raxmix vol. 9
Nov. 22nd, 2022 10:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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likealarkCGR crunch time = mixtape time
I've had enough tracks for ages but I've been so busy at work that I wasn't able to cut it together, until today's conversation gave me the kick in the pants needed to finish it. (Also having a small vacation off for thanksgiving helped.) I felt like so much of this album was music from Asian markets, but it's actually only half the tracks. This is probably accurate to my typical music consumption, which I always feel is "90% vocaloid, 10% everything else" but it's actually more varied than that.
Following in the grand tradition of raxmix bird covers, this track cover is from a jubeat song called "Heron." (It sounds like this) It also appears on DDR and a few other rhythm games, iirc. An SCU song was also the cover to raxmix vol. 1, so retro. I just got back into playing rhythm games again; there's a dave and buster's ten or so minutes from my new apartment, and even though it only has pump it up, I go and play once a week. I got started playing dance games again because when I visited my friend Aster in Ohio, they dragged me to their home arcade and I played Heron there. I saw it and was like, "that's the next raxmix cover." And so it was.
If you are not Rax but also like music, you're welcome to give this a listen too?
> DOWNLOAD <
( iTunes Playlist )
01. Dirty Androids - Midnight Lady (Extended)
This is from beatmania iidx! When this song came out on iidx Cannon Ballerz (what a name) it made a big splash in the rhythm game community. The rhythm game wiki has liner notes and other info that I personally thought was interesting. The wiki article highlights one of the worst things Konami does, which is to force all their in-house musicians and composers to work under the monolith group name "Konami Sound Team" without allowing them to take credit for their own contributions. Konami sucks!
Anyway, the opening of the track is a big reason I put it first, 1) it's a nice mix-opening conceit and 2) no other song would segue nicely to that. I keep wanting to say this is vaporwave but it isn't, it's apparently nu-funk? Love the saxophone. This is the extended version from Dirty Androids' solo album Destination, and honestly it's amazing that he's managed to negotiate his own rights to publish his work independently and even make an extended mix like this, because Konami does not usually let musicians do that.
Here's more info on Dirty Androids if you want it.
02. Lizzo - 2 Be Loved
Lizzo came out with a new album this year! It's called Special. I've been talking to my friend a lot about this album. He thinks every track is the best track, but I unequivocally like this one the best. Partially because it's such a loving kick in the pants, thanks for the auditory callout post Lizzo. Literally from the first line I'm like "oh, same." I really love the call-and-response of the chorus. I always sing the response part, not Lizzo's part. Anyway this is Lizzo enthusiastically telling you to get the fuck back up and keep trying, which is exactly what I love her for. Thanks, Lizzo.
03. SHINee - Romance
I've been listening to a lot of SHINee this year. I don't know how much you know about them, but their lead singer Jonghyun, a kid with a megawatt smile and a voice that could move mountains, died in 2017 and it was extremely traumatic for the entire kpop industry and fandom across the world. His death forced the industry to become more humane, and also started the foundation of a nonprofit entirely dedicated to keeping kpop kids alive. It was traumatic for me, too, and I stopped listening to their music for a long time.
Anyway, I've been talking a lot to my friend Aster this year, who was a shinee fan the way I was a super junior fan once upon a time. Jonghyun's death was more traumatic for them than it was for me, but through talking about it I think we've both made a little more progress towards coming to terms with it. Because of our conversations I started listening to a lot more of their music, and I was reminded again that shinee was, and still is, one of the most musically inventive kpop groups out there. Their music is just actually good in a way that stands out from the usual industry scene, and part of that was because Jonghyun was actually a great musician and personally helped shape their sound. Like there's a baseline "good, but boilerplate" sound that one associates with kpop. Shinee often breaks away from them and creates actually good shit and I think this track is a good example of that.
This is from Odd, the last album they made in Korean before Jonghyun died. (Their actual last album with him is in Japanese; shinee became REALLY popular in the Japanese market and they spent a huge amount of time performing and targeting their songs over there.) Jonghyun sings at 0:28 and finally gets to sing a real verse at 1:25. The member doing all the responses during the verses is Onew, whose classical opera training is Painfully Obvious in his embouchure and I love him for it. The fuck is this key???? Or scale or whatever it is. This song is so bright and breezy. It's fun but also kind of mysterious because it keeps going in ways you don't expect and those DELICIOUS chords, lovely. This is a good song. I miss shinee. I'm so glad they're still making music. Their latest album was AMAZING too, it's called Atlantis.
04. Hikaru Utada - Somewhere Near Marseilles
Utada also came out with a new album this year. It's called BAD MODE and you can tell that she permanently moved to Manhattan (she did) because she says fuck on this album. You tell 'em, Hikki.
This isn't the track with the curse on it though; this one is my favorite on her album and it's a delicious 12 minutes long. It just takes you on such a mellow, relaxed journey. I spent a lot of this summer hiking, and I listened to this track while traveling through the oldest old growth forest on the East Coast, watching the wind move through the tuliptrees. Utada Hikaru continues to make songs with lyrics that perfectly encapsulate my own thought process, and now that I know she's nonbinary that makes so much more sense to me.
05. Caroline Polachek - Door
I don't know a lot about music but everyone says this song has amazing mixing. I don't know what that means, but I had a feeling you would, so I wanted to share it with you. The plaintive melodic line is beautiful and the music video is a weird trip.
06. Harry Stiles - Matilda
Harry Stiles is a weirdly contentious figure these days. He came up from One Direction and then everyone was praising him, because he's a good singer/songwriter, but we're supposed to hate him right now because he tried to be in a movie and he sucked at it and was apparently uncouth/poorly mannered/not genteel enough/not a sparkling conversationalist during the promotional movie tour. Okay but the kid's a nonbinary musician, not an actor, and I enjoy his work a lot so he's gonna be in here anyway.
This song made me cry? It reminded me thematically of family by mother mother, except like. I have trouble with Family because I don't have any blood relatives I can identify with like that, I was an only child and my family turned on me. Matilda is to me, I think, the way Family is to you; it has personal meaning because it aligns with something in your life that is heartfelt, hard-earned, and meaningful, but also perpendicular to the traditional expected familial experience.
07. Stromae - Sante
The return of the Random French Song on raxmix!!!!! I was more excited about this then I should be
I think I found this song through a weird rabbit hole of European tiktok-adjacent memes? Anyway it fucking slaps. We start with mandolins and we end with breakbeats, thank you. This is a Belgian composer, as far as I could tell from google translate. I love how the bass beat shows up a millisecond too late. It drives me crazy in the best way, what a hook! It gives the whole track a seesaw, thudding-forward feeling like bouncing down the road in an old junker car.
08. Kairiki Bear ft. Hatsune Miku - Static Electricity Human (Computer Flavor)
This is the song that kicked Bug off of this mix. I wanted to share Kairiki Bear with you in case you didn't already know about them, but I generally limit myself to one song per composer per album. This one won out because it was longer and also chiptunes. There's a guitar-heavy less digital version of this song, but the Computer Flavor is way better. I like how this song sounds like a glitched-out charleston? You can absolutely dance the charleston to this track.
Kairiki Bear wrote one of the most famous flower songs, called Venom. Between these three tracks (this one, bug, venom) you can get a firm grasp of Kairiki Bear's style. Upbeat and energetic with bouncy instrumentation, a lot of usage of onomatopoeia and alliteration, lyrics that verge on denpa-like (where the word sound is more important than the word meaning, and lyrics can become nonsensical in pursuit of this). A lot of Kairiki Bear's songs are hit-and-miss; I bought this album, Darling Syndrome, and I love some tracks and find others a total snoozefest. But when they get it right, their songs are GREAT.
09. Hiiragi Kirai - Bottom ft. flower
Speaking of people who make amazing flower tracks. Hiiragi Kirai (kirai literally means hate, they are at least always on brand) makes furious tracks that yell about how the world sucks and society sucks and they want to tear everything apart with their bare hands while crying. They use flower a lot, and their most famous flower song is Bocca della Verità.
Holy shit. Flower's tuning on this song. This is the best tuning of flower I've ever heard. The melodic line is very tricky and the way flower's voice twists between playful vocal flips and gritty vocal burn on held notes, they sound so alive. This track is fucking virtuosic, what a flex. How is this a robot and not a real human singing!!!
10. Foals - Wake Me Up
I love the wall of sound feel of this track. I also like the call and response in the chorus. This song is great fun to sing along to. That's it!
11. Aiobahn - ここにいる (kokoniiru / I'm here) ft. rionos [Stephen Walking Remix]
I was cleaning my house with my itunes radio station spitting out whatever songs it felt like and this track made me stop and listen for four minutes. That bassline!!! The dreamy floaty singing laid over top. The way the instrumentation comes in gradually like dawn breaking. The gentle chiming-like guitar of the chorus weaving in with her wordless vocals. This song is so beautiful.
12. Laurie Anderson - O Superman
Content warning for this song because it's about fraught maternal relationships, and at one point has the singer acting out a mom leaving voicemails.
There's a decent chance you know this song already because it came out in 1982, and sounds like the kind of song you may have picked up somewhere. This song still sounds fairly modern. This song is pretty overtly political/social, and a some of the stuff it discusses feels retro now, but what's most upsetting is that most of the stuff it talks about isn't retro at all. It's 40 years later and we're all still worrying about the same shit.
Bonus Track: Hikaru Utada - Simple and Clean (Ray of Hope Mix)
Maybe you know this track too but I didn't! This is a deep cut remix of simple and clean so I am sharing it just in case it's new to you.
I've had enough tracks for ages but I've been so busy at work that I wasn't able to cut it together, until today's conversation gave me the kick in the pants needed to finish it. (Also having a small vacation off for thanksgiving helped.) I felt like so much of this album was music from Asian markets, but it's actually only half the tracks. This is probably accurate to my typical music consumption, which I always feel is "90% vocaloid, 10% everything else" but it's actually more varied than that.
Following in the grand tradition of raxmix bird covers, this track cover is from a jubeat song called "Heron." (It sounds like this) It also appears on DDR and a few other rhythm games, iirc. An SCU song was also the cover to raxmix vol. 1, so retro. I just got back into playing rhythm games again; there's a dave and buster's ten or so minutes from my new apartment, and even though it only has pump it up, I go and play once a week. I got started playing dance games again because when I visited my friend Aster in Ohio, they dragged me to their home arcade and I played Heron there. I saw it and was like, "that's the next raxmix cover." And so it was.
If you are not Rax but also like music, you're welcome to give this a listen too?
Bonus Track: Hikaru Utada - Simple and Clean (Ray of Hope Mix)
|
( iTunes Playlist )
01. Dirty Androids - Midnight Lady (Extended)
This is from beatmania iidx! When this song came out on iidx Cannon Ballerz (what a name) it made a big splash in the rhythm game community. The rhythm game wiki has liner notes and other info that I personally thought was interesting. The wiki article highlights one of the worst things Konami does, which is to force all their in-house musicians and composers to work under the monolith group name "Konami Sound Team" without allowing them to take credit for their own contributions. Konami sucks!
Anyway, the opening of the track is a big reason I put it first, 1) it's a nice mix-opening conceit and 2) no other song would segue nicely to that. I keep wanting to say this is vaporwave but it isn't, it's apparently nu-funk? Love the saxophone. This is the extended version from Dirty Androids' solo album Destination, and honestly it's amazing that he's managed to negotiate his own rights to publish his work independently and even make an extended mix like this, because Konami does not usually let musicians do that.
Here's more info on Dirty Androids if you want it.
02. Lizzo - 2 Be Loved
Lizzo came out with a new album this year! It's called Special. I've been talking to my friend a lot about this album. He thinks every track is the best track, but I unequivocally like this one the best. Partially because it's such a loving kick in the pants, thanks for the auditory callout post Lizzo. Literally from the first line I'm like "oh, same." I really love the call-and-response of the chorus. I always sing the response part, not Lizzo's part. Anyway this is Lizzo enthusiastically telling you to get the fuck back up and keep trying, which is exactly what I love her for. Thanks, Lizzo.
03. SHINee - Romance
I've been listening to a lot of SHINee this year. I don't know how much you know about them, but their lead singer Jonghyun, a kid with a megawatt smile and a voice that could move mountains, died in 2017 and it was extremely traumatic for the entire kpop industry and fandom across the world. His death forced the industry to become more humane, and also started the foundation of a nonprofit entirely dedicated to keeping kpop kids alive. It was traumatic for me, too, and I stopped listening to their music for a long time.
Anyway, I've been talking a lot to my friend Aster this year, who was a shinee fan the way I was a super junior fan once upon a time. Jonghyun's death was more traumatic for them than it was for me, but through talking about it I think we've both made a little more progress towards coming to terms with it. Because of our conversations I started listening to a lot more of their music, and I was reminded again that shinee was, and still is, one of the most musically inventive kpop groups out there. Their music is just actually good in a way that stands out from the usual industry scene, and part of that was because Jonghyun was actually a great musician and personally helped shape their sound. Like there's a baseline "good, but boilerplate" sound that one associates with kpop. Shinee often breaks away from them and creates actually good shit and I think this track is a good example of that.
This is from Odd, the last album they made in Korean before Jonghyun died. (Their actual last album with him is in Japanese; shinee became REALLY popular in the Japanese market and they spent a huge amount of time performing and targeting their songs over there.) Jonghyun sings at 0:28 and finally gets to sing a real verse at 1:25. The member doing all the responses during the verses is Onew, whose classical opera training is Painfully Obvious in his embouchure and I love him for it. The fuck is this key???? Or scale or whatever it is. This song is so bright and breezy. It's fun but also kind of mysterious because it keeps going in ways you don't expect and those DELICIOUS chords, lovely. This is a good song. I miss shinee. I'm so glad they're still making music. Their latest album was AMAZING too, it's called Atlantis.
04. Hikaru Utada - Somewhere Near Marseilles
Utada also came out with a new album this year. It's called BAD MODE and you can tell that she permanently moved to Manhattan (she did) because she says fuck on this album. You tell 'em, Hikki.
This isn't the track with the curse on it though; this one is my favorite on her album and it's a delicious 12 minutes long. It just takes you on such a mellow, relaxed journey. I spent a lot of this summer hiking, and I listened to this track while traveling through the oldest old growth forest on the East Coast, watching the wind move through the tuliptrees. Utada Hikaru continues to make songs with lyrics that perfectly encapsulate my own thought process, and now that I know she's nonbinary that makes so much more sense to me.
05. Caroline Polachek - Door
I don't know a lot about music but everyone says this song has amazing mixing. I don't know what that means, but I had a feeling you would, so I wanted to share it with you. The plaintive melodic line is beautiful and the music video is a weird trip.
06. Harry Stiles - Matilda
Harry Stiles is a weirdly contentious figure these days. He came up from One Direction and then everyone was praising him, because he's a good singer/songwriter, but we're supposed to hate him right now because he tried to be in a movie and he sucked at it and was apparently uncouth/poorly mannered/not genteel enough/not a sparkling conversationalist during the promotional movie tour. Okay but the kid's a nonbinary musician, not an actor, and I enjoy his work a lot so he's gonna be in here anyway.
This song made me cry? It reminded me thematically of family by mother mother, except like. I have trouble with Family because I don't have any blood relatives I can identify with like that, I was an only child and my family turned on me. Matilda is to me, I think, the way Family is to you; it has personal meaning because it aligns with something in your life that is heartfelt, hard-earned, and meaningful, but also perpendicular to the traditional expected familial experience.
07. Stromae - Sante
The return of the Random French Song on raxmix!!!!! I was more excited about this then I should be
I think I found this song through a weird rabbit hole of European tiktok-adjacent memes? Anyway it fucking slaps. We start with mandolins and we end with breakbeats, thank you. This is a Belgian composer, as far as I could tell from google translate. I love how the bass beat shows up a millisecond too late. It drives me crazy in the best way, what a hook! It gives the whole track a seesaw, thudding-forward feeling like bouncing down the road in an old junker car.
08. Kairiki Bear ft. Hatsune Miku - Static Electricity Human (Computer Flavor)
This is the song that kicked Bug off of this mix. I wanted to share Kairiki Bear with you in case you didn't already know about them, but I generally limit myself to one song per composer per album. This one won out because it was longer and also chiptunes. There's a guitar-heavy less digital version of this song, but the Computer Flavor is way better. I like how this song sounds like a glitched-out charleston? You can absolutely dance the charleston to this track.
Kairiki Bear wrote one of the most famous flower songs, called Venom. Between these three tracks (this one, bug, venom) you can get a firm grasp of Kairiki Bear's style. Upbeat and energetic with bouncy instrumentation, a lot of usage of onomatopoeia and alliteration, lyrics that verge on denpa-like (where the word sound is more important than the word meaning, and lyrics can become nonsensical in pursuit of this). A lot of Kairiki Bear's songs are hit-and-miss; I bought this album, Darling Syndrome, and I love some tracks and find others a total snoozefest. But when they get it right, their songs are GREAT.
09. Hiiragi Kirai - Bottom ft. flower
Speaking of people who make amazing flower tracks. Hiiragi Kirai (kirai literally means hate, they are at least always on brand) makes furious tracks that yell about how the world sucks and society sucks and they want to tear everything apart with their bare hands while crying. They use flower a lot, and their most famous flower song is Bocca della Verità.
Holy shit. Flower's tuning on this song. This is the best tuning of flower I've ever heard. The melodic line is very tricky and the way flower's voice twists between playful vocal flips and gritty vocal burn on held notes, they sound so alive. This track is fucking virtuosic, what a flex. How is this a robot and not a real human singing!!!
10. Foals - Wake Me Up
I love the wall of sound feel of this track. I also like the call and response in the chorus. This song is great fun to sing along to. That's it!
11. Aiobahn - ここにいる (kokoniiru / I'm here) ft. rionos [Stephen Walking Remix]
I was cleaning my house with my itunes radio station spitting out whatever songs it felt like and this track made me stop and listen for four minutes. That bassline!!! The dreamy floaty singing laid over top. The way the instrumentation comes in gradually like dawn breaking. The gentle chiming-like guitar of the chorus weaving in with her wordless vocals. This song is so beautiful.
12. Laurie Anderson - O Superman
Content warning for this song because it's about fraught maternal relationships, and at one point has the singer acting out a mom leaving voicemails.
There's a decent chance you know this song already because it came out in 1982, and sounds like the kind of song you may have picked up somewhere. This song still sounds fairly modern. This song is pretty overtly political/social, and a some of the stuff it discusses feels retro now, but what's most upsetting is that most of the stuff it talks about isn't retro at all. It's 40 years later and we're all still worrying about the same shit.
Bonus Track: Hikaru Utada - Simple and Clean (Ray of Hope Mix)
Maybe you know this track too but I didn't! This is a deep cut remix of simple and clean so I am sharing it just in case it's new to you.
