Hello and welcome back! Apologies for the delay on this one, our intrepid team of reviewers (including myself) have collectively had a very busy month. Huge thanks as always to all our reviewers this month - September Hofmann, Twig & Cabaret (from Jade / Branches), pocke, and UTD. Special shoutout to Twig, UTD, and September, who all wrote about Cirno's Perfect Math Classroom after I attempted a deep dive into the Touhou fandom and quickly gave up after stumbling upon this video.
Click here for a playlist of all videos in this roundup (in order). Titles also link to videos individually.
Though I do not know if xiaozhou2333 is autistic, I feel that Cirno's Perfect Math Classroom is rooted in a deeply autistic culture. This is because this track is a purposeful indulgence into the layers upon layers of lore of something called the Touhou Project. The presentation of this lore is utterly elaborate, and best of all, Xiaozhou kindly explains every ounce of it in the track's description. There are a total of nine riders, all with custom skins who represent different characters who are all illustrated into the track at some point and all hold importance to Xiaozhou. There are arrays of math problems ripped directly from a college entrance exam Xiaozhou was stressing about when making the track. The skins of the train assets are meticulously recreated from a specific model of locomotive that Xiaozhou has experience with in the Chinese railway system. There's so much going on here, but not in a way that's typical for Line Rider. It's not the same kind of overwhelming, as the incentive behind the elaborate visuals are coming from a different place than the "trying to win at Line Rider" approach - this track spans across many autisms within one individual.
In Cirno's Perfect Math Classroom, we get an exhilarating and somewhat scary feeling of all the information whizzing by us, like an infodump of a special interest, or a math lesson where nothing makes sense, and the track leans into this feeling with how it presents the song's narrative. The energy is fun and silly, and also there is no way I'm following along with the pace it's moving at, and it's clear the characters are feeling similarly. The section recreating a word problem with bus and train departures and trying to count the passengers always leaves me confused, and in a way, so does this whole piece. But nonetheless, I think it is our responsibility to care for this art. You may not understand it, but it's there for all of us when we need to be reminded that people across the globe have such silly interests and particular niches they specialize in knowing everything about. I feel Line Rider fits right at home as a medium for enabling and showcasing this deeply involved silliness.
At the same time, despite the track's percieved online nicheness, I do feel that I have lived through the particular insane vibe that this track is emanating. I am reminded of being pressured to take the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) when I was a kid and having this strange feeling of not fully understanding how to use particles in sentences and having to guess a lot of the answers and not understanding what the purpose of the exam was or why it was structured so horribly or why all the Japanese teachers were so encouraging and hyped about it... "ganbatte!!!" There's an indescribably beautiful catharsis in this track for me and my weird half-Japanese academic childhood.
Review by UTD:
During the making of this track, Xiaozhou had asked for help in the Line Rider Discord with translating a specific part where another rider says "Hey stop!! Take this headbutt!!" At the time, he had translated it to "Eat me a head!" Since I was there at the time and knew that wasn't right, I tried my best to help. But all I had to work off of was still images without context and Chinese characters I couldn't understand. I frantically tinkered with Google Translate and tried recreating the Chinese symbols Xiaozhou was trying to translate to no avail. Eventually, Xiaozhou was able to explain that they needed a verb describing someone using their head to hit others, and then I was able to help. But through that whole exchange, I couldn't help but think to myself, "this would be a whole lot easier if I knew how to read Chinese. The fact that Xiaozhou can even understand 2 languages enough to know when a translation doesn't sound right is impressive on its own. Comparably, I feel stupid."
It's funny, then, that this track is primarily centered around feelings of inadequacy under a demanding education system. But it's also not surprising. A common theme I've seen represented by works from Asian Line Rider artists such as Ethan Li or Ray is that of a constant pressure to excel academically and be a perfect student; to be a perfect child. Of course, this pressure is prominent throughout a lot of Asian culture for a variety of complex socioeconomic reasons that I'm admittedly not the most knowledgeable about. And I don't know if Xiaozhou himself is going through this pressure as the track is based off of a Touhou character. Nonetheless, I strongly connected with this track. I feel as if the core of it does a great job at dismantling a universal problem with various education systems; the fear of failure.
To learn is to fail, and schools paradoxically discourage failing all the time through grades, social humiliation, and especially through standardized tests. The more you fail, the less opportunities you get. The less seriously you'll be taken. The more you're written off. This system is especially harmful towards disabled people. But it's also especially harmful to those who're clawing at every chance they can get in life to move up the societal hierarchy. Honestly, I don't think anyone likes this kind of pressure. But people like to learn. Touhou is a bullet hell game, and bullet hell games are often notorious for being extremely difficult to beat. But that's part of the fun. Failure is part of the fun. Not only are you allowed to fail in these games, you're expected to. And I think a similar thing can be said about Line Rider, too. The Line Rider community is built in a way where it not only encourages "failure", but celebrates deviancy from the norm. You don't have to make the most groundbreaking, technologically innovative track to be recognized by people in this community. Putting yourself out there is often enough. And it's clear from this track how that type of environment can greatly benefit someone. This track floored me the first time I watched it. I couldn't believe that someone not only made this in Line Rider, but made it in the span of 2 months. And I feel like, had Xiaozhou not had the resources or space to figure out Line Rider as an art medium, I never would've been able to see it.
Towards the end of this track, our main character exclaims, "Fine, call me an idiot! I don't care anymore!" And I think that perfectly captures a lot of the apathy people build towards school over time. When learning is warped into this punitive process, it doesn't make you wanna get better at any given subject. It just makes it harder to trust the institutions around you and care about your progress within them. I had tried learning another language in school, but just couldn't do it. I got through school by memorizing specific things for tests and final exams, then forgetting everything immediately afterwards. It was clear, however, that learning another language was gonna be different from that, and as I continued taking French classes, I realized I wasn't learning anything. Actually, I was struggling... badly. I tried figuring out my own way to go about learning the language, but nothing clicked. All my teacher offered was vocabulary words and grammatical conventions that wouldn't stick because the context of the language was lost on me. As a result, I started failing the class. Eventually, I just stopped caring and thought learning other languages was simply my Achilles heel. But maybe it's not. As a native English speaker, I can tell that Xiaozhou's English is... not perfect, but he's still writing it and understanding it. And I, in turn, can understand him. Isn't that what really matters?
Review by September Hofmann:
(special thanks to Tulips, whose knowledge and insight on fanfiction and vocaloid had a profound effect on this review)
Xiaozhou2333’s is one of the most interesting voices that have come from the Chinese Line Rider scene on Bilibili. I had already found his previous work in Water A-39 and Enchanted Love to be quite promising, providing us with high-quality music visualizations that make use of some of Line Rider’s more obscure features. What really caught my attention, however, were the bits of narrative that structured the opening and ending of Enchanted Love—Xiaozhou seemed to be interested in using Line Rider’s capabilities in various ways in order to tell the kinds of stories he wanted to tell.
Cirno’s Perfect Math Classroom is that interest propelled to its utmost extent, the likes of which has never really been seen in Line Rider before. There’s not really a track that I can compare to Cirno’s Perfect Math Classroom, because it feels like a unique synthesis of many things that have been brewing within Line Rider as of late and several things that seemingly have never really had any substantial connection with Line Rider before now. Xiaozhou uses color layers, time remapping, layer automation, advanced camera controls and many multiriders to fulfill his very particular vision. At one particular moment, Xiaozhou even makes use of the “screenual”, a very silly term I invented just now to describe the varioustimes people have intentionally filmed computer monitors displaying Line Rider tracks for artistic effect.
The end result is something that just blows me away just from a technical and raw experiential standpoint—it’s kind of jaw-dropping that almost all of this was done in Line Rider with so much code and so many lines and so many layers. And the music sync is great! All in all, it ends up being a wild ride of a time that left me kind of flabbergasted by the end.
But, for now, let’s set aside the clearly virtuosic technical accomplishment Xiaozhou has achieved with this track. You may have noticed that I have avoided talking about what the track is actually about, thematically speaking, up until this point. This is because those elements are a bit harder to talk about for this track. There’s a bit of a language and culture barrier operating here, of course—but even more than that, Cirno’s Perfect Math Classroom is an unapologetic work of fanfiction.
The Touhou Project is a series of video games in the “bullet hell” genre created by independent solo developer ZUN—but more than that, it’s the rare sort of fandom that has developed around the music and characters of these video games and eventually outgrown its source material—becoming its own constellation of fandom works—videos, songs, fanfiction, and even fangames. Cirno’s Perfect Math Classroom is a work that unapologetically derives itself from this whirlwind—Cirno herself is a character from the Touhou Project, and so is pretty much every other character or place depicted in this track. Furthermore, many of the visuals CPMC are themselves derived from this music video of the same name and which features the same song. And, of course, when this video and this song are themselves fanfiction of ZUN’s original source material, you enter into a kind of whirlwind of derived and referential material with its own little cultural quirks and particularities. Which is to say—if you don’t know anything about Touhou, there’s a high likelihood you won’t understand all that much about this track. This problem feels even more pronounced when placed into an English-speaking context; while the English-speaking world certainly has plenty of Touhou fans, Touhou is substantially more obscure in places like the U.S. than in China or Japan.
But this is an intentional strategy of fandom works—they intentionally make themselves inaccessible to a general audience to better appeal to a smaller group of people who will be more invested in what is being made. Often, I have joked that Line Rider is a kind of fanfiction for music, but it is rarer to see these kinds of high-effort works of passionate fanart being produced in Line Rider. Sure, you get your Harry Potter Soundtracks or Line Rider Megalovanias now and again, but Cirno’s Perfect Math Classroom is the sort of labor-of-love Line Rider fanwork I think I’ve only elsewhere seen in Jeremiah Lopez’s Line Rider 2: Unbound - A Star Wars Track. It seems clear that Xiaozhou really cares about Touhou, and that this fandom is actually a part of his life that is deeply connected to the way he relates to his own experiences and the world around him. In the video Xiaozhou uploaded to youtube right after Cirno’s Perfect Math Classroom, “Fumo & Lagtrain, but it is on the real lagtrain”, we can watch Xiaozhou create the vocaloid song “Lagtrain” using the same stuffed plush of Reimu (a Touhou character) and papercraft Cirno that he features prominently in the screenual section of Cirno’s Perfect Math Classroom. These are objects and characters that Xaiozhou clearly cares about, and—like all good fanfiction—uses as a vehicle for his own experiences and anxieties.
What is the song Cirno’s Perfect Math Classroom actually about, after all? Cirno is conceptualized in the fandom as not being very good at mathematics, having once been referred to in the games as not being able to count past 9—hence the prominent number “9” that is featured throughout the track. “Cirno’s Perfect Math Class” the song then takes this character and places her in the everlasting genre of the “school sucks” song (especially compare with, for example, other japanese-language “school sucks” songs like Neru’s “Lost One’s Weeping”). “Cirno’s Perfect Math Class”, the song—and Cirno’s Perfect Math Classroom, the track—are about struggling and feeling overwhelmed in a math class, especially with the context of trying to get into one’s “preferred school.” And it is no coincidence that Xiaozhou chose to sync to this kind of song at this particular moment in his life—Xiaozhou was in the process of taking his college exams around the time this track was made, and even several test questions and answers from those exams were included in the “question answering” sections of the track. In so doing, Xiaozhou pokes fun at the grind of the school system by comparing test-taking to the sort of bullet-hell bossfight one might find in the Touhou games.
Strangely enough, there’s a kind of thread that can be drawn between this track and another remarkable release from this month—Ray’s 4U, which also prominently features mathematics test-taking as an element with personal and emotional valences. While Cirno’s Perfect Math Classroom is more upbeat and playful with its subject matter—the trials and tribulations of school are more meant to be poked at and laughed about than despaired over (a commiserative chuckle)—while 4U chooses to despair, to stop and ask… wait, what the FUCK we doing here? Why are we wasting the time and destroying the minds of children for the sake of all this test taking? And as a student educator through various stages of my life, I appreciate both of these tracks for how they speak to the range of emotions I have felt in relation to these strange institutions which both educate us and fail to so, systems so vast and tied into society that both laughter and tears are some of the only responses we often have left.
In 4U, Ray reinterprets Charli XCX’s “party 4 u” to be about (wanting to?) party in spite of academics. It’s really well done structurally — it starts out with very simple Line Rider and slowly introduces the theme, first with a direct representation of the song mixed in with cheeky math and programming jokes that hint at the later centerpiece of the track — the Mathematics Extension 2 of the 2020 TRIAL HIGHER SCHOOL CERTIFICATE EXAMINATION, pasted directly into Line Rider using LROverlay, a tool that converts images into Line Rider lines.
You know that feeling when you’re taking a big test and you just look at all the questions? I mean, I know that there’s a lot of copy and paste but it still encapsulates the feeling well. Even as someone who likes math (fuck, I even tried solving some of the questions on first watch) tests can be really overwhelming, especially when they’re high-stakes. These things don’t feel like a huge deal to me nowadays but they did when I was a kid, especially when there was a large amount of external pressure alongside a competitive environment with my peers. I took the SAT (an American college entrance exam) 7 times, more than anyone I know.
Maybe I’m making this too personal? But I feel like it’s a relevant theme in the track — the written text that appears after the test talks about yearning to developing a relationship with someone else (that plays off the song in a really smart way into the next section — the last time I’ve seen this done was in Toivo’s I Can’t Ride These Lines Without You) but not being able to because of academics. I find this sentiment relatable. Honestly, I kind of feel like my childhood was robbed from me in a way only relatable to recent generations, and I feel like I’ve been penalized for it, and mostly I feel like nobody really gives a shit, which is fine, but it sucks that we have to live with the consequences.
I’d rather not think about these things, but this track lets me do that without getting too bitter because it’s genuinely pretty funny.
Review by Twig & Cabaret:
[cw: suicide mention]
Going to school. Going to high school. Going to college.
Studying. Partying.
Taking tests. Making friends.
Learning about math, and getting confused. Learning about you, learning about myself, and getting confused.
There was a time when I went to high school. There was a time I was in a pre-calculus 10 or 11 or 12 class. I don’t remember the numbers. I remember people. I remember the students struggling. I remember the feeling — the focus — the fear that dawned over the room of students like a cloud during an exam, much more than the contents of the exam itself. I remember when the guys in the back row brought their controllers to school and played Super Smash Bros with the laptop under the desks and the teacher went up and asked to play with them after she finished the lesson. I remember hearing that one of those same guys got cursed and yelled at by another teacher a few years earlier for carrying one of the school laptops in a slightly precarious way.
I remember bike rides in the night. Students walking home from a birthday party… and then not going home, because who actually wants to be at home? Instead we biked from 1am to 8:30am around Vancouver… traversing the night… sharing our lives… our feelings… knowing that there were exams coming up soon, or that we should be sleeping… but…
What do high school students want? What do STEM students want? To learn? To achieve academic success? To make their parents happy? To make friends? To party and have sex and get high with each other?
And why do they all seem so sad…?
After all the partying, the math, the exam, the stress, the crying… Ray gives us this remarkably simple and sincere invitation:
hey do u wanna hang out some time? I know… we are supposed to be working hard… studying right now but… …
There’s a lot of thoughts and feelings and memories that come up for me when I see this text so blatantly presented after everything that came before. It’s like, so sad and so real. At the start of high school, I was in an accelerated program for “the smart kids” where they cram the first three years of high school curriculum into Grade 8 and 9, and it got very stressful at the tail end of the program, which was also when I had some of the most intense experiences as a teenager, such as three-or-four-way makeout sessions, or trying to talk friends out of suicide, or getting into Line Rider for some reason. I find it so thought-provoking… the way Ray builds a narrative out of blurring the line between party life and academic life, modes of being that feel so different in energy, and yet are so strongly linked together when you think about what comprises the stereotypical high school/college experience; on one hand, there’s the social aspect of the parties, the drama, getting into relationships and going to the dance or the prom and all the dating and the who-likes-who… and on the other hand, you have the academic grind, the studying, the midterm, the finals season, all the cramming… I find these two things equally stressful and traumatising, funnily enough, and when Ray places these two core aspects of school side by side, what ends up shining through the most is the upsetness of the students and their desire to genuinely connect and to be heard. The acts of scribbling over the test paper and ditching the party are the same — the person feebly inviting us to “hang out sometime” is taking a step to escape both the academic and social pressures being placed upon them by adults and the system.
Ray doesn’t provide a response or even bother to articulate writing the reason for wanting to hang out. It doesn’t need to be said in the track, because Ray wants us to fill in the blanks and make our own responses and reasons, making us a part of the piece. And I love that, because yes, I really would like to hang out sometime, even if we should be working hard and studying.
Jade’s Honed. Hemmed In is one of those pieces in her catalog that fall into the same category as tracks like Silver and Gold and Yr Million Sweetnesses — one of these kinds of mostly-offsled scribbled landscapes that meander through minimalist, vaguely psychological landscapes in a nonlinear fashion. These kinds of tracks, at times, feel like some of the most strangely private of the Line Rider tracks she creates—there’s a reason she chose to sit on Silver and Gold for two years before finally choosing to release it. None of these tracks really feel like they were meant for us—they feel more like a kind of journaling, an attempt to capture the vague geometries of an emotion felt. And in this newest entry into this odd genre of Jade’s, she manages to capture these emotions in a way that feels newly visceral and poignant.
So much of Jade’s line rider work has been about holding onto childhood—holding onto youth—in various ways. Aging into a new life stage is a specter that has lurked in the background of many Jade’s tracks, from the “Feels so scary getting old” of Ribs to the “What will you do when everyone else has grown?” of Hold Yourself Tight. Jade’s Line Rider work is something that has grown up with her since childhood over the past five years, and in so doing, her Line Rider work has given its own in-depth, personal account of that experience and her relationship to it. At times, “growing up” has looked like a horrible fate looming on the horizon—at others, it has seemed like something entirely inaccessible and impossible to achieve.
So what happens when such an artist, who has such a complicated relationship with growing up—with both childhood and adulthood—finally does discover, one day, that she has begun to grow up, has begun to imagine a future for herself? You get the strange, pensive reflections of Honed. Hemmed in.—and really, on a first watch, it is the textual forms these reflections take that really becomes the star of the show. Jade creates these phrasal units that can each be often read in relation to one another in a nonlinear way, which build and repeat on themselves like poetry as Bosh is flung through her environment in various nonlinear ways:
there is a future “what did you say?” i don’t know how to articulate my needs “nothing” Sleep i don’t know how to.
This comes to an incredible emotive climax when Jade writes, in various styles and fonts, the word “adult” over and over, capped off with the word “child” being run over by a train. The “Hemming” in this track are the ways in which these turns between adult and child, the gap between “child” and “ish” define this in-between space where one is no longer a child, but not yet an independent adult: the childhood home, the spectral figure or voice of parents, the life tasks one does not yet know how to do—images of the strange condition of “still living there”, in the haunted space between adulthood and childhood. Jade, too, gives an accounting of too-slow but still beautiful process of forging a future, of “alternative marriage” and “am i allowed”, of rewriting “responsibility” as “response-ability” and reflecting upon having “called my mom a fucking bitch.”
And I would be remiss if I did not emphasize the particularly neurodivergent character of this track. Neurodivergent people, especially autistic people, are often infantilized and often foreclosed the possibility of being an “adult” and all the rights adulthood currently confers. Of being “childish”, of having “redundant” interests, of not quite knowing yet how to take care of yourself, but wanting to learn. The tension between childhood and adulthood in this track is a specifically neurodivergent one, a processing of the way neurotypical and ableist visions of our “development” into adults structures the way we view ourselves and our relationship to the world as we grow up. This track is a process of looking for the alternative, for emphatically declaring that neurodivergence is not “childishness”, and that becoming an adult does not mean masking away the neurodivergent parts of yourselves—and in that way, is an attempt to make a neurodivergent adulthood livable for oneself.
I’m amazed that Best Tears was made for a Secret Songsta (a contest in which participants pick a song and get randomly assigned someone else’s choice) since the only times I’ve seen compelling art come out if them are when the trackmaker is actively hostile toward their assigned song, such as September Hofmann’s Running Red Lights. Shockingly, gavinroo538 (here under the alias “nameless”) appears to have both received a remarkable song and taken the project to heart. There are a lot of ideas in the mix - many of them music visualization ideas recycled from Gavin’s other tracks - and some of them are more distracting than anything else, but some of them work incredibly well. The emphasis on the first jarringly suicidal turn the lyrics take works remarkably well, especially when followed up by abandoning the concept of lyric video in favor of an infinite screaming scribbled mass of red for the second verse. The piece then fully wins me over with the use of the lyrics of a genuinely terrifying Mormon children’s song that borders on self-parody. (I had no idea “Turn It Off” was this on-the-nose?!) The icing on the cake is an abruptly-cut-off furious rant at the end of the track as the facade finally cracks and those suppressed emotions erupt all at once, as they inevitably do when keeping up appearances is consistently prioritized over honest grappling with whatever messy emotions are actually present. Best Tears is far from polished, but I found the way it portrays masking and toxic positivity to be as pointed as it is darkly hilarious. I haven’t seen another Line Rider track nail “black comedy” so effortlessly since My Pal Foot Foot.
∞ is a gamer. This is evident by the fact that they play Line Rider, which is a game. Oh wait, that’s an outdated sentiment? Am I going to be beheaded? And what is a “thos moser” exactly? ∞ thoughtfully explores these implications and lets us into their world very kindly and rudely. I like how it’s big. I like how it’s like, a, um, a, um, a track. It is a normal track.
In ∞’s debut, Designated Male at Birth, we are designated male at birth. But what if we weren’t? This is what thos moser presents.
Within the first three seconds, thos moser immediately proclaims to us that “this is a normal track. c:” And considering the “quirky” song choice and the track’s “unusual” artistic choices, this statement might seem ironic – but the true irony here is that this track is actually a lot more normal than whatever shit is being considered good these days. Much more normal than whatever shit Hide and Seek and Unfold Reimagined are doing – within the context of the vast ocean of Line Rider tracks being uploaded to YouTube by some random kids, these are deeply abnormal videos. And the aesthetic of thos moser isn’t even a Freaks by vsbl level of perceived artistic amateurity, because Freaks has drawings and doodles which many will agree have charm or character or at least are something. thos moser does not have drawings. It is wearing the costume of the Line Rider video by a small child that is literally just some fucking lines. Lines that form nothing concrete or iconographic – lines that are seen as useless. ∞ is an embodiment of the average YouTube kid. ∞ is seen as useless.
thos moser turns this perceived uselessness into an engaging fire beat. An absolute romp comprised of many smaller romps which form an expansive geography, and this geography reflects the map of an unlabelled prehistoric world. The most defining characteristic of ∞ tracks like Designated Male at Birth and dance for borderline miscanthus is the incredible use of space, and how we and the rider are constantly revisiting familiar places, but there’s this wild sensation because these places we return to are not obvious, they are often just fucking lines. The first few squiggles we fall past in thos moser sync to these autotuned vocal runs, but then halfway through we move past them but flying upwards and more zoomed out during a musical section of airy gay ambience with more washed-out vocal runs. The beginning with the title and text reading “this is a normal track. c:” is also constantly being revisited, giving us a geographical anchor (a home) that gives a sense of direction and palpable spaciousness. Watching thos moser is like traversing a huge forest, where there’s just a few spots where the bushes and trees and mushrooms have grown in a particular way that you keep running into and you feel like you recognize, but you can’t quite put your finger on it, because it’s a forest, not a city. These spots aren’t labelled. They’re just fucking squiggles. This is what makes the ∞ track infinite.
Am I allowed to review this one? You know, my name is September, after all—and, you know, the track being set to the song “September” by Earth, Wind, and Fire, I assume the track is like, dedicated to me or something—
…Huh? What’s that? The track is specifically NOT dedicated to me?
Well… okay, then! Review it, I shall!
As you can probably tell from the video description above, Goose Exe and pocke’s latest collaboration i rember, is a pretty silly affair—laden with jokes and funky little movements from everyone’s favorite omnigender sledder, i rember falls squarely into the storied tradition of “people—or perhaps even friends—collaborating on a Line Rider track together as a fun social activity”. However, unlike many tracks in this genre, i rember is a delight to watch. Why? Because, unlike many non-serious, “for fun” tracks, you can actually tell that the people making it are actually having fun—Goose and pocke telling jokes to us and to each other, drawing little hearts and :3 faces, and just having an irreverent old time being menaces to society (/pos). What results, perhaps unsurprisingly, is a track that feels like it’s about that fun, about that friendship—it seems very clear Goose and pocke had a great time making this track in collaboration, sharing those hours, moments of attention, and jokes with each other. Over the course of this month, their friendship has led them to make happy memories with each other—ones that they are very likely to rember.
After william017’s impossibly huge debut in Impossible Soul, I and a few others hoped they would continue sharing more of their Line Rider explorations, so we’re really happy to see william017 putting out something shorter that continues to deepen their connection with the medium. It’s set to another Sufjan Stevens song, this time off of his brand new album Javelin which is a serious pull at the heart strings, with the song “So You Are Tired” being one of my favourites – there’s something so defeated yet uplifting about this tune’s instrumentation and lyrics, which william017 captures wonderfully through the rider’s movement. Their playful movement style of tossing the rider around like a ball first introduced in Impossible Soul is elaborated on to express a sort of whimsical floppiness.
There are a few aspects of this track that make it stand out, like Bosh’s physicality and the way she feels very responsive to gravity – there are quirk and acceleration lines that tug or dismount Bosh quickly and unpredictably, but anytime she gets tossed up in the air, she always comes back down, finding herself in a landing or remount that is either elegant and swooping, or tired and rough. I especially love how the curve followed by the landing at 4:14 feels – it’s such an expansive and airy jump for such a feeble return, and I love how that syncs to the background vocals.
Speaking of music sync, I feel drawn to william017’s way of showcasing their listening to the different instruments. This song doesn’t have many obvious or rhythmically distinctive moments, so william017 takes a more textural approach to syncing the rider, which I think is very tasteful. I love this flowy way of cycling between different line textures that capture the little conversations between instruments, juxtaposing smooth lines that feel more vocal-adjacent with fast straight line tumblies that emulate the guitar picking or a repeated piano note. I can tell william017 is a really good listener, feeling the overall musical story but also picking up on specific overlapping details and mixing them into a flavourful choreography soup. I’m interested and excited for how this style of movement may combine with scenery in william017’s future projects, since they considered this only a filler track before those projects are shared, but I still think this track is special for being such a concise yet full demonstration of this unique approach to representing music in Line Rider.
Berreymusic’s Lo sposo deluso is just one track in the sea of contemporary Line Rider’s most common subgenres: that of the DoodleChaos clone. Featuring classical music, a minimalist style of scenery, and light smatterings of sheet music notation, these tracks are essentially a dime a dozen, and often fail to capture the charm of some of DC’s or Matthew Buckley’s best work. Lo sposo deluso, however, manages to capture that spark more successfully than any other track in recent memory. How? By turning its music sync into a narrative.
For me, what divides the simply “good” DoodleChaos tracks from the “great” ones is the use of narrative. Sure, Mountain King, Dance of the Line Riders, and Line Rider Phone Juggling are pleasing, music-synced romps, but DC’s work shines best when combined with simple, dramatic plots involving the riders as characters, such as in The Marriage of Figaro, Beethoven's 5th and Line Rider Race: Who Will Survive? In these tracks, the sledders fall in love, get killed, cheat on one another, murder other sledders, or participate in wacky races in a way that feels overblown, melodramatic—operatic, even—in a way that tickets the part of my brain that thrives on emotional conflict and intensity. It fits perfectly with the old-dead-white-dudes style of classical music that DC sets his tracks too, which is, itself, a kind of overblown, melodramatic sort of music that you can just imagine scoring some kind of Old Timey Drama Bullshit in 1100BC or whenever Beethoven lived his little gremlin life. And Lo sposo deluso manages to recapture this sort of theater-kid-ass framing in its own, less polished way—featuring riders falling in love, angrily making faces at one another, and, in an impressive climactic moment, resulting in one rider forcibly dismounting the other by crashing into them. Sure, it’s no DoodleChaos, but it’s not often we get this kind of narrative-laden multirider fight scene, and it’s worth watching and celebrating if that sort of track is Your Shit, like it is mine.
