ALiCE'S EMOTION - RED

ALiCE’S EMOTION
RED (Disc C Hand-in-Hand)
[ALiCE’S EMOTION; 2010]
3.8

Photon Wave Orchestra - Echoes Across the Astral Wastelands EP

Photon Wave Orchestra
Echoes Across the Astral Wastelands EP
[Photon Wave Orchestra; 2010]
10.0








I had never even seen a shooting star before. 25 years of rotations, passes through comets' paths, and travel, and to my memory I had never witnessed burning debris scratch across the night sky. Photon Wave Orchestra were hunched over their instruments. Fred Zoidos slowly plays on his masterfully-crafted stradivarius whilst his younger sister, Robyn “Robbie” Smith sings, eyes closed, into her microphone like she was trying to kiss around a big nose. White pearls of arena light swam over their faces. A lazy disco light spilled artificial constellations inside the aluminum cove of the makeshift stage. The metal skeleton of the stage ate one end of Florence's Piazza Santa Croce, on the steps of the Santa Croce Cathedral. Michelangelo's bones and cobblestone laid beneath. I stared entranced, soaking in Photon Wave Orchestra’s first release, chiseling each sound into the best functioning parts of my brain which would be the only sound system for the material for months. Sometimes an album is so good and makes its case so flawlessly that it spawns a mini-genre of its own and becomes shorthand for a prescribed set of values. The Velvet Underground's third and Miles Davis' Bitches Brew are two older records that spring to mind, and I'd toss in Spiderland as well. It's not a long list, but somewhere on it belongs Photon Wave Orchestra's Echoes Across the Astral Wastelands.

35 minutes of lush soundscapes entangle your senses, but not in a tight constriction, but a gentle caress, similar to that of a mother gently rocking her baby back and fourth, singing soft lullabies to calm the upset child until they fall into a state of slumber. An aural nirvana is opened up through seemingly simple drones. However, to output such sounds requires superhuman musicianship. The pitch-holding is unreal and far exceeds that by any person on earth, living or dead. It is an emotional, psychological experience. Echoes Across the Astral Wastelands sounds like a clouded brain trying to recall an alien abduction. It's the sound of a band, and its leader, losing faith in themselves, destroying themselves, and subsequently rebuilding a perfect entity. In other words, Fred and Robyn hated being Falling Rose and Dead Entry, and ended up with the most ideal, natural recording yet in the history of humanity. The track's final moments are a wash of humming synths, echoing moans, and pins-and-needles noise that comes just a little too close to human screaming. By the time the piece ends, the tide is way out.

Echoes Across the Astral Wastelands  still wields an uncanny, affirming power. It's the kind of music that makes you believe there is a Heaven, and that this is what it must sound like. The experience and emotions tied to listening to this extended play are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax. It's an album of sparking paradox. It's cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental yet familiar, foreign yet womb-like, spacious yet visceral, textured yet vaporous, awakening yet dreamlike, infinite yet 35 minutes. It will cleanse your brain of those little crustaceans of worries and inferior albums clinging inside the fold of your gray matter. The harrowing sounds hit from unseen angles and emanate with inhuman genesis. When the headphones peel off, and it occurs that two people created this, it's clear that Photon Wave Orchestra must be the greatest band alive, if not the best since you know who. Breathing people made this record! People who show signs of doing what they condemn the world for not doing: changing, evolving, experimenting with new approaches, growing. And that's why Photon Wave Orchestra-- along with Jeremiah, Blaise Finnegan and every other prophet of doom-- might all turn out to be wrong. Perhaps it does get better before it gets worse. And you can't wait to dive back in and try to prove that wrong over and over. Photon Wave Orchestra tapped into the collective unconscious of those who grew up in the English speaking East and were talented enough to transcribe the soundtrack. No need to get hung up on specifics; however we lived and whoever we were, Echoes Across the Astral Wastelands reflected back the truth for a lot of us. You can't ask more of an album than that, and I don’t think we’ll see something like this ever again, and we will always return for what PWO’s EP debut alone can deliver. I realize that this is not a doujin album, but it needs to be heard. It needs to be recognized. It needs to be spread so as that it doesn’t fade away from our memories. Don’t let this treasure slip out of our hands. Clench it, and never let go.at this is what it must sound like. The experience and emotions tied to listening to this extended play are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax. It's an album of sparking paradox. It's cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental yet familiar, foreign yet womb-like, spacious yet visceral, textured yet vaporous, awakening yet dreamlike, infinite yet 35 minutes. It will cleanse your brain of those little crustaceans of worries and inferior albums clinging inside the fold of your gray matter. The harrowing sounds hit from unseen angles and emanate with inhuman genesis. When the headphones peel off, and it occurs that two people created this, it's clear that Photon Wave Orchestra must be the greatest band alive, if not the best since you know who. Breathing people made this record! People who show signs of doing what they condemn the world for not doing: changing, evolving, experimenting with new approaches, growing. And that's why Photon Wave Orchestra-- along with Jeremiah, Blaise Finnegan and every other prophet of doom-- might all turn out to be wrong. Perhaps it does get better before it gets worse. And you can't wait to dive back in and try to prove that wrong over and over. Photon Wave Orchestra tapped into the collective unconscious of those who grew up in the English speaking East and were talented enough to transcribe the soundtrack. No need to get hung up on specifics; however we lived and whoever we were, Echoes Across the Astral Wastelands reflected back the truth for a lot of us. You can't ask more of an album than that, and I don’t think we’ll see something like this ever again, and we will always return for what PWO’s EP debut alone can deliver. I realize that this is not a doujin album, but it needs to be heard. It needs to be recognized. It needs to be spread so as that it doesn’t fade away from our memories. Don’t let this treasure slip out of our hands. Clench it, and never let go.

TatshMusicCircle - Far East of East III

TatshMusicCircle
Far East of East III
[TatshMusicCircle; 2010]
1.9






I did not get into IIDX music until shortly after RED AC came out. I didn’t give much of a crap for his music. I have never been big on GENOCIDE, and was lukewarm to Sphere. However, I, like many others, have left RED ZONE on repeat on my iTunes player. The two-word mantra SPEED RAVE made me take a liking to the idea of more Tatsh songs with a rock-meets-rave formula. I rode Gekkou off as a misfire, since Twelfth Style and Scripted Connection=> were cool, and even Xepher was decent if you ignore the hype. In DistorteD shit like DEEP ROAR turned its ugly head, and it doesn’t help that Double Loving Heart showed how inept he is (like almost every other Bemani artist or person on the planet) at J-Pop. However, we still had Kachoufusetsu and D.C. Fish so it wasn’t all bad in DD. Then, he vanished to pursue other interests, because apparently, making music for VNs that nobody has heard of and the doujin music market pays better or something.

Recently, he has returned in Resort Anthem. Now, I may not have heard to song, and I cannot find it anywhere, but on the chan's I was told it was more shit in similar vein to his Touhou arrangements, which must mean it’s tripe. I have heard WHITE MUTATION, which if it weren’t for Sampling Masters Mega, would have been a total waste of time bothering with. I have also heard the first Far East of East, which was crap, so I bailed out on the second. Judging from Far East of East III, I missed nothing skipping his arrange album from C77.

It follows the standard formula: Rock-meets-Eurobeat. Unfortunately, Tatsh shines far brighter with  techno, and can’t make good rock to save his life, and Eurobeat is a dead-end genre. That much has already damned FEoE3 to the point of beyond saving. As if the arrangements being the most boring shit on the Goddamn planet wasn’t bad enough, the tracks are mixed VERY VERY VERY poorly. Here’s a game for all of you people who have good headphones: Count how many times you hear static and tinniness at a fourth or fifth of your player’s maximum volume. It could be anywhere as high as a couple hundred times (the vocals of 涙のソリチュード and every other piano note in 蜃気楼) or a few times, with those few times consisting of prolonged periods of droning static (The eternity stay with and 哀、揺れて・・・). It’s generic, uninspired, lazy, one-bit rock and eurotrash arrangements playing over a wall of static. I guess you could say it was dirtied. With loudness.

Even if it wasn’t on the dark side of the Loudness Wars, TatshMusicCircle is still a bad circle. It shakes the senses as to how something can be boring and horrific at the same time. Even awful music isn’t dull because you are set back at the ineptitude of the people surrounding the project. TMC is unsalvageable and Far East of East III puts to rest any arguments saying otherwise.

Corky Voce - Ambient Dreamer

Corky Voce
Ambient Dreamer
[Corky Voce; 2009] 
7.6










Back when I listened to a huge pile of releases back in January 2010 from Comiket 77, Ambient Dreamer left a strong impression on me with some of the strongest tracks from the 600+ songs from the 100+ albums, EPs, singles, etc. I downloaded. The high points in Corky Voce’s debut release, I either forgot or, even worse, ignored the flaws that plague the album from being the best release from December 2009’s Comic Market.

Ambient Dreamer is an album that knows damn well what to do two-thirds the time, but is far too timid to carry it all the way each time or gets so caught up in what it’s doing that it goes overboard the other third. I’m going to hazard a guess that they like vocal manipulation software. Layered recordings (マトリョーシカ), echoes (Inner Heart), fidelity (楽園 -シントニック・コンマ-), a very-light pinch of the robot-voice effect that’s is on every other song in Daft Punk’s Discovery (practically every song), duets with second member Kei Fujiyama (Good Day), the list goes on. While Sayaka Horise does have a good mellow voice, the moment she makes her pitch higher is when everything falls apart.  If you have ever listened to Radiohead, you might have noticed that with each passing release, Thom Yorke sounds whinier and whinier to the point of annoyance. Now imagine that but higher pitched and more irritating.

That’s right. Sayaka Horise is trying to out-Thom Yorke Thom Yorke.

What genre is Ambient Dreamer? Hard to tell because they get around to various sounds, such as the paint-by-the-numbers J-Rock (いざない), post-hardcore (Ambient Dreamer), Hard Rock (マトリョーシカ), etc. This is no surprise to anyone who has known the groups past contributions and their flexibility.

The songs themselves range from great to mediocre, and the reasons behind it being mediocre make you sincerely wish it was crap. However, don’t fret because it's still one of the most solid releases from the 77th Comic Market. 風車 has a childish nostalgic feel to it and a solid musical transition. The piano melody of 楽園 -シントニック・コンマ- would fit perfectly at one of those retro soda shacks and is the one time that Horise’s high pitched squeals work and would blend into the song list of pop’n music perfectly. マトリョーシカ is my personal favorite track with a Barracuda-esque opening rhythm, a post-punk touch, and guitar solos that are just as catchy as the lyrics, and blueNote’s opening could very well be a darling homage to Endroll by Mass of the Fermenting Dregs. Despite the name, title track Ambient Dreamer doesn’t have even a shred of ambience in it, but has guitar work that sounds like a really clean Number Girl. Hell, Inner Heart sports more of a dreamy vibe by simply having a soft guitar with a bit of reverb.

It’s so weird to think that the songs that I’m practically tripping over myself to praise share the same compact disc as those that feel like B-Side material or have such a sudden change at the halfway point it will have you eyeballing your media player in amazement as the track number stays the same when it clearly is an entirely new song altogether. 蝶’s first third says “I’m easy-listening with a traditional Japanese influence”, while the other two-thirds sounds like BeForU if they were more intricate.  いざない displays the nadir of Horise’s vocal talents, and Good Day’s mellow stride is constantly interrupted by angst-stained squawks that should have been its own song.

I want to love everything about this album, but it has many missteps and songs that stick out like a sore thumb that would be suited for a more light-hearted release. It’s difficult to not be tsudere for Corky Voce’s debut. Instead of scrapping the laid-back records, we get these weird bipolar vocoded Frankensteins. Maybe next time Sayaka Hirose and Kei Fujiyama will learn to correct the mistakes made here and polish their strong suits. Looking over the flaws, what makes this album so strong is that it stands out from many other doujin releases by besting most circles in technical skill, production, and being damn catchy. Ambient Dreamer is a collection of songs with radio-appeal, which is surprising because so few circles lack such gusto to be talented and daring while still being accessible.

Sharpnelsound - m1dy - Speedcore Dandy

m1dy
Speedcore Dandy
[Sharpnelsound; 2002]

6.6








Speedcore is not a popular genre whatsoever. Even in the rather small world of hardcore techno, it is looked down upon by many groups. Most of the time, it is written off as a bunch of aspies playing around with drum machines under a “Let’s see how fast this fucker can go” mindset, throwing away rhyme and reason and taking a huge shit on music theory and melody while searching for youtube videos and torrents of B-Grade horror movies and low key electric guitar noodling. The result: One’s ears being blasted with a firehouse of bass beats and sped up samples that most would only find a few notches more bearable than noise music.

This album needs no introduction. Speedcore Dandy comes up very quickly in speedcore discussions. It’s practically one of the hallmarks of doujin music. It embodies everything I have listed in the opening paragraph. m1dy’s widely-considered magnum opus is a pillar proving the nicheness of the genre. Who could blame people for riding off stuff like this as a clusterfuck of breakbeat drills and blasts, bordering between torturous and annoying?

Talking about the songs do very little to describe the songs on the album. The standard tempo for the genre makes it difficult to have much variety because speedcore, as the name implies, IS FUCKING FAST. It doesn’t have time to build its way up or any of that pussy shit. It laughs at the idea of a patient and orderly line and instead bum rushes the senses right off the bat. Take the title track Speedcoredandy for example: Opens right up with a machine gun of distorted deep bass, only taking a breather at the one-third point to kick back up thirty seconds later. Reaf is the first track where I was able to get an idea as to just how fast it was going. Crash is the poster boy for all of the tropes for Speedcore that people jeer at. The lo-fi production of Midi Anarchism obscures the breaks and beats into some unholy drum machine orgy, and Kimoneverybody sounds like an abstract noise session turned into a legit jam. Closer Destruct is arguably the most tame song on Speedcore Dandy and is my personal favorite on the album, almost as if it was a song several minutes longer slashed down to 93 seconds, leaving us with the best parts.

Speedcore Dandy treads between energizing and irritating, giving almost a perfect split of invigorating and Goddamn obnoxious tracks. It’s a pretty good starting place for those interested in exploring the Speedcore genre (the questions “Who?” and “Why?” are anyone's guess). This might change a small audience of peoples minds about the genre being complete trash, but it certainly won’t change the stereotypes that it carries eight years after being released. To call it “better than most speedcore” isn’t much of a compliment, or probably even a true statement.

DDBY - Highway2

Bizen
Highway2
[DDBY; 2010]

6.2









I cannot deny that the circle DDBY can produce some classy-ass shit. If all of the music in the world as opposed to two-thirds of Comiket were just Touhou arranges, Bizen would be listened to by gentlemen in top-hats sitting by the fire in their lavish chairs as tall as thrones sipping pricey brandy and wine while polishing their monocles while pulling out the 78 RPM Touhou Synthesis set (assuming we all don’t hang ourselves from their being only two-hundred fifty-something or so songs ever made and billions of arranges of each first).

In late June, DDBY has released their third album of 2010. Likewise with the original Highway, Highway2’s arranges are based off the spinoff game starring Aya Shameimaru, who has been scorned and loved by many, either as a borderline-Tabloid reporter in canon, or as a cumdumpster by fanon. The original Highway were arranges of Shoot the Bullet, so now we are treated to remixes of Double Spoiler tracks. Based off Modern Youkai Colony, opener City is your standard jazzy liquid funk that we have come to know and love from Bizen. Piano Soon somehow sounds even more eastern than The Mystery in Your Home Town and sedates the original track’s hectic tempos with chilled out cheery flutes. Nemesis’s Stronghold is remixed twice on this album, with both arranges averting the usual formula Bizen has been known for in his past releases. Syncopation implements rough percussion and high-spirited synths reminiscent of Yellow Magic Orchestra and Square Night sounds like primitive instrument mimicking music programs and club music where funk is locked into combat with techno. Based off Bell of Avici ~ Infinite Nightmare and closer Auto Pilot is guitarist Takayan’s moment to shine, but even coupled with the spastic at first glance breaks, it still doesn’t save the arrange from sounding like something I’d hear playing on The Weather Channel.

Highway2 has no actual misfires but suffers from the never-changing drum line which comes off as tragically generic and seldom changing, similar to TS5. The breaks feel like they were made in a short amount of time and pushed out the door. The blandness is hidden by the instrumentals huddling together around it to keep it out of main sight, but every once in a while someone drops their amber-stem pipes and exposes the weakest part of the drum and bass offshoot remixes: The drum and bass itself.

Hardcore Technique - DJ Technorch - Gothic System ~Trancecore meets Gabber~

DJ Technorch
Gothic System ~Trancecore meets Gabber~
[2005; Hardcore Technique]

9.3

No, I am not reviewing the remixes, because they could be their own separate release, and honestly, I don’t feel like analyzing five versions of Gothic System when there are eight tracks made by the man who single-handedly got me interested in doujin music: DJ Technorch. After listening to his free downloads, I went through a Japanese Hardcore Techno faze which took around two or so months to snap out of, only to realize that most of it is generic and all of it doesn’t even deserve to be placed under the same classification as anything DJ Technorch has made, much less have the honor to piss a urinal away from the man.

Gothic System ~Trancecore Meets Gabber~ is the first full-release album by DJ Technorch, featuring eight glorious tracks that still srand unparalleled by not only the hardcore techno scene, but the whole doujin community as a whole, and five remixes you wouldn’t bat an eye at as soon as you separate them from the preceeding tracks so as they don’t get dirt on the real meat of the CD, which I will at times find myself repeating after finishing. What separates Gothic System from your average hardcore techno release is that it’s not just hardcore and no song can be pigeonholed into one genre. The Cosmosmith opens up quietly and slowly unveils itself with fast, intense melodies and breakbeats, all the while losing none of its tranquility. The minimal oddball Machine’s EXtream boarders between ambient techno and psychedelic experimentation.

While many “J-Core” artists will constantly bust out the “HARDCORE NEVA DIES”, you can find Technorch sampling speeches by Malcolm X over breaks accompanied by low-tone piano chords in opening 極楽鳥 (Oldskool Mix). Title track Gothic System keeps repetition fresh through effectors, turning a normal synth melody into something fluid and lucid. Even the drum machine-centric 暗転 leaves a number of producers in the dust. PARANOiA TCN 〜Dirty Mix〜, a definite nod to the KCET mix from 2nd Mix Plus, is the most traditional remix of PARANOiA we have had in years from someone who has been apart of any Bemani project.

No song tries to be a Hardcore anthem or displays passive Tourettes through sampling.  DJ Technorch is a man who goes on producing songs and ignoring the trends, the tired tropes, the clichés that swallow up many of the “artists” today in the hardcore techno scene. Even on an off day, Technorch can still take groups and artists like DJ Sharpnel and P*Light to school and even leave competents like REDALiCE, M-Project, USAO, and kors k a damn good lesson. Gothic System ~Trancecore Meets Gabba~ is one of the very few doujin releases that I can point at saying "this album as got balls", throwing in minimal, ambient, and hardcore onto the same compact disc. If you start out with J-Core with this artist like I did, you will be most likely setting yourself up for heartbreak if you're pinheaded enough to find someone like him.