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shinmelodia · 9 months

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Love & Process: blue (2002)

Hello to everyone reading, and welcome to a highly belated attempt to squeeze some of my thoughts and emotions through some semblance of a creative process and onto a page. Today, I want to introduce this blog by talking about a lovely film, blue (2002), directed by Hiroshi Ando and based on a manga by Kiriko Nananan.

Since I'm still somewhat new at diving into live action film, especially, like, uh, Japanese indie film, its helping to start with the yuri genre. Because like practically any other woman on this site, I quite enjoy lesbians. blue's manga original offers something of an alternative to the yuri norm, though, and the film follows suit. Both are definitely examples of the Japanese filmmaking trend I've heard of called "mumblecore," (or maybe mumble-komi for the manga equivalent) that most people know through the likes of Inio Asano's early work. Like Solanin or Girl on the Shore, blue is shoegazey, quiet, and contemplative, adorned with moments of subtle physical intimacy, layered emotion, and stunningly beautiful compositions of daily life.

My metric for these kinds of slow mood pieces, which I've previously tended to watch at random whenever the mood struck me, is that if my barely-medicated ADHD brain can even finish them, there's clearly something special going on. blue passed with flying colors; yeah, ok, it took two sittings, but I spent all of both enraptured, immersed, and invested in the mono no aware of silent, fragile love and messy asymmetry that formed this movie's emotional palette. blue is about love, of course, but its also about process and expression, both emotional and creative, and how processing things, artistically, verbally, non-verbally--is often required of real, human love.

In being about this, I think it did things for me that a lot of yuri often doesn't and gently hit me in a place that I really needed to be hit. So, let me get into it. This is going to be...very personal, and also obviously spoil the details of the film, if you care about that, although I'm sure there will be plenty of depth left in the text that I leave untouched. Whether you read it or not, I'll be happy I made it. Oh, and sorry if I come off as really New for being so struck by themes and aesthetics that are probably sort of standard for this type of film. I can't help what I feel like writing about, though.

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Kirishima Kayako lives in a small town by the sea, one much like dozens of other anonymous, disaster-prone exurban towns in Japan at the turn of the millennium. She rides the bus to her girls' high school every day, where she eats lunch with her friends and tries her best to learn something in class. Really, though, she's aimless, quiet, lonely, and introspective. She's trying, but its rare for others to be able to tell. She's also in love with her classmate, Endou Masami. When she confesses at the end of the first act, on a windy beach against the vastness of the ocean, Endou responds that she's glad, and the two become our lesbians for the movie. Kayako falls to her knees and cries in relief. Masami is different from the others--she sees how hard Kayako tried. Does that mean she loves her back, though?

Endou Masami has cool passions and interests; she collects American CDs, which she expertly critiques and describes while lending to friends. The mere view of her vibing to her American alt-rock while smoking a cigarette in front of her apartment window is album-cover worthy in itself. Kayako feels the same way: one of the most intimately gay scenes of the pre-confession portion of the film is when Masami lights a cigarette and asks if Kayako is shocked. The quiet girl declares without hesitation, "No, I'm admiring the way you lit the match."

The whole early film is such a delectable, lonely vibe. The slowly intertwining couple's solidifying dynamic is the kind that forms between an emotionally complex introvert and the perhaps even more unknowable yet somehow more confident object of their affection. The two are classmates, (there's no classic yuri kouhais and senpais here) but for the early part of the film we are seeing things from Kayako's perspective and Masami seems unmistakably older in spirit. There's something about the dense emotions conveyed in her gazes at her new girlfriend, the almost world-weary tinge of recklessness in her distant grins. She talks about music Kayako's never heard of and lends out books with Romantic-era paintings that she has well-formed thoughts on. Kayako even openly admits that if she could, she would want to be Masami.

I think we've all loved a girl like that.

It's a pretty typical experience in middle school or high school, for really anyone lonely who loves women, to be drawn to these sorts of sad, beautiful, oh-so-seemingly-complex femmes. I guess straight men have a similar thing going on with the whole Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype, but for us women (or, women-to-be, at the time, I guess), the phenomenon of these people to us often involves a sort of existential jealousy. I'm not sure what is so alluring to other people about the sense that the object of their love has Something Going On that they are working through, or a vast and complicated life beyond the scope of one's understanding, but it me it always felt like something I was missing out on for myself. Obviously, a lot of their experiences and interests must be interesting and fun and super cool, you think, but even what pain you think they convey must be somehow more edifying than yours.

For me, the edifying aspect was the mere fact of femininity itself. The idea of a girl who has deep and Real emotions, who feels Real love and Real sadness and can actually express that in how she looks, beautiful and imperfect, always threw into stark contrast my own inability to express myself comparably. I was depressed, I was growing up, and I felt things, too, but, as someone who everyone thought was a straight boy and who was too scared to admit to being otherwise, I lacked that sort of beauty, that means of expressing what was inside me through fashion, makeup, book or music knowledge or taste. Or at least I thought I did. Thus, my own emotions must have also meant less. So, I ignored them and belittled them, and entire years passed before I processed a thing correctly. I always wanted to be some other girl. That was the only thing that would fix me.

I assume that the teen (and, uh, sometimes beyond) existential pining experienced by some other people in real life usually lacks the fun bonus that mine had of a screaming void where my femininity should have been, but I'm not sure how much this actually matters to the crux of the kind of experience I'm talking about. That some kind of void is there is all that matters, really, and its there for Kayako in her relationship with Masami at the beginning of the film. She has nothing, Masami is everything, and just being close to her is enough, for now. Just being noticed, just sharing something with her, is all Kayako feels like she can ask for.

Of course, this incomplete way of seeing love can't last, which brings us to the next part of the film, which starts when the two are hanging out and Masami reveals through a guarded, distant grin that she had an abortion a while ago. This isn't something that shocks Kayako or is really meant to shock the audience, and it isn't the big moment where she forced to reconsider her feelings. Rather, she asks how it went, and Masami responds honestly. She mentions she felt horrible the next day and had to be picked up by ambulance from the nurse's office, prompting Kayako to recall silently what to us was the film's first scene, a view from her window during class of an anonymous ambulance, sirens turned off, discreetly rescuing a student.

That she had this ambiguously traumatic, and at least unpleasant and potentially taboo experience is something that could have made Masami feel even older to Kayako, her pain even more distant and obscure. It certainly already is a way that Masami herself feels distant from others. Yet, by considering her own special, observant view of the ambulance back when it happened, it becomes one that Kayako can in some small way assertively share with her. Rather than continuing to put her lover's experiences on a pedestal, Kayako in this scene makes a silent decision to turn a blossoming mutual acceptance simply that they happened into a moment of true intimacy between the two, a sleepover punctuated by smirking kisses and satisfied cuddles initiated by each of them for the other. Despite her remarks that Kayako is weird for unhesitatingly wanting to stay with her, its an intimacy that Masami is happy to accept. This is all an important turning point in Kayako's development because she begins to choose insight, closeness, and assertion over the distant admiration that trapped her earlier.

As we go on, we'll start seeing how blue's gentle impact comes from the way it doesn't glorify or sugarcoat that earlier kind of unhealthy and immature dynamic. Instead it subverts it by giving Masami depth and Kayako agency, before reaching an endpoint that reflects on how the dehumanization of that kind of depressed, pining relationship can be overcome. In that sense, blue is a yuri romance mostly about the couple coming to accept their own and each other's humanity and capacity for expression. Like any good mumble movie, its full of long silences and almost unrealistically hesitant dialog, and doesn't give any explicit internal monologues like a lot of manga do. The world of this movie is one where expression is an uphill battle, something that has to be worked towards and struggled through. It's the world that Kayako and Masami share, in their own separate ways. And that's why its such a triumph to watch Kayako finally find her voice, her passion, and her process, which all starts in this scene.

First, though, it's time to learn about the Something that Masami has Going On.

Things begin when Kayako is still sleeping. Masami gets a call on her house phone that she doesn't answer, but that sends her into a silent spiral of emotional dread. She spends the next day at school in the nurse's office, refusing to tell Kayako what's going on and confiding only in her friend Nakano. Then, when summer break comes along, she disappears, leaving Kayako alone at home, pouring silently over the book of still life oil paintings that Masami lent her.

It ends up being Nakano who tells Kayako why she left. It's the story Masami didn't tell about the source of her abortion: an adult, married man whom she had a relationship with and eventually a pregnancy from. She got things taken care of without telling him, alerted her parents and tried never to see the rotten salaryman again. That is, until he called. He wasn't getting along with his wife anymore, apparently, and she had some sort of attachment to him that made her come running back. Her taste in music originally came from him, after all. It seems that, for the time being, her devotion to this mysterious, abusive man is going to perpetuate a brutal cycle: she'll keep hurting both Kayako and herself all at once.

What really destroys Kayako and her relationship, though, is that she lies about it. When she comes home after some predictably rough interactions with this guy, she tells her supposed girlfriend that she was enjoying a vacation with friends, and even gives her some grapes, supposedly grown in the prefecture she was hanging out in, as a twisted souvenir. The more assertive Kayako enforces her boundaries without hesitation, though, in equally as blunt a tone as she complimented her love, as when she told her she wanted to stay with her, all those nights ago. "Why are you lying to me?" Its with that same grin, now tinged with emotionally oblivious deception, that Masami dares to at first first feign ignorance.

"Eh?" Her smile is shallower than its ever been.

So Kayako walks away.

Their dynamic has now become worse than just immature; it's entirely toxic. From an outside perspective, Kayako is working on her shortcomings, while Masami refuses to reconcile her past. This kind of toxicity, though, is sadly just as common in high school (and even sometimes middle school) as is the kind of misunderstanding, lonely pining I talked about earlier, just usually among different sorts of people. Appropriately, its often even that exact kind of beautiful, hurting, mature femme (in the eyes of disastrous, moody lesbians like Kayako) who is going through that sort of pain. Its that mysterious and tragic byproduct of compulsory heterosexuality that causes a lot of girls to seek validation in the love of an older man, and that I imagine becomes a sort of addiction to that validation that only masquerades as love. Hell, Masami attributes much of what made her seem so interesting on the surface, her love of music, to this guy. She feels like she'd be nothing without him, and the way Kayako praised her, at least in the way she interpreted it, did nothing to dispel this fear. Which I think is really why she decided to go back, even though it would mean betraying the very girl whose love provided her an escape from it all.

Its an ugly truth, and its one that yuri media usually shies away from portraying, but it is explored with refreshing frankness and resolved with astounding maturity by the end of blue. And I think its the source material's status as "alternative" (I guess in Japanese parlance, Garo-inspired) manga, not to mention the movie's simply as an independent film, that allows it to break with genre limitations in this way. There's been tons of writing done on how yuri definitely presents a fantasy of the sapphic experience. Mainstream yuri's origins in Class-S still to this day often cause it to portray romances between women as fundamentally different, and inherently more pure, than those involving men, trapping them in a bubble of unassailable innocence. While that kind of makes sense and seems extremely cool to those of us who celebrate having little interest in moids or whatever, it also has the effect of sugarcoating and sometimes even outright obscuring what real women, even (and sometimes especially) sapphic ones, go through.

There's already a decent amount of yuri, especially among those aimed at older demographics and those where its more of a secondary genre, that do deal with compulsory heterosexuality and the experiences that come with it. What are much rarer are yuri series where one of the lover's flaws more resemble Masami's than Kayako's. Not enough that I've read at least is willing to make its relationships messy, or have one of its leads just do straight up bad things like self-destructive cheating and lying.

Because, really, its the same as what Kayako went through, isn't it? The lonely longing for something more that feels like it can only be cleansed by denying oneself all one has and betting it all on being close to someone else. The only difference between the two's actions is temperament and perhaps socialization--one sought it from a cooler woman, the other from an older man. And somewhere out of sight, that sad, irresponsible, fucked-up adult was probably hopelessly lonely, too, just like Kayako had to accept Masami was. Maybe disaster lesbians, disaster bisexuals(?), and yes, disaster straights aren't so different after all.

Well, other than that Kayako has worked to process her feelings, while Masami went and ruined her relationship over them. That's an important difference. Still, though, even Kayako has some work to do about how she feels about all of this. Masami's pedestal has been smashed, whether she likes it or not, and now she's lonelier than ever. So where does this vampiric cycle of taking from others end? What substance can replace loneliness in this ouroboros of etropic emotional alchemy?

Kayako doesn't touch the grapes. Instead, she silently processes things, lies on the floor listening to the cicadas scream in the garden. The grapes go rotten, and her brother throws them out. She sulks for a while.

Then, she starts painting. A still life of grapes, inspired by the books that Masami lent her. At first, her drawing is lousy, as the school fine arts instructor later tells her, but the colors are gorgeous. The deep purples of the fruits are expertly layered to capture light and tell a story, one deeper than the instructor could possibly imagine. It's the story not only of the transformation of a relationship, but of the growth of one of its participants. As the hot, still air of the coastal Japanese summer cloys around her lonesome final vacation of high school, Kayako finally salvages a passion to call her own out of a floundering relationship. When school starts again and she picks up art classes, going to Tokyo for uni, a dream that was previously held only by Masami, starts to be within her reach. She has a future, an interest, and a way to process all has happened to her.

And then comes the time for Masami to try and return. She proves unwilling to address all that happened before, instead trying to kiss Kayako after school in the art room. Her undeserved attempt at intimacy is rejected with a shove, but so too is her self-pity that causes her to instantly run away. There's more that needs to be said that simply "I'm a terrible person." Kayako pursues her into the town's small shopping district as night begins to fall and neon crackles to life against a cool late summer night. Now the emotional climax of the movie begins.

First, Kayako starts talking. She tells Masami about the painting, about her summer, about how lonely she was without her, about all the places she wanted to go with her. She talks about how happy she was at the same time that she found something she wanted to do without her. This approach is new for her. She's never so far relied on words so heavily to express her emotions. When Masami points this out, Kayako says:

This is how she's choosing to process things for the time being. At first, it was being silent to carefully consider her emotions. Now, its speaking up to keep them focused on what she really wants.

Then, its Masami's turn, for the first time, to tell the truth. By now they're away from the small cluster of lights, staring out at the blackness of the beach where they first got together. Masami broke up with the guy, she says. But she also asserts that she came to his emotional aid to begin with because she felt his need for help was more important than anything else to her. She couldn't tell her girlfriend this before, because doing so would mean telling a truth she didn't think Kayako could bear to hear: that he meant more to Masami than she did.

Kayako already knows this, of course. And by speaking up to quell her justified anger, by weaving words like the deft strokes of honest color on the tip of a paintbrush, she's gotten herself to a point where she can accept it, too.

I mean, think about it. Masami is broke now; Kayako needed to buy her a sandwich so she wouldn't be hungry on their impromptu date. Her sabotaging drive to be validated and her inability to accept love from the girl willing to give it has, by all accounts, ruined her life for the time being and harmed those around her. Even though she broke up with the guy out of necessity, or out of some fleeting impulse to run back to Kayako, she still feels like nothing without him. As she says to Kayako later, now the envy runs in reverse--Kayako is passionate about painting now, while Masami will still amount to nothing. Despite it all, though, Kayako is willing to love her. She's called Masami out on what she needs to be, then decided to stay nonetheless.

"I always come second. You broke up with him, so the number one spot is vacant. When someone else comes, you'll put him there...

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For most of my life, I believed that artistic expression was primarily the product of unrestrained, innate, and self-indulgent passion. I thought it was just something people either have or don't have, and that when they do, its something that can drive them to great heights of accomplishment and happiness otherwise impossible for humans to reach. It was mostly Japanese otaku media that instilled this into me, I think. I grew up exposed to a dizzying array of diverse and often miraculous artistic products that captured my imagination in ways the safe output of my own boring, monolithic home empire never did, and most of them were made by people who literally poured their lives into working on them. From Eiichro Oda's future-destroying, decades-long devotion to making One Piece to Kentaro Miura giving his life to practically paint the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel in pen on page after double-page spread in Berserk, to all of the hyper-passionate, universe-shattering early works of Hideaki Anno and his animator cohorts, I thought that I lived in a world of weird and wonderful treats whose cooks had the work ethic of demigods and the talent to match.

And even on the lower levels of the medium, among fan artists, cosplayers, writers, posters, historians, I felt surrounded by people who lived and breathed impossible passion, whose lives must have been defined by a kind of information processing my brain simply wasn't capable of. They had some ability to inhale the miraculous vapors of an abundant artistic landscape and spew out works of their own that further decorated the texture of a fleeting age of impossible marvels. And all that time, there I was, left on the sidelines, interested in many things but passionate about none, and lacking the motivation to really work to pursue anything at all. It was (and, honestly, still is) a state of existential discomfort similar to that sort of lonely-girl-pining, but doubtlessly far larger in scale. Some people had passion, while I had nothing to show for all my years of being alive. For fuck's sake, there was so much stuff out there, and I barely could muster the motivation to even read any of it most of the time.

After a while, I started to feel like I was simply broken, like I was an empty person that didn't belong in the very world I loved living in. And while I think this might be a niche outlook and insecurity (although one represented, to my profound gratitude, in Masami), I think it's also how a lot of people think about love. Love is often portrayed as a feeling sparked entirely of instinct, one that, when a person truly feels it, will never cause them to make any mistakes or do anything fucked up to those they care about. Something that will drive those bolstered by it to impossible heights, improve lives beyond the sorrow and loneliness to which they are otherwise condemned. But, as Kayako learned and as Masami and I are having to find out, that isn't really the whole story.

Expression is love. Love is process. Therefore, expression is also the labor of putting love through a process, of rigorously trying to get your ass in a seat and put in the steps of putting your feelings into form. As this is required of art, so is it required of relationships. And so the two are a cycle. Creation requires emotions to process; relationships require emotions to be processed. And the love that creation inspires feeds itself into the love for others that inspires the emotion to fuel more creation. A Labor of Love. Again, I know I'm New.

But this is what Kayako has been working up to all movie long, first with her silence, then with some words, then with the labor of painting, the iteration of getting better, then with more words again. She has found a slow cycle that is elevating her above her loneliness, a cycle that Masami helped create, and is welcome within, but that can, if need be, exist without her.

Love, labor, process. Expression, creation, process. Creating, processing, choosing...in the end, to do it all again. To stay with what--and who--you have labored to love. And that is the choice Kayako has made.

I have not yet answered what, after thinking and writing about this movie for days on end, might be the substance that can replace loneliness as fuel for the alchemical cycle of emotional taking and giving. By the end of the lovers' reunion, sitting by the road under the slowly-illuminating blue of a haphazardly-clouded dawn sky, Masami doesn't feel like she has an answer, either. She feels small and hollow, manipulative and weak. She's jealous of the coping strategy her own girlfriend has developed to deal with the effects of her bad behavior. So, in the end, what is she? What is there even left for Kayako to love?

I'll be honest, this feeling is so fucking real I get perilously teary every time I think about it. Because, for as much as I mused about Kayako's feelings resonating with me as a former and sometimes girl-piner, when it comes to my current relationship at age 22, it's Masami in whom I see myself most clearly and brutally. It's hard not to when she is the only representation in romance, let alone in yuri, I have seen so far who is as much of a fucking brat as I am at times. Whose tendency to sabotage her own relationship makes it so asymmetric that what her girlfriend feels appears almost one-sided, but whose love is real all the same. If she lacks process, talent, maturity, mystique, if no one is ever going to be good enough for her, then what at all does she have left?

The answer to all of this is the thing that lies at the core of her being, that makes her who she is. The source of her potential to express herself, the starting point of a process yet to fully begin. It's hard to see, but it's there. Its what makes her Endou Masami. And its what Kirishima Kayako loves the most.

It's color. It's the thing at the core of creation that can't be described with words, that forms the motivation for any process. Its the vivid purple of a painted grape whose intentional creation transcends deception and nurtures discovery. It's the blue of a dawning sky whose light guides two girls in messy, lopsided love back into each other's arms. It's Kirishima Kayako. It's Endou Masami. It's what everyone has, and it's all anyone has.

It's the source of love, its process, and its object.

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Eventually, Kayako has to leave for Tokyo. That's the decision that's best for her, and its a decision that, for the time being, will leave Masami behind in the countryside, hard at work on the process of learning to love herself. At the end of the film, she sends Kayako one final piece of proof of who she is. It's a painting of sorts, recorded on VHS, composed not of oil but of compressed light and sound. Stylistically, as the camera zooms in, it begins to resemble less Renoir and more Rothko: at first, its the beach, then, simply the point of the horizon, the area where the sea and sky meet. Its raw, not quite processed, pure color, vibrant blue, filtered and compressed into chunky, washed-out 800x600.

By way of description, "this is all I can do."

For years, I've struggled to believe that my emotions, hindered by depression and self-sabotage, have any value at all. As someone for whom love, passion, and expression have always felt difficult, even putting my thoughts down on a page, let alone drawing, painting, composing, or directing, has always seemed impossible. Recently, though, I've grown a lot. I've found the beginnings of a process learned to accept its existence. Both this process, and all the loves that go along with it, are often uncomfortable. They are painful and brutal and blissful things into which to pour the labors of communication and the torments of understanding. I've learned to process discomfort for the sake of creation, to create for the sake of love. It sounds cheesy, but again, I can't help what I wanted to write about.

I hope you'll join me as I find more new things and tough feelings I love to process on this account. There's so much more I'd love to say about blue, just for starters. I could talk about my undying appreciation for the work of Mikako Ishikawa, or how the shots in this movie are so gorgeous and evocative that I'd seen many of them before in "Japan in the 00s" vibes compilations.

But, until then, this is all I can do.

#japanese film #japanese cinema #yuri #yuri manga #lgbtq films #teen romance #pining #film analysis #personal essay #blue (2002)#kiriko nananan #mumblecore #long reads

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comradekatara · 8 months

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Hi, hope you're well.

Idk if you've listened to the new mitski album, but I think it's such a sokka album. There are so many songs on the album that remind me of sokka or sokka and yue like:

heaven and star are such yuekka songs to me or rather yuekka from sokka's perspective where he is both remembering their time together and mourning her death and kinda brings up how her death has fundamentally shaped him forever.

I don't like my mind, the deal and when memories snow makes me think of how exhausting it is to be sokka. All of his many problems that he refuses to (can't) acknowledge and the guilt he feels for those rare times he thinks of not dealing with his many responsibilities.

And finally, I'm your man and I love me after you really make me think of how sokka puts so many people before himself that he is willing to die several times over if it meant the other person's safety. I'm your man especially makes me think of sokka's worship of his dad and how he can't acknowledge that while his father left for the right reasons, it still hurt sokka and katara in very different yet fundamental ways (your father leaving the safety of your sister and entire tribe to twelve year old you will do that).

But yeah it's a good album I think.

Sorry this ask is so long, I just wanted to know your thoughts on this new mitski album + the gaang and others?

yes!! was wondering if/when someone would ask me this lol. i agree that a lot of songs on the album have sokka vibes. i'll go through the album in bullet points (out of order) to elaborate on how i think they fit various characters as i have done with other albums in the past:

"my love mine all mine" is THEE sokka/yue song to me. like the denial of agency/personhood outside of their love which must be hidden and ignored for the sake of duty but cannot be denied!!! and the invocation of the moon is just so potent, of course. if i had time i would make an amv, quite frankly

"star" is such a sokka/yue song from yue's pov specifically she is literally the shining light "burning so you can keep looking up" normally i hate when people compare stars and moons as if they are interchangeable bodies (this is why i cannot enjoy sun & moon dichotomies in poetry i am an insufferable pedant when it comes to astronomy) but i will make an exception in this case because it is just such a beautiful song and really does fit so well.

"buffalo replaced" is such an aang song to me. like not just because of the obvious buffalo (or is it bison?) imagery, but because of the evocation of not being able to catch up to the destructive progress of imperialist nation-building (replacing buffalos with railways, etc.) while simultaneously contrasting it with the liberty and love and freedom of the individual (and that whole verse about how much she loves her cat, that is so real and also so aang) that is so poignant and devastating yet celebratory and warm. maybe that's just my interpretation, but it just feels so aang.

"the frost" is a katara song to me and not just, again, because the imagery is so obviously evocative. there's also some aang themes in the first verse, but the "you're my best friend / now i have no one to tell of how i lost my best friend" lyric really hits because it feels like an address to her mother, but also to sokka. obviously kya was the most important person in katara's life (i assume this is the case for all children with their mothers, i know it's still true for me), but she also lost sokka as a friend when he became her sworn protector. i think katara is grieving the relationship she had with sokka but has no way to communicate it because he's right there, so instead she communicates her grief over kya and rage at the fire nation for taking her family away from her, because it's far easier to verbalize than grief over someone having changed but in a way that seems imperceptible. she calls what sokka does "playing soldier" because the idea that it's just a game to him is far preferable to the chilling alternative that he is prepar[ed/ing] to die. she is losing him in increments and has no one to tell because everyone in her family has either died, left her, or left her emotionally. "it's just witness-less me."

"bug like angel" is a song quite specifically about addiction (alcoholism in particular) but the themes of guilt, regret, and longing do evoke aang and zuko (separately, not as a dynamic) to me. the desire for family, comfort, and for life to revert back to its "original" state before mistakes were made that irreparably altered it (a "sunlit garden" if you will)

"i'm your man" is a sokka song it is also an azula song also a zuko song maybe even an iroh song? it's a song about staking your identity in patriarchal logic especially wrt to one's own father (especially if that father happens to be the leader of a state). it's about the contradictions of patriarchy and selfhood under patriarchy and worshipping at the altar of masculinity even as subsuming its logic destroys you. (will expand on this matter whenever i finally find time to finish my sokka nanami essay. btw)

"i love me after you" is a song that could apply to any number of them but i think it's most poignant if you imagine it as an azula song ("king of all the land" is quite literal, in this case), but also like, a version of azula in the future. it's an azula song someday. eventually.

"when memories snow" is an azula song wrt the line "and if i break could i go on break" and the "thousand hands that clap for me in the dark" but the imagery of memories as snowfall also evokes the black snow that triggers sokka and katara and feels like a metonym for ptsd and trauma. for such a short song, it has a wide range of highly specific applications.

"the deal" can apply to so many characters, as it broadly follows mitski's pattern of existentialist songs such as "abbey" and "door" that can be applied to any range experiences concerning the human condition, BUT, i find it most evocative when considering iroh and his relationship to lu ten and to the spirit world. i'll expand on this more if asked, but for now. just think about it

"i don't like my mind" is such a zuko song especially book 1 zuko who is so obsessively focused on capturing the avatar because he refuses to consider the obvious implications of his situation and is in hardcore denial and avoidance of the blatant truth. he needs this job it is all he has..... please don't take my job from me......

"heaven" IS a sokka/yue song but it's also a sokka/suki song and a mai/ty lee song and really just a universally applicable love song and maybe the most beautiful song ever i dont know. "now i bend like the a willow thinking of you" makes me go crazy every time i hear/think about it probably because i am so othellopilled i think of desdemona and start crying and gnashing my teeth... anyway. on that note!

i'd be happy to expand on any of these, as i recognize that some of my claims were cursory and vague. thank you for asking this and indulging my ramblings :)

#yourlocalamoeba #asks #atlamusic #the gaang and #synthesis #cannot in good conscience tag this analysis but i do think. i made points here #esp wrt the frost lol #which is also SUCH a simon petrikov song this album is SOOO simoncoded and im not just saying that bc i have at/f&c on the brain #im your man is also THEE nanami touga song #the deal is an anthy song. my love mine all mine is an utena song. ok no one asked but. swagever

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rincewindsapprentice · 5 months

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Top 5 albums of 2023 (for me)

This list is not at all exhaustive, but is representative of the albums and EPs that I listened to in full that came out this year. There are plenty of other songs that I loved, but these are the top albums that really resonated and are solid as whole units. I encourage everyone to try out listening to full albums when you have the chance since they can be quite fantastic experiences!

5: Bitter Reflection by Body of Light

Body of Light is a wonderful synthpop band, and Bitter Reflection was an unexpectedly great album! I have listened to basically all of the songs on repeat, and absolutely love "This Conversation" and "Never Ever" to the point where I'll sing them out loud when I cook.

4: Radical Romantics by Fever Ray

Fever Ray is always a trip to listen to, and this album is no exception. "Shiver" is one of the horniest songs I've listened to. The beats are funky and layered in such interesting ways, the instrumentation fascinating, and the lyrics complex and wild. Highly recommend "What They Call Us" and "Even It Out." Really hits it out of the park, and might be my favorite album of theirs.

3: Intra Apogeum by Belgrado

Literally did not hear of this Barcelona-based Polish-Venezuelan coldwave post-punk band until this EP came out, and I fell in love with the band and this album so much that I bought merch from the band, and I rarely buy anything! Extremely solid vibes that struck me so much that I've replayed it over and over. The sound is solid and you are able to pick up on the Dada and Bauhaus influences! "Boixar," "Nie Zapomnę," and "Elementy Umysłu" are highlights for me. If you have not listened to Belgrado, listen to them! Was my top EP/album of the year until the next two came out.

2: Momento Mori by Depeche Mode

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A completely unexpected album for me, really. It feels like the darkest that Depeche Mode has done, at least to my knowledge (which is somewhat limited!), and it is a fantastic album from start to finish. The lyrics are meditative and dark, cynical and at times hopeful. The instrumentation and synths are heavy and wonderfully put together. There is not a single part of this album I dislike, and it is very cohesive. My favorites off of it are "Before We Drown," "Never Let Me Go," and "My Favourite Stranger." Give it a listen!

1: Javelin by Sufjan Stevens

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Another unexpected album. I have been a massive Sufjan Stevens fan since I was a teenager and his music is what really shaped a lot of my music taste throughout much of my life, and this album felt like a return to form. I have liked basically all of his music, from Michigan and Seven Swans to his 10-CDs worth of Christmas music, but my favorite albums have always been Age of Adz and Carrie and Lowell. Javelin almost feels like a synthesis of those two albums at times, as well as reaching all the way back and across his entire discography. The album came out of an exceptionally hard year for Sufjan Stevens, and you can feel the heartache and pain throughout, but there is also a hope that is present. While Carrie and Lowell, a masterpiece, is so full of emotion and heartache that it can pull you under, Javelin does not pull you down quite so far, but gets you in touch with similar feelings. My favorite tracks are "Will Anybody Ever Love Me?," "Goodbye Evergreen," and "Shit Talk." It is fantastic, and I highly, highly recommend it to anyone.

#music #top 5 #body of light #fever ray #belgrado #depeche mode #sufjan stevens #I am not a music writer/reviewer so apologies if the reviews are not great #but this is what I think!#also likely easy to see how non-exhaustive this is for the music that came out this year!#Bandcamp #Youtube

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girlfriendsofthegalaxy · 1 year

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tuesday again 3/21/2023

i didn't want to sit down and write this bc i was having too much fun playing viddy gaem

listening

IT'S QUICKER AND EASIER TO EAT YOUR YOUNG!!!

"i'm starving...darling,,," is very sexy but the way the lyrics slowly slide into something more and more horrifying until the chorus hits??? mwah. lovely.

my one critique is that this song is...breathy, for lack of a better word? does not showcase the man's magnificent pipes. oh well! there are other songs.

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how'd i find this: im gay, also he is one of the most popular indie artists in the World. his first album went platinum six fucking times.

reading

i read all of frank miller's sin city bc im on a noir kick and i didn't have a good time. the closest i got to fun was (deadly little, always described as "deadly little") Miho, a mute japanese??? generic asian??? assassin who is tits out not in these panels but in almost all others, rollerblading around mowing down guys with her katana. that was a painful sentence to write.

i read a lot of genre fiction. i read a lot of older genre fiction. they are not written with me, a bisexual "woman", in mind. and that’s ok bc not everything has to be written with me in mind. rarely have i read something that is more For The Boys Only!!! than frank miller’s sin city. felt kind of gross and a little put off the whole time i read these and they made me a little bit upset and afraid of men in a way i have not felt since high school. now it does feel odd to go “i didn’t think this noir was very pleasant >:(“ but miller’s work feels unpleasant and distinct from, say, chandler or hammett in a way i am still having trouble articulating. it is possible that the misogyny in chandler is a flavor i already know and barely register the taste of anymore. it may be that i got tired of looking at miller's women with twelve-inch waists and nipples as full and perky as their mouths.

mostly i think the labor market in sin city is super fucked up. women in sin city exist to have their value extracted from them in a way that is different and worse than normal capitalism. like, i can see how someone would read these comics and go full SWERF. women are literal trophies, both arm candy and in a very upsetting trophy hunting way. especially in the final volume, women are machines of potential profit. aside from one landlady and one cop and one child who grows up to be a prostitute, all the women in this whole city seem to be prostitutes or prostitutes who have married up and out. like there aren’t really even any women on the street just walking or in diners. it’s all dudes.

this is probably a comics vs novels thing, but miller is often sadistic in a way that chandler is not. a guy dies on a page to make cool art. they fuckin mow through dozens of goons a volume. if a guy dies in chandler it’s usually bc chandler's philip marlowe has stumbled across a dead body accident and it becomes a tremendous pain in order to tip off the cops that a body needs retrieving without getting framed for the kill. marlowe (and by extension chandler) is a people person-- he is a detective bc he likes figuring out what makes people tick. he is alert and it's hard to get one over on him but his resting state is congenial. despite his job, he still does believe in the concept of justice.

sin city (more of a comment than a question) says "if people piss you off you should kill them." this is not to make light of the very real Situations that protagonists in sin city find themselves, but there are very few problem solving skills on display other than "apply dick" or "apply gun". VERY RARELY, "apply pussy". that last one almost never works out tho.

aside from All That, it does contain some of the best straight up art (not just comics art) ive ever seen. the command of light and shadow is incredible. the command of negative space is incredible. panels aren’t busy unless they’re showing the chaos of a scene. he doesn't draw every single brick bc that's not important to the scene. it’s really quite stunning.

also the MOVEMENT in this fringe is incredible. do u see what i mean about the nipples tho

watching

i gotta lotta fuckin bones to pick with the manda/lorian but they're all spoilery. this shit fucking sucks man. it's twenty fucking twenty three we have had well over a century to master storytelling through the art of the moving image.

all three eps so far have felt very weirdly edited-- like a lot of changes happened after filming and there wasn't enough time for pickups?? this is a gajillion dollar show just reshoot some shit on your little fake stage i am Begging you. at least bo-katan looked hot. god she's awful i love her

again again i say to ye, what if star wars was good? i am slightly terrified that andor may have ruined me for any s/tar wars that follows but by any metric these first three s3 mando eps are simply not good television.

playing

ty @pasta-pardner for gifting me Weird West some weeks ago bc it is the new thing i am obsessed with. this first trailer gives a better sense of the Vibes than the launch trailers imo

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i find it is scratching a lot of the rpg itches that new vegas does: you wander around beautiful western settings running into weird shit, followed around by a hot butch you've recruited to your cause. unlike new vegas, it is a little less forgiving and you have to really scrap and loot everything that isn't nailed down.

this is a top-down action rpg with a weird little aiming system that is sort of a 3D twinstick? it takes some getting used to, and shooting is not the part of any game i am particularly good at. here's xbox wire's screenshot, which gives a good idea of how isometric it is and what enemy detection looks like. i do wish i could expand the minimap, bc some of the locations like mines or bigger towns can really sprawl.

i have one big annoyance bc it is a thing that made me take a break and sulk for a bit: as you're traveling across the map (not open world, location-based), you can run into Travel Encounters. you can decline to engage with some of them. you cannot save within or between the encounters unless you stop and make camp. if you're on a long journey to a different corner of the map, you might run into three Travel Encounters. if you die on the third, you are catapulted back to your starting point. this is tremendously annoying in the early game, so either take short trips or get good at about-facing and exiting areas quickly.

a writer i admire likes games that let him tell stories about what happened in the game to other people-- this is a game that very much facilitates that. i was ambushed during a Travel Encounter by the some outlaws, bc i accidentally let one escape while i was trying to collect a bounty on his boss, and that specific named grunt came back with a Vendetta. but! i met a dying outlaw from the band who kidnapped my character's husband in a different second encounter, swapped some bandages for a treasure map, and he is now a Friend for Life. so he showed back up to help me during that ambush AGAINST FELLOW OUTLAWS WHO SEEM TO HAVE SOME SORT OF MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING??? mWAH. DELICIOUS. LOVE SYSTEMS INTEROPERATING.

ive put like six hours into this, and it has five chapters with five different characters. i have not progressed past the first chapter bc i am having so much fun poking around. i am so so so grateful that the first character is a wife seeking revenge and not the other way around. ppl are throwing big baby tantrums in the steam forums about this but you know what? some husbands should be macguffins sometimes. widens their perspective.

i am fascinated by the drips and drabs of lore this game is feeding me. there's an order of witches with huge underground temples that (crucially!) they did not build, but have adopted for their own uses without really understanding who built them and why. i want to know so much more about their whole shit. there are werewolves but idk what their deal is bc i haven't met any yet.

i am a simple woman! i only demand perfect cowboy western-flavored rpgs and so far this is holding up. i will have more thoughts as i go along but goddamn is it fun to play. we truly do love a competent little rpg with interesting lore and good stealth mechanics that lets you loot everything in sight.

making

mostly fallow week, wrists hurty

made this tuna-chickpea salad for lunch. it is quite rich for a lunch. there are a lot of components that may be challenging to digest all together for a milennial with tummy troubles.

this would have definitely been improved by solid instead of cheap chunk tuna (or salmon. this would be great with canned salmon) and if i actually chopped the baby spinach instead of going "it's fine" and flinging it all in. or maybe wilting the spinach, but that's a lot of extra work and this would be a very warm, wet salad :/ the point is the chickpeas really want to sink to the bottom. i like that there is no cooking involved, only assembling, but realistically i have only half of these ingredients in my house at any given time. screengrabs from the site bc i paid a dollar but there's no reason you have to

#tuesday again #tuesday again no problem #this is 1600 words i am so sorry nyx

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thisworldisablackhole · 3 months

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This week in listening, 02/09/24

I honestly just listened to a fuck ton of Silverstein and Thrice this past week, so in an effort to not repeat the same bands on these posts, I'm only including 6 releases instead of 10.

Chelsea Wolfe's new album dropped today (friday) and by goly it's my favourite thing she's done since Unknown Rooms in 2012. To be fair, I haven't given many of her other albums a fair shot (heavy doom-folk wasn't really my cup of tea), but after listening to this I think I owe it to myself to do a full run through her discography. The gothic industrial instrumentals are both subdued and engaging, and when combined with Chelsea's gorgeous voice it comes together to sound somewhat like a soundtrack to unearthing the catacombs of a lost civilization in a decayed concrete jungle.

Like Moths To Flames has been one of my favourite metalcore bands since I re-discovered them a few years ago. They've been a super solid band ever since their first EP in 2010 and have only grown stronger over the years. It's actually quite rare for a metalcore band from the 2010's to still be on top of their game and improving after 6 LP's. One of my favourite things about this band, and why I believe they've managed to be so consistent over the years, is that they aren't afraid to wane and wax in their evolution without losing sight of their DNA. Over their career they have released albums that have gone back and forth from heavy hardcore to a more hook centric Breaking Benjamin-esque alt metal sound, but it's always been good and it's always sounded like the same band. Now with these new singles (and the two standalone singles they dropped in 2023) they are stripping way back on the catchy choruses to pour their focus into just creating memorable and heavy as fuck riffs. This is some of their most crushing and technical material to date and I can not wait for the full length to drop later this year.

Wolves & Machines are a super underrated alternative rock/post hardcore band in the vein of Brand New and Thrice. I first listened to this band back in 2010 when they released their debut record Ailments. I really loved that record and have super fond memories listening to it, but those memories were only triggered recently when I stumbled upon them again while falling down a rabbit hole of "fans also like" sections on spotify. I completely forgot they existed until I saw their name and then all those memories came flooding back to me. I swiftly hit play on Ailments and let the nostalgia bathe me in it's afterglow. The absolute best part of rediscovering this band though was finding out that they never stopped putting out really solid albums. I have since fallen absolutely head over heels with their 2014 record Since Before Our Time. For fucks sake, just hit play and you'll see why.

Ghost Atlas is the side project of progressive metalcore outfit ERRA's guitarist and clean vocalist Jesse Cash. Ghost Atlas' 2017 album All Is In Sync... was very much rooted in post hardcore ala HRVRD, Saosin and Circa Survive. With this new album he has diverted course a bit into much softer pop rock territory. He didn't completely ditch the post hardcore edge, but the whole album is just a lot more mellow and blissed out than his previous work. Some fans have felt very divided by this shift in sound, but I love it. This record is just pure comfort. I think the album art does a perfect job at capturing the vibe: a morning cup o' joe on your balcony with a cat on your lap, and Jesse's beautiful voice serenading you into a deep state on contentedness. This is likely going to end up on my year end list.

I've been a "big fan" of Burial ever since his groundbreaking 2007 LP Untrue. I put "big fan" in parenthesis because despite absolutely loving some of his earlier music to death, I am not die hard enough to be keeping up with every two song single or weird ambient EP he has released over the years. Someone wrote online that this new single was his "best work since Rival Dealer", and that was enough to make me don my Burial fan cap again and dive in. Boy was I not disappointed. These two tracks are expansive at approx. 13 minutes each, but they do not feel tiring or strung out at all. They represent everything I love about Burial; that sweet sweet crackling atmosphere, nimble footed drum patterns and haunting vocal samples that are effective in their sparsity, injecting just the perfect amount of melody into the hazy rhythms. Dreamfear slowly disintegrates and becomes more aggressive over it's run time until the sample repeating "BACK FROM THE DEAD, FUCKED UP IN THE HEAD" hits us in the head over and over, inducing psychosis panic in the listener. It's glorious.

I've been getting back into more progressive rock and metal recently. I blame TesseracT and Aviations for that, as they both put out absolute home run records last year that reawakened the bound and gagged Dream Theater fan inside me. I checked this album on a whim after reading a review about it that described it as "bright and uplifting" metal, and I was immediately captivated by it. If there's one thing I absolutely adore in music, it's a contradiction. Taking two things that people usually do not associate with each other (uplifting and metal) and engaging them in holy matrimony. Artificial Language have a more classical sound than Aviations, but the bright chords, djenty riffs and piano leads are all still in stock. I'd say it's the perfect counterpart to 2023's Luminaria and I'm keen to give it more listens over the coming weeks.

#chelsea wolfe #like moths to flames #wolves & machines #ghost atlas #artificial language #post hardcore #alternative rock #dubstep #progressive metal #metalcore #thrice #ERRA #music

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idiotcoward · 10 months

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Dystopia - Humans = Garbage

This is the first record from classic crust punk group dystopia, and holy shit. The first song legit always makes me feel like I’m going to cry. The vocalist just screaming about how fucked it is we have to work every day just to feed ourselves feels so fucking raw, so real, and emotional. It makes you feel exhausted. Like the weight of the world is coming down on you. Right away you have some fucking insanely hard hitting punk that brings a level of brutality and emotional potency that only dystopia fucking does as good as they do.

The rest of the album is equally powerful and intense. Definitely not an album I’d recommend putting on if you’re in a dark place, because it plays on those emotions. It feels those emotions and it dials them up to fucking 11. The instrumentation is so complex and well mastered. You can hear the click of the strings. You feel like you’re in the room with these people. The samples are just as raw as ok their other records and the whole thing is perfectly integrated. There are a few lighter moments that usually have to do with weed on this thing, but for the most part this is a dark dark dark record.

Dystopia is quickly becoming one of my favorite bands and this album just solidified their place even more for me. Very rarely do crust punk albums make me emotional. Very rarely am I impressed by the technical proficiency on display both in its instrumentation and production. Very rarely do I say you HAVE to check out a band if you’re into the genre they’re a part of, but you do. You do.

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dead-set-goat · 5 months

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Although spotify does it for you, i think it’s better to make your own music-year-review list. I want to share a few songs (and maybe a few words about them too) that have inspired, helped, impressed or spoke to me. This is also a very light personal year-review.

No particular order!

Every Day is Halloween by Ministry

Obviously, listened to this constantly in October but really works any day of the year, the message gets me going. Moving away from my parents and my hometown that very October, I felt free as all hell, free to be who I want to be, dress how I want to dress (or at least try!), it makes me want to fight for my skin :

I exclusively listen to music from an MP3 player when I’m out, fuck smartphones :))))))))), so the story of this: downloaded this whole album to my MP3 player for my trip to Greece this summer because I’d be out a lot, was just curious about ska punk, never listened to it before. And yeah, I fell in love with this, and Capdown. I listen to this when I’m on a rush always, gets me flying! (Yeah, nothing beats running and panicking about being late to an appointment to this)

Can’t recommend Swans early stuff enough! And the new stuff as well. Could swap this for Power for Power on Filth as well. Really good mechanic beats and cold lyrics, walking through a city as lively as it is decayed to this feels just right. A great inspiration for what I’d like to achieve with my music.

I quite enjoy (love with a burning passion) this album for the most part, I don’t listen to drum n’ bass on it’s own but, the metal combo to me hits just perfect. I think this song has the perfect amount of agression, melancholy, explosive distortion, and the best whiney guitar ever! I swear I can hear words of lament in that guitars voice… it’s awesome. It’s a very good song to drown out the noise of the Subway…

This album as a whole. My anxieties and anticipations for the future, my nostalgia and existential terror, agitated into soundwaves. Listening to this, on a suffocating late August afternoon while driving, feels like a thousand spent lifetimes.

I listened to this on easily one of the most emotionally charged days of my life. I was on a car trip across the country, it really hits different with neverending crop fields and rural sights and abandoned factories… For more context about the song, it’s a mockery of the former communist regime, the singer is posing as the dictator, singing about a carefree land preparing for winter, in which “everything is wonderful” and “perfect”.

This is a commuting staple. An industrial rock banger! I think the sound is easy to get into, good for guitars, good for the dance floors, a perfect combo. A fair bit of Machines of Loving Grace songs hooked me instantly.

Absolute dance staple. Strapped it to a wall in the hall of dancing-with-your-last-breath.

I had a panic attack while driving to this, on a bridge. That was an exciting time. I was going to the beach. In the winter. All the vibes were off that day, but in the best way possible. And this song took them all, it’s preserving them like alcohol. Oh also, saw a guy at the gym near my house that had a HEALTH tshirt and I was like, yoo, cool! Because really, rarely do you see people with taste here hah.

One of my industrial fascinations. Not exactly the eye opener (I’ll have that guy show up later), but my, sound has never felt so powerful and it’s not even booming-lound. I highly suggest listening this surround, but even stereo, it’s such a disorienting, enveloping experience.

OH SHIT. Audio limit for this post???

Look out for part 2

#Spotify #SoundCloud #music #industrial music #ministry #year review #🦞chat #godflesh #david bowie #coil #machines of loving grace #tackhead #health band #swans #timpuri noi #capdown

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autistic-shaiapouf · 1 year

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hello shaiapoufer… thank you for all the nice interactions… id love to be CAA buddies :] i’ve been a CAA fan for 4 years and i’m very passionate about hxh ost specifically the ost 3 album. do you have a favorite ost?

Hello hi hi!! I'm literally so pumped to have CAA mutuals now,, I've been waiting for this moment for at least 3 or so years at this point and I'm so glad me being completely insane for one specific bug guy is yielding real tangible results ✨️ PLEASE feel free to hit me up whenever, I love. ants

And to answer the OST question, I've been meaning to actually sit down and listen to the whole thing for a while now and I think this is the motivation for me kshdkd there's a handful of tracks I can pick out but it's bc they're the only ones I've listened to as standalones U_U New Mutation stands out to me especially bc the main melody is carried by a dulcimer, which imo is an instrument that's pretty rarely used!! The classical/orchestral nods a lot of the soundtrack uses also make me, a person with deep interests in composers and music, makes me go !!!! Using inspiration from holst's Jupiter Bringer of Jollity for the OST makes me INSANE, as does the one piece for the zoldycks that draws from prokofiev's Dance of the Knights; there is so much emotion in this style of music and so much of it goes unnoticed U_U what I will unfortunately mention is that a lot of the nods are more recent than my late classical/early romantic era scope (late 1700s to about the 1850s or so, for reference holst wrote his planets symphony in the 1900s lmao) so I tend to miss some of the ones that other people feel are more obvious (like. Prokofiev U_U). Special shoutout of course to both of Pouf's violin solos drawing from Vivaldi, the only baroque composer I really pay attention to bc the music is too formulaic for my liking :/

Actually thinking of pouf's violin music, I'm so so certain that those particular tracks are being played by an actual performer!! Idk how the ost was made but this stands out to me specifically bc you can hear small squeaks during shifting or string changing, which you'd only get with an actual performer, which, as someone who's played violin on and off for years, that's everything to me 👁👁 also,, those violin pieces are what made me realize I wanted to play music again h a h a I still don't really play often enough to build actual skill but it's still a hobby I enjoy a lot + it's the only reason I know how to actually draw and proportion violins properly lmao

This is a very long and nonspecific answer but I got excited to talk about music kshdkd but yeah!!! I've been meaning to sit down and listen to the entire soundtrack front to back and I'm certain the CAA soundtrack is gonna Do It To Me once I immediately recognize every single track when they're isolated ✨️

#shaiapoufer made me smile kshdkd thank you lmao; I'm so glad to be drawing in caa friends now ☺️💕#i think it's so funny that yall seem to be meruem blogs as well; the more i see him the funnier he gets to me and also #the closer he gets to making me cry for real #pouf on the other hand has had me absolutely insane from day one and he continues to spiral me into lunacy with each passing day #i saw your tags on your art that was like. the ants activate your autism or smthn and SAMEEEE me being nd is how i got this far 😤#it's why my art tag becomes nothing but ants after a certain period of time ksjdkf i love ants and that's the entire statement #you could even say. that that's all there is to it #anyways thank you for the ask!! happy to meet you 🙌💕#asks

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lordmayokcorner · 10 months

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ODD EYE CIRCLE <Version Up> - Album Review

There’s no word that describes how eagerly I have been anticipating this EP. I don’t believe I talk quite enough about LOONA in my reviews. That’s sarcastic, of course. I probably mention them at least once per review, as they are my ult group and have incredible music. With all of the members being recently freed from their unfair contracts with Blockberry Creative, five of them including the OEC squad (Jinsoul, Kim Lip, Choerry) have joined Jaden Jeong’s new label MODHAUS. While no music from the full 5-piece girl group ARTMS has been released yet, Odd Eye Circle has come out with a new EP. It will be interesting to see the JJ sound continue into the modern era of LOONA, and to see if their sound resembles the 2017 Mix & Match or has changed. I’ll listen to each of them three times and rate them afterwards. Keep in mind that a five on my scale represents neither like or dislike.

Did You Wait? - 6.5

Yes. Yes I did wait. It’s surprising to me that all of the clips of Blockberry-published OEC songs haven’t been copyright claimed. Let’s hope it stays that way. As for the intro itself, the synth is uncannily similar to the one in Chaotic and Starlight on the 2017 EP. It brings a modern twist to it though that makes me anxious to hear what the title track will have to do with it.

Air Force One - 9.5

This song embodies the direction that K-pop has been dying to follow for a long time now. Groups like NewJeans and STAYC have started to move the girl crush sound to a more “lo-fi” and minimalistic sound. The whole first verse has this very soft feeling to it that’s reminiscent of that. The chorus is very fun and addictive and the crunchy, silvery vocal processing is fascinating. The hook feels like it’s keeping you on your toes. On the other hand, the breakdown is absolutely chilling, maximizing that vocal effect and drawing out the rich synth pads to create a simultaneously beautiful and terrifying ambiance. When the chorus comes back around, it seems to have more meaning and the synths hit way harder. Very well done track.

Je Ne Sais Quoi - 5

The introductory few seconds of this song make it seem almost like a lo-fi hiphop song, but when the beat comes in it becomes clear that this song actually has more of a relaxed dance music feel. I don’t love what’s been done with the vocals on this track. The processing on their voices is a little over the top and reminds me of some of what I didn’t like from tripleS’s vocals. The beat feels somewhat squashed and garbled unfortunately. I think it has the potential to feel much larger than it does, but because of those factors coupled with my general dislike for the melodic content, it’s certainly not my favorite song but also has elements to it that I like.

Lucid - 7

This is the 1000th song I’ve seen with Lucid in the name, I swear. Ooh, so soft and comforting at the beginning though. It has a lilting flow that makes it auditorily resemble the slowly rising and falling waves of a calm ocean in the morning. The vocals in the refrain have the same sort of rising and falling sound, and the way they drop lower reminds me of Zero (NewJeans) which is a very rare thing to do in a pop song. The vocals themselves aren’t done quite as I would look for similarly to Je Ne Sais Quoi though. As more elements enter, it becomes more bouncy but stays very peaceful. A little more variation musically could help this song be even better.

Love Me Like - 4.5

With the addition of this song, it’s becoming clear that this album generally has a repetitive chill dance vibe featured in all of the songs so far. This one is interesting but the beat feels a little garbled like the previous couple songs. It’s much more upbeat however, with more of a R&B and disco fusion beat. It can get pretty boring, that would be my main critique. More depth would be helpful, certainly.

My Secret Playlist - 4.5

This one feels much more like classic early LOONA. The sound is generally more spacious and wide. It reminds me particularly of LOONA 1/3's stuff. The actual songwriting is pretty dry though, and the chorus is very disappointing. It could definitely be worse though. That’s basically all I have to say. It’s fine.

Final Thoughts

This EP is a very big deal for LOONA, a symbol of progress and freedom from BBC. I personally feel that the songwriting and production on basically every song feels pretty half-assed. I think that Lucid with its ocean-like production and the terrifying and fascinating Air Force One are definitely the two with the most thought and effort in them. I don’t see much in Je Ne Sais Quoi, unlike many other fans. Despite the meaning of this, I didn’t love the content itself. I give this album an overall score of 5 for that reason, with my favorite song being Air Force One. I’m really hoping for good things in the future of LOONA, ARTMS, and other affiliated groups. We’re just going to have to hold out and hope that JJ pulls it together a bit. Thanks for reading!

- Maya

#oec #loona oec #artms oec #artms #kpop #kpop gg #loona #album review #music review #kpop girls

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mr-no-life · 2 years

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Telling a Story with No Words (Spooky Special)

Ahh October, the leaves are falling, Starbucks’ ever growing pumpkin spice monopoly is taking its hold on the modern world, and it is suddenly the appropriate time for all the Horror movie fans to come out the closet. Halloween may as well be Christmas for me (and a bunch of others). It's the time of year that it is socially acceptable to listen to heavy metal and be appropriately spooky. However, were as most people are in it for the immediate shock and awe factor of the season (I used to be trust me) I find myself drawn towards that kind of horror that makes you feel uneasy throughout and then hits you when you least expect it. Very rarely does any horror movie scratch that itch (then again, I am not a big horror movie fan, eventually I would like to do a sound comparison across genres, but that is off topic) even more rarely does an entire album scratch that itch in spades (and tells a nice little story in the meantime). So, for the spookiest time of the year, I present to you, Midnight Syndicate’s 2011 album: Carnival Arcane.

I happened upon this masterpiece by sheer happenstance actually. I listened to an episode of an old Halloween inspired music podcast called “Gruesome Joe’s Musical Morgue” , a podcast that I can not seem to find anymore (which is a shame really). One of the episodes I was able to listen to was about this album (and I wish I could remember what was said at the time) and it caught my attention in a way that I did not realize it would follow me most of my life till I decided to delve down the Audio Production rabbit hole, then it clicked. This album does something that not many seek out to do, it tells a story with no words. Traditionally, most music/poems rely on the spoken words of its lyrics to tell a story (I briefly touched on this in my September post). But, somehow, this album manages to let the listener come up with its own story behind the music. Sure there are titles to the songs, tilted around carnival attractions that give the appeal of a sketchy ass Carnival set up.. But that’s about it really in terms of a provided story. With no lyrics and a dynamic arrangement (which we will get to shortly), your imagination is kind of left to go buck-wild really. The overall eerie ambient structure and how effortlessly each track plays after the next makes it a very smooth (if not creepy) listen. I HIGHLY recommend NOT to listen to it on shuffle, I feel like you lose the experience if you do.

So. Aesthetics of the album aside, how do I feel like it accomplishes this? Well, as mentioned the arrangement is the major selling point. Most of the tracks on the song rely heavily on percussion (with a focus on pianos, chimes and drums/drum like instruments) and some brass instruments with a sprinkling of strings. Most of the tracks are played in a Minor key (with some of them being played in major key) (and all this means is how the song is played, I’ll explain more about this later). The caveat of some of these songs is that you really can’t tell off the bat which song is played in what key it is played in and in this case, I actually do not mind, because what key it’s in is not the focal point. Now what does matter is what instruments are being used and when they are being used. The two songs that I feel best express this are “Agent of Fortune” (Track #8) and “Freakshow” (Track #13). Both of these tracks demonstrate the importance of the right instrument at the right time as well as a near perfect showcase of the instruments (not sound effects, that will be addressed in a minute) that are the focal points of this album.

Speaking of effects. This album utilizes a lot of effects and sound effects to support the arrangement. To make up for the fact that all but two of the songs have no lyrics in them (the two tracks in question are more like glorified ambient tracks) sound effects and a whole lot of post-production magic. From what I can deduce there are mostly pan and echo effects that used sparingly but effectively (Track #19 “Krellsig’s Kastle of Fun” and Track #23 “Sea of Laughter” I personally feel are the best demonstrations of this). Now, if I may take a sharp turn to quickly discuss the use of sound effects and the creation of soundscapes in this album. The tracks “Midway”, “Midway Reprise”, “Krellsig’s Kastle of Fun”, “Sea of Laughter”, “Epilogue” and “Crum Car” (Tracks #2, 5,19, 23, 25, 26 respectfully) are mostly just soundscapes, no real focus on music and pull a double duty; they not only serve as story moments but also low moments from the otherwise high tense moments (or in the case of “Epilogue” and “Crum Car” it serves as a way to end the story. "Dr. Atmore's Elixirs of Good Humour and Fortification" and “A Strange Menagerie” (tracks #6 and 9) are excellent examples of how sound effects can be used to enhance an already well arranged track even better without it becoming to obnoxious or overbearing, Now, back to production effects, as I briefly mentioned earlier (not to repeat myself) you can tell this album relies on subtle (and not so subtle) to help drive the narrative and (in the words of Bethesda Studios’ Todd Howard) it just works. The overall mix and master of the whole album is just *Chef Kiss* delightful. No one track is louder than the next and (as mentioned earlier) each track flows seamlessly into the next with no hiccup (unless something causes a crappy playback). For a two man group, they make it seem as if they are running with a whole orchestra of people.

I could go on and on about the technicalities of this work of art, but I’m actually going to leave it with this. This album is a one-in-a-million that comes along that I feel like doesn't get enough spotlight really. I’m willing to bet there are more of these types of albums out there, but they have a lot of work to do to meet these expectations. I do highly recommend giving this one a listen to (with a good set of headphones).

Well, I hope you all have (or had) a safe and amazing spooky season. This one took a minute to come up with because I have always loved Midnight Syndicate’s work and always wanted to talk about it and this is just the hobbled words I could describe it in. I’ll have the links to where you can find this album and the rest of their work (plus a couple of old ass reviews for the album as well). As always, if you have any questions feel free to reach out on any of my socials (LINKS HERE).

Find Carnival Arcane Here:

ITunes

Spotify

A snip-it from an old Fangoria Article

Have a Good Day, Y'all 👻☠️

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