’t yet thought to ask? These are just a few initial thoughts as we begin to consider how to dedicate our time and creativity in Line Rider as we move forward. flotsam would be a fine place to start. 👍
Well, he finally went and did it. After years of slamming out releases at a breakneck pace, that ranged from instantly forgettable to vaguely promising, CrazyGameMaster went and made a track that doesn’t just have potential, but is just genuinely good. Combining and refining the fake-out misdirection of Mope Mope, the sense of place of Boss (Bullet Hell Monday), the satisfying music sync of A Stranger’s Dead, and the dynamic animations of Robot Language (just to name a few), Aleph-0 is unequivocally CrazyGameMaster’s best track yet. LeaF’s electronic music piece “Aleph-0” (ubiquitous amongst rhythm games), has a ton going on, with frequent changes in tempo, instrumentation, and mood over its two and a half minutes, and CrazyGameMaster does a fantastic job visually representing all of these drastic shifts. One second, Bosh is navigating a maze where the walls are illusions, the next they’re drowning in darkness, then zooming through a tunnel, then flying past a nearly-overwhelming volley of shapes - throughout it all, every movement and visual perfectly synced with the chaotic music.
Sure, at best it’s still just a great visualizer set to a song from a rhythm game, but it’s good enough that it no longer feels accurate to describe it as “budget Brain Power” - it’s just CrazyGameMaster’s own signature style now. It’s definitely messier and more chaotic, but it also has a sense of brilliant intuition and playful improvisation that could only come from someone who’s spent the last couple years slamming out tracks at a breathtaking pace without stressing too much about making all of them good. Indeed, just one week before Aleph-0, CrazyGameMaster put out a track set to “Gas Gas Gas” that’s so dull it’s difficult to sit through (how do you make a Eurobeat Line Rider track and not go fast???) but personally, in a day and age where some Line Rider creators are spending years on works that I find incredibly boring upon release, I don’t mind at all if someone needs to make 50 bland tracks in a year to help them make one that’s sick as hell. When CrazyGameMaster first started making tracks, I was skeptical that such an extreme quantity-over-quality approach could pay off, but he has absolutely proven me wrong. 👍
It’s wild that in nearly six months of color layers, nobody has thought of using a saturation gradient of a single color until pocke did it with Compass. Even more noteworthy is how pocke utilized a gradient of specifically sky-blue colors to riff on a abstract themes of crystals, snow, ice, and glaciers in numerous brilliant ways. The majority of the ideas in Compass are shockingly simple and remarkably evocative, from snowy drop shadows, to crystals that look lit from one side, to massive columns of ice, to a giant glacial structure that looks like it’s glowing from the inside. The only major weakness of Compass is how it feels more like a fun creative exercise than a work that has anything to say - an aspect that feels especially awkward in 2022, a time when imagery of ice, snow, and glaciers might easily conjure up thoughts and feelings about climate change - the thawing of the polar ice caps, the destruction of animal habitats, and the increasingly chaotic and unpredictable weather across the globe. Like pocke’s December release Forever, Compass is a brilliant, fun piece with tons of evocative ideas that have lots of potential, but it remains nothing more than that. I hope that going forward pocke can lean into narrative aspects like he did in last October’s Abandoned Castle. None of this is to say that Compass isn’t enjoyable or worth checking out, or to say that creative iterations on an idea have no value, I’m just hoping to see more of these brilliant ideas used in service of things that make me feel something beyond, “Whoa, that’s cool!” 👍
Described as a stress-relief track without a lot of thought put into it, Toivo’s newest release, despite being short and understated, is quite pleasant. I don’t know how Toivo continues to come up with aesthetics that are super unique and incredibly simple at the same time, but the subtle micro-scribbles, manual rolls, and tiny gravity wells of Kedvesem follow in the footsteps of thematically unique aesthetics of past Toivo releases such as Line Rider Nightmare, I Can’t Ride These Lines Without You[cw: suicide], and It’s ok, You’re ok. The movement in Kedvesem is incredibly precise - it still is Toivo after all - but it also manages to be remarkably subtle, rather than stiff and over-engineered, and this allows for a playfulness that Tovio never quite managed to capture in prior releases like Merry-Go-Round. Kedvesem never does much to expand on its simple premise, so it’s not particularly memorable, but it’s cute, charming, and fun. 👍
It’s not terribly polished, and it’s kind of all over the place, but pocke’s newest release under the o3n alias has some very memorable moments. It’s not the first movement-focused Line Rider track that extrapolates the DoodleChaos concept of flatsled sync to classical music to the logical conclusion of manuquirk synced to virtuosic solo piano - that honor goes to iPi’s 2019 release Minute Waltz?. La Campanella does have less clarity of purpose - where Minute Waltz? had in mind a showcase of specific techniques in different sections of the song, it seems like pocke is just messing around and having fun, even if they are ostensibly strikingly similar concepts for a Line Rider piece. This does mean that Minute Waltz? is more of a satisfying piece as a whole, but the advantage of a more playful approach is the ability to surprise the viewer and keep them on their toes. La Campanella isn’t married to doing any specific techniques in any specific section, and while this can lead to times when pocke seems low on ideas, it can also lead to thrilling moments when Bosh suddenly rockets through a pinch, or slams into a line and flies offsled. On my first watchthrough, an extended sequence of offsled Bosh vibrating through pinches to sync to an incredibly long high trill on a single note made me laugh out loud when the melody finally came back in. Oddly, some of the offsled moments near the end of the track feel most connected with the hammering percussive sounds of the piano playing, even as I can sense pocke worrying that it might look bad while making it. How much of La Campanella was half-assed isn’t totally clear, but it seems to me like a track that was a lot of fun to make. I hope pocke can lean into that sense of play in future releases, while also perhaps developing a stronger sense of discerning in the moment what is working and what isn’t, for both the process and the end product. 👍
fruit punch is an absolutely delightful concept - an alt-quirk collab between pocke and OTDE synced to jazz trumpet, with clouds of color scenery corresponding to different sections of the movement and little suggestions of scenery all drawn by Branches. The colors are very pretty, the alt-quirk sync is accurate, and OTDE and pocke’s parts blend together seamlessly, creating a tightly executed package all around. Despite this, it doesn’t do much for me. It’s not any individual collaborator’s work that’s bugging me - I love large portions of all three of these artists’ work, even when they’re doing similar stuff to what they’re doing in fruit punch. It’s not the way colors are used to emphasize mood, which worked beautifully in Don’t Worry. It’s not the alt-quirk sync, which I adored in BRING DOWN THE HOUSE. So what’s going on???
I think the issue is that I have a hard time getting into the music. It’s a solo trumpet jazz piece that involves a lot of noodling - the full song is played with the big band ensemble for the credits, and I get a lot more out of this version that the one the track is actually synced to, because of the notes and beats that are emphasized by the rest of the band. When it’s just a trumpet by itself, since I don’t know the full piece it all kind of blurs together - I didn’t even realize it wasn’t just someone aimlessly improvising until the credits. I’m sure part of this is just my lack of literacy with jazz music, but I also think I personally get a lot more meaning out of the timbres and textures of music, or slow repetitions of simple melodies, than lots of notes on their own in isolation. (There’s a reason I was a percussionist in high school and listen to a lot of post-rock!) I also struggle to discern the difference between the differently-colored sections - it certainly looks like there’s a clear rhyme and reason to them, but to me it all feels remarkably monotonous when it’s all the same solo instrument noodling away in the same register, timbre, and volume.
I’m emphasizing my own personal experience here because it definitely seems like fruit punch is a fully realized vision by its creators - a creative concept that seems like it would be right up my alley - and unfortunately it’s just not clicking for me. Often times I can see what a piece is trying to do, and dislike it either because I believe the creator failed in attempting those goals or because I have reason to dislike or disagree with the goals themselves. With fruit punch, it’s hard for me to get a grasp, on an emotional level, of what is even being attempted in the first place. So I want to take extra care not to pretend I’m an objective observer here - I imagine people other than me might get a lot out of this even if they have little or no experience with Line Rider, especially if they are into jazz music. For me, though, despite the compelling premise, snappy movement sync, delightful colors, and solid delivery of a fun concept, I find myself enjoying the credits sequence more than the actual track, which I think speaks for itself. 🤷
There are several motivations on why Line Rider creators create Line Rider tracks. They might make tracks for attention, for approval, expressing themselves, and/or other ways. However, when I watch Fred Astaire by StackBabber, I see a huge motivation that I don’t really see as much in other Line Rider tracks these days, which is just making it for fun. Now, don’t get me wrong, if LR creators didn’t put any fun into their motivations for making tracks, then Line Rider would be dead a long time ago, but StackBabber takes the whole “fun” motivation to a level of “I don’t care what anyone else says about my track, I had fun making it, I think it looks good, so it’s good to me” sort of way, and it works really well for what it’s going for.
But why? Why is it fun? Why does that work well for me? To start, I didn’t know why I liked it so much when I first watched it. The track had faults, of course. The most prominent of the faults is that it’s all over the place in terms of velocity, lyrics, visualizers, and drawings. At one second, there’s a little drawing. In the second after that, there’s a lyric. It can be seen as directionless and groan-worthy in most other tracks. However, the faults didn’t bother me when I watched this track. In a way, the faults in Fred Astaire actually kinda fits, especially if you look through the lyrics of the song this track syncs to.
In the song, it describes a person who dances in a way that might look weird or peculiar in front of others, but their lover likes the dancing and calls them “Fred Astaire”, who is a well-known dancer. Keeping this in mind for StackBabber’s release, we see Bosh doing these “all over the place” movements like the Kramual dance move and the OKAY Bounce. Like before, these dance moves are all over the place, directionless, and possibly groan-worthy. But when I see Bosh dancing in Fred Astaire, it reminds me of whenever I listen to dancey music on Spotify alone with headphones on. I’ll bounce on my exercise ball in rhythm, I’ll do weird movements with my arms like I’m in a corny music video, and I’ll be bopping my head and badly mouthing the lyrics. Bosh does the Kramual while I do the Arm Wiggle. Bosh does the OKAY Bounce while I do the Exercise Ball Bounce. Basically, I see a connection with my own dancing and Bosh’s movements in Fred Astaire, and that’s a plus for me. Heck, you might say that Bosh dances like they don’t care, but gavinroo538 calls them Fred Astaire.
HOWEVER!!! I didn’t pay attention AT ALL to the lyrics until several watches later, SO WHY DID I LOVE FRED ASTAIRE ON MY FIRST WATCH??? Maybe the poppy song helps the track out? But that couldn’t be the main reason! Hmmmm... To be honest, I’m still not exactly sure why. So instead of providing a good explanation like a real reviewer, I’ve decided to look through another Line Rider track that I consider pure fun and compare it to Fred Astaire. A perfect example of a track that oozes out fun is Run Away With Meby Andrew Hess. While Run Away With Me and Fred Astaire may look like two completely different tracks, they both have the same energy going on in both tracks. In Run Away With Me, Bosh dances gracefully with music from our Lord and Savior Carly Rae Jepsen with another Bosh. The two Boshes love each other. The two Boshes have practiced dancing in the past. Their dance moves are fun to watch and everyone gives them a chef’s kiss! In Fred Astaire, Bosh is just a drunken mess. Just hanging out at a dance party and trying their best to do some cool dancing. It’s all over the place. It’s directionless. It makes some people groan, but Bosh doesn’t care. They keep doing these weird dance moves, and Bosh is having fun by themself. Eventually, a few other people notice the dance moves. The people love the dance moves and give Bosh a chef’s kiss! I’m a part of those people, and I give StackBabber’s Fred Astaire a chef’s kiss!
...Screw it. I want to talk about my favorite parts of the track! WEEEE!!!
I love the spiral when we hear the first scream of the song 20 seconds in; it conveys the screaming very well and it gets me pumped up!
I like the recurring “eyes” drawing motif that shows up a few times during the track. It gives the all-over-the-place stuff a more consistent feel.
I like how during the first post-chorus, Bosh swings around a line and then lands on the line out of nowhere when we get to the second verse. That part just satisfies me every time I watch that section!
When we reach around the 2:45 mark, the song calms down to just a piano and voice. We see a few lyrics and the “eyes” motif. We also see a pencil line waving around Bosh, but Bosh just drops on the pencil line when the backing vocals come out into the final chorus! It gets me excited when that happens!
At the very end of the track, we see a monument of the titular dancer made with not only LROverlay, but with added pencil lines to make the monument look more like it’s made in Line Rider.
Last but not least! In the first chorus, Bosh does some OKAY dancing with a pencil following Bosh. In the second chorus, it develops into instantly rotating Bosh in every 10 point cannon. In the last chorus, it AGAIN develops into Bosh flying around instead of bouncing in every 10 point cannon. Finally, in the outro of the song, StackBabber adds the zig-zag trope along with the 10 point cannon movement which works well with the final scream and the banger ending of the song. To me, the development of the OKAY dancing movement makes it look like Bosh’s dancing is getting better and better as the music plays and it makes me extremely happy to see the idea developing across the track!
In conclusion, this track is just pure fun! Nothing more. Nothing less. In fact, it inspired me in wanting to make more fun tracks synced to fun songs in the future. I’ve been making a lot of tracks that are very personal to me and I’m still gonna make those types of tracks, but it’s good for me to also make tracks just to have some fun in Line Rider. Hopefully, more tracks with the same fun energy as Fred Astaire will come out later on!
No rating.
Analytically speaking, Fred Astaire is a mess. There’s random kramuals that don’t fit at all, there are animations exported at 60fps so they don’t look how they were intended, there are strange, random drawings in all manner of different styles and qualities, and the movement is uneven at best and entirely phoned-in at worst. However, it’s undeniable that StackBabber had a lot of fun making this track without worrying about if anything was good enough, and you can sense this enthusiasm with the ways his use of generated 10-point cannons develop throughout the track - discovery, followed by excitement, followed by refinement into a motif that then closes out the piece nicely. StackBabber has a remarkable sense for how to make high speed feel exhilarating, rather than mechanical - fast but not too fast, spinning Bosh just the right, zooming out just enough, and making sure there’s the perfect amount of stuff flying by - enough that you get a visceral sense of the speed without it ever getting distracting. The high-energy song, with lyrics like “Make it up as we go / All the words we don’t know” and “Still like me better than the rest / I swear I don’t understand it” nicely matches the attitude of the Line Rider piece to boot.
Sometimes I worry that Line Rider creators put too much pressure on themselves that they have to make something “good” - an attitude that all too often keeps people making the same thing over and over because it’s safe, or even prevents people from finishing anything at all due to paralyzing perfectionism. So while I personally might not get a lot out of it, and StackBabber might not have been trying to say much of anything with the piece, I can absolutely appreciate the “Make something fun even if it’s not that good” vibe that oozes out of Fred Astaire. I hope it encourages more creators to relax and make more stuff that’s just plain fun, even if it’s not hugely influential or widely celebrated. 🤷
Over the past few weeks, Paranoid seems to have fallen in a similar place in my brain that Replica did last year, where I keep rewatching it over and over and I have little idea why. Especially in the drop, there are a ton of moments scattered throughout the track that match the music on a very natural level. While I will admit that I am just a sucker for absurdly intense movement matched to a super loud and dynamic song in a specific way, there are a lot of decisions made in this track specifically that work well.
(You probably should) skip this paragraph if you don’t really care about the specific moments that struck resonated with me the most. The kramuals from 0:44-0:48 and again from 0:51-0:54 feel still and stiff and match the momentary silence really well and contrast the busy sections well. The scratchy texture of the alt fling at 1:44 (my favorite moment in the track) is very aesthetically pleasing and matches the shift into the drop well. The stop on the singularity at 1:48 matches the sudden silence well and it feels nice to see the quirk lines that surround it not in motion (a really interesting, unexplored aesthetic! im kinda quirkpilled). The manual at 1:53 that alternates from side to side matches the back-and-forth nature of that moment in the song well. The way the sled moves around the screen at 1:57 matches the wobbly nature of the song in that moment. The constant applied force to the alt fling and its stillness at 1:59 also really works. The camera movements at 2:02 (my second favorite moment in the track) really match the song. The ending sequence from 2:08-2:11 is a really nice final breath and then ending for the track.
I find it notable that even though I kept rewatching the track, I always seemed to immediately skip to the fast sections, and it’s because the slow sections are just way too intense, which make it difficult to take seriously. There are literal moments of almost silence where bosh is accelerating in an alt fling or moments of quiet where they move across the entire screen. I think this is due to the approach of overthinking each movement present in many quirk tracks. While this approach works really well for the drops, it really hurts the slow sections, and I think they would have turned out better with a little more awareness. Regardless, there’s a lot of potential within this track that could be applied to tracks like it in the future that get at something more artistically meaningful, whether through visuals added or engrained originally in the track. I would really love a track that I inexplicably rewatch super often that I also appreciate artistically throughout its runtime.
By far the most interesting of Goose Exe’s first three releases, I Can’t Handle Change doesn’t have any ultra-precise sync, drawings, or tricks to speak of. What it does have is some simple but effective ideas, movement that’s dynamic without ever feeling either jarring or boring, and a decent handle on the structure of the song as a whole. I’ve watched a lot of Line Rider tracks, and I can tell you that good ideas, expressive movement, and a sense of structure - these things are typically the foundation of what makes for good Line Rider work, and when people focus on precision, artistry, or techniques before they have a solid handle on these fundamentals, it often leads to work with tons of time poured in that doesn’t hold together well in the end. So, while I Can’t Handle Change could accurately be described as sloppy, rushed, or unremarkable, for me the first word that comes to mind is a far more positive one: promising.
There’s some simple scenery at the start that syncs to the music while also giving us a nice sense of speed, and I was disappointed when that never returned. I felt similarly about a mess of lines that Bosh floats through when most of the instruments drop out and the lyric “nothing I do is ever good enough” is repeated - after the first four repetitions this scenery idea is abandoned and never revisited again. I hope that in future releases, Goose leans harder into these aspects of I Can’t Handle Change that really worked, trusts their own ideas, and commits to the follow through of developing them into a coherent piece. 🤷
It took me quite a while to formulate what I think about Instantflare’s newest track, in large part because of how rapidly Line Rider is changing and thus, my viewpoint towards it as well. I’ve gone on record saying how you’d be hard-pressed to find me hating a Line Rider track, which doesn’t mean that there aren’t Line Rider tracks I like better than others, but it does mean I won’t have any strong negative feelings towards something unless it’s actively promoting harmful themes and messages. However, as time goes on and Line Rider builds itself more as an art medium, I find as though this criteria becomes much harder to quantify. All about that bass is a perfect example as to why.
By all means, the track itself is very well made. It takes heavy inspiration from the works of XaviLR, (particularly from And the day goes on), and perfectly utilizes their zany and unorthodox style to match with the song. Bosh going into an off-sled kramual on the lyrics “I won’t be no stick-figure, silicone, Barbie doll”, for example, is reminiscent of stuff like Bosh gets ready for the day, but recontextualized to feel appropriate to the song instead of being a technique used for animating Bosh. Similarly, text used to represent the lyrics on screen in a similar way XaviLR does so is added with a twist in many areas. In this track, lyrics will either fill up the background or show up in a magazine, and this felt like a brilliant expansion upon what some consider to be one of XaviLR’s weak points. Most importantly, though, the experimental spirit of XaviLR’s output is carried over to here in full force. Scenes where Bosh stops and poses for cameras through the use of 10 point cannons or having parts of Bosh flash on screen “from the bottom to the top”, are just 2 of many examples I could point to. All about that bass is, in many ways, endlessly innovative and extremely creative. So why do I not like it?
My biggest issue here is with the song and how the track visualizes it. Meghan Trainor is a horrible artist who makes faux-empowerment anthems that, 9 times out of 10, only serve to reinforce sexist ideals. “All About That Bass” is, at the very least, not “Dear Future Husband” but still pretty terrible. It’s a disingenuous message on body-positivity that ironically makes jokes at the expense of skinny people and ties a woman’s worth into what a man might think about their looks. In short, it’s what you would call problematic, and that’s what makes this track so complicated. On one hand, I could look at this track the way I looked at tracks like Innuendo, where I had a heavy admiration of the track itself in spite of finding its song to be annoying. On the other hand, All about that bass isn’t annoying – it’s disgusting, and there are parts of this track that kind of rub me the wrong way, like when Bosh’s butt sticks out to emphasize the word “bass”. Yeah… yikes.
On the other other hand, there are plenty of different ways to interpret any given piece of art. At one point, I considered this track to be a satire. “All About That Bass” is a song that doesn’t exactly fit the character of Bosh since Bosh is… well… skinny, and there are plenty of moments that feel outright silly. Most notably, a crudely drawn image of a fat person named “Bob” appears on the lyrics “I know you think you’re fat”, and bass is interpreted in both its metaphorical and literal sense, making it come across as though Meghan Trainor is singing about how she’s also all about the musical instrument/timbre. These artistic decisions make it hard to take this song seriously at times, and if this track were trying to mock the song it’s syncing to, then I’d say there’s potential here. Unfortunately, if I were to lean into this interpretation, I’d actually call this track more confused and unfunny than anything. Once again, this track takes a lot of influence from XaviLR, and although XaviLR’s tracks are rather quirky in nature, I wouldn’t say they equate to being satirical in nature. Therefore, there are plenty of parts in All about that bass that feel 100% genuine, despite having a tongue-in-cheek tone. Maybe if this track really went all out with misinterpreting every line to make it come across as though Meghan Trainor has no idea what she’s talking about, (because she doesn’t), I’d feel differently, but as it stands, I don’t view this favorably as a comedic track.
Of course, there’s always the possibility that this track wasn’t made to be art. Maybe it exists as a homage to a trackmaker that Instantflare likes or maybe this track is set to a popular song for the sake of it. Maybe this track was just an excuse to try out different ideas that wouldn’t fit in other tracks. In fact, that last possibility WAS the case with Chuggers’ One Eyed Giant 2[cw: racism], another extremely well-made track that was bogged down by iffy aspects, so it’s certainly possible that tracks like this are simply not meant to be read into. I have no problems with making a track that doesn’t really convey across any artistic statement, but I do have a problem with, what writers refer to as, unfortunate implications. Even if you intend for the viewer to not pay much attention to the song and more to the inventive visuals, that doesn’t mean the viewer will, nor does it mean they won’t object to the song and, similarly, the track. This phenomenon is known as “death of the author”. It is a creator’s greatest challenge and a critic’s greatest advantage, and as the Line Rider community continues to evolve in integrity and culture, it’s only gonna get harder to consider context and accessibility.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t enjoy this track if you do, nor does it mean that we should discourage looking at tracks in a certain way, nor does it mean that you have to consider my opinion specifically. As I’ve mentioned, there’s a lot to like here. But I bring this all up to encourage trackmakers to be more conscientious about their audiences, their song choices, their intentions, what they want to say, how they want people to react, and how to best achieve their vision. Yes, Line Rider doesn’t have to be solely an art medium, but these questions aren’t just related to art – they can apply to every form of trackmaking, and asking them will always be a cornerstone to improving in your craft. So don’t be scared to challenge yourself. I may not be a fan of this track, but I can easily see myself becoming a fan of Instantflare’s in the future, and I have no doubts that they will eventually come into their own as a trackmaker.
Rating: 🤷♀️
It’s difficult to pick apart and write about everything that’s going on in Instantflare’s newest release. Conceptually, the work ping-pongs from lyric video, to music visualizer, to synced manuquirk, to choreographic representations of the lyrics, to drawings representing the lyrics flashing by. Some of them I find to be fun creative ideas, like using 10-point cannons to freeze Bosh in place in the line of sight of little drawings of cameras. It’s clear that this wasn’t trying to be anything serious - just a fun romp of a piece with a bunch of creative ideas and some tongue-in-cheek humour. However, much like UTD, I find this piece exhausting.
The humour in All about that bass comes from the central idea that the song - an attempt at body positivity, originally sung by a straight woman, typically assumed to be directed at other straight women - is being directed at Bosh, a character often seen as male by the community (despite not being gendered at all in most builds). Meghan Trainor’s song is ostensibly a body-positive anthem, but it’s incredibly muddled in its messaging. One second, it’s saying “every inch of you is perfect from the bottom to the top”, and then the next we have some bizarrely judgmental comments on women’s bodies (“I won’t be no stick-figure silicone Barbie doll”) and the troubling implication that she’s only proud of her body for the sake of boys’ pleasure (“I got that boom boom that all the boys chase”, “Boys like a little more booty to hold at night”), not to mention the implicit objectification in the intense focus on the size of a single body part as the line “all about that bass” repeats over and over. The fact that one of Bosh’s contact points is typically informally referred to as the “butt” is milked quite a bit in All about that bass - in one of the most prominent sequences, the butt contact point is repeatedly yanked backward every time the word “bass” is sung, with a little arrow pointing at Bosh’s ass and a label reading “BASS” just in case we didn’t get the joke. The joke, I think, is that if you see and understand Bosh as male (which I personally don’t, which is likely part of why it’s not funny to me), drawing focus to their body and highlighting their butt in particular is unexpected and therefore amusing, because that’s not how men are typically treated in white, western media and culture.
What is this humor saying, though? What is the point? I genuinely have no idea. It feels vaguely satirical, but what message is the satire sending, either intentionally or unintentionally? That Bosh is a certain gender? That it’s funny when we objectify men? That the song tries to be body-positive but winds up being sexist anyway? That there’s a double standard when it comes to how we portray the bodies of men and women in music and media, even when those portrayals are ostensibly positive? I genuinely don’t know what was intended, and I genuinely don’t know what different viewers might take away from this piece. This bothers me because, unlike XaviLR’s And the day goes on, All about that bass touches on body image, objectification, sexism, and heteronormativity - fraught topics that actually affect real people, and it deals with them in confusing and muddled ways. The Line Rider community has been, and remains, overwhelmingly male, and spectacularly failing to engage thoughtfully with issues that affect most women is only going to exacerbate that problem. At the end of the day, that’s what does feel clear to me - that, based on the wild variety of different ideas at play and a complete lack of consistency in which ideas and themes and concepts are focused on in different parts of the song, Instantflare didn’t do a lot of thinking about any of this while making the piece.
So, taking a step back before I fall down this rabbit hole any further, if All about that bass was only meant to be a surface level piece, maybe I should only be reading it at a surface level. In that case, the intention was probably, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I grabbed this virtual puppet’s ass and yanked it around whenever the song mentions butts?” To answer the question on a personal level, speaking only for myself, no, I don’t find that particularly funny no matter how you slice it. 👎
[cw: discussion of suicide, self harm, and evangelical Christianity]
At first glance, Guns For Hands is quite similar to Garry the fish’s January release Saturday - a speedy track set to a Twenty One Pilots song, with a smorgasbord of different music visualization and animation ideas that are fun in a vacuum, but never coalesce into anything solid narratively, and, due to mostly consisting of half-assed copies of others’ recycled ideas, fail to ever actually be memorable. However, while the lyrics of Twenty One Pilots’ “Saturday” have about as much emotional meaning as Rebecca Black’s “Friday”, “Guns For Hands” is a whole different story. With lines like, “And you swear to your parents / That it will never happen again”, and “You never put the safety on / And you all have plans / To take it, to take it, don’t take it”, a single attentive listen-through is likely enough to notice not just that this is a song about teenagers struggling with self-harm and suicidal thoughts, but that it’s explicitly about Twenty One Pilots’ Tyler Joseph struggling under the responsibility of having so many teenage fans dealing with these things, and that he is singing directly to them - “I’m trying, I’m trying to sleep / But I can’t, but I can’t, when you all have / Guns for hands”.
Guns For Hands, the Line Rider video, does not reflect this heavy, vulnerable subject matter in the slightest. Does this mean Garry the fish isn’t aware of it? Well, I don’t know what’s inside Garry’s head. I’ve certainly made art about heavy personal subject matter and then been disappointed that my feelings didn’t come across to the viewer before because I failed to adequately convey it, so that’s certainly possible. It’s also possible that Garry is aware of the subject matter but doesn’t think of Line Rider as a medium that could convey it. However, what makes all of this especially jarring is the telling subtitle for Guns For Hands: “100 Sub Linerider Special”. It’s a bit upsetting to me to think about an artist writing a piece of music trying to help teenage fans to not kill themselves, and then a fan using that music for a generic visualizer celebrating a subscriber milestone on YouTube, regardless of that fan’s intentions.
Later in the month, Garry released Father’s House, a bland track set to a nauseatingly evangelical Christian song with lines like “Miracles take place / The cynical find faith / And love is breaking through / When the Father's in the room”. Tellingly, unlike with Guns For Hands, Garry does indicate awareness of the meaning of the lyrical content of “Father’s House” in the video’s description, where they state, “i love the lord and felt the need to make this video”. Tell me, when making art about music, which song do you think is more important for an artist to grapple with the meaning in the lyrics: a raw and vulnerable piece begging teens not to hurt or kill themselves, or a piece that is entirely dedicated to evangelization of Christianity?
Surprise! It’s a trick question. The answer is both. The answer is you should always think about the meaning in art you utilize in your own work, not just so you can avoid harm, but, more importantly, to better understand what your work is saying, intentionally and unintentionally. Unfortunately, Garry the fish is failing to grapple with much of anything. 👎
