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likealark2023-11-30 05:50 pm
outstretched) wrote in likealark2023-11-30 05:50 pm
Entry tags:
raxmix vol 11
Right under the wire for CGR, here's a bunch of dance tracks
All I've been listening to this year (besides the ever-present vocaloid shit) is high pop from the 1980s. We're talking Michael Jackson and related sounds, including tracing those sounds to the present day. It's an era of music that I haven't actually spent a ton of time listening to - can you believe that I'd never listened to the Thriller album before two months ago?? - and it's been a fascinating education in where all the music I like today, came from. Hearing licks of 80s music in modern music and going "OH now I UNDERSTAND the full weight of time and history behind that sound!" has been so fucking cool.
As for the cover this time, remember Lagtrain from raxmix vol. 8? Jubeat Ave. just released last month, the first update to the game since 2018, and Lagrain is in it!! Therefore making it eligible as a raxmix cover!! So here it is. I felt like it matched some of the spooky or atmospheric music on this mix. Also, the echoing art of the character makes me think of internal family systems.
If you are not Rax but also like music, you're welcome to give this a listen too?
> DOWNLOAD <
( Youtube Playlist )
01. AJR - The DJ is Crying for Help
AJR just likes being the intro track to raxmixes. Who am I to argue.
With a title like that, how could I have done anything but put it on the raxmix? I think a lot of this band's lyrics/music is wide-eyed gen Z scarcasm-despair and this is more of the same, but in a way that makes me laugh and bury my head in my hands with grief at the same time. This song is just so fucking relatable. I like the chorus the most, but they do so many small clever wordplays throughout all the lyrics. My favorite one is where they use the melodic one-two note that everyone expects to go with the word "higher" but then change it to "hired" because lol our economy is in shambles just like everything else in modern day life. Yeah. They get it! Sometimes you need to hear a song about how somebody gets it.
02. Apashe ft. Alina Pash - Witch
Weirdly, I found this song while playing Just Dance 2023, which I bought earlier this year in a bid to get into exercise. The game didn't stick, but this song did. The other stuff was straightforward exercise style techno dance but this was so different and I was like, damn, this song is actually so cool. I played it during Halloween, so it was especially timely then. The singer is Ukranian, which adds an additional Specific Nuance right now. The primal chittering adds such flavor. I like the way the song takes up space with the echoing.
03. Fever Ray - Now's The Only Time I Know
This singer is Karin Dreijer, and they're most famous for collaborating with Röyksopp. Fever Ray is their solo alias. Weirdly enough, I found them because the lyrics from this song was used as the epigraph to a porn fic on AO3. But then I was like, holy shit, wait, I'm suddenly slingshotted to 2010 when all I listened to was that particular brand of electronica. Also they're nonbinary and their shifting visual appearance is so jarring and fashion-forward, I love it. I liked this whole album but liked this song the most, maybe just from the imprinting-of-the-first-song-you-hear effect. Like a lot of other things on this mix, the appeal of this to me is in the finding of something old and recognizable in a piece of music you've never heard before.
04. Tsukiri ft. GUMI - Go To The Big City
I was letting iTunes play vocaloid music at random and this one came up. I'm not sorry for my over-fondness for chiptunes. It's GUMI, it's dancey, I listened to it on repeat for three weeks, it goes on the mix. The way GUMI is tuned gives her voice a wistfulness that's heightened by the innate nostalgia impact of the chiptune sound. To me this isn't vaporwave but it has the *feel* of vaporwave and I think that's interesting.
*Please note that these lyrics are super NSFW if you are going to play them around people who speak Japanese.
05. KIRA ft. Kasane Teto AI - WILDCARD
This song just came out! I know you know KIRA, of course, and there's a good chance if you follow their youtube channel that you've already heard this song, but I wanted to talk about Kasane Teto because she has been *hot* right now and that's so fascinating to me. Kasane Teto is from ancient Vocaloid history. Back when all we had were the impossible-to-use vocaloids of ancient V1 Meiko, Kaito, etc., and Miku was the best thing on the market, people wanted to make songs with voices that weren't Miku, but were as "usable" as her. So they found ways of tuning her so strongly in one or another direction that she sounded like a different voice bank, and those "fan made" voice banks got fan hivemind designated names and character designs. Kasane Teto is the most popular of these. This year (I think), they released an official Kasane Teto voicebank, which is crazy?! Fandom went insane. Enjoy the uncanny valley effect of "that almost sounds like Miku but it doesn't" that is Kasane Teto! And of course KIRA absolutely kills it, as usual. The music video was produced by Ookiku of REOL fame!
06. Justice - Safe and Sound
I listened to Fever Ray, and it made me nostalgic for 2010s music, so I looked up Justice, and found that they'd released several albums since their first album. And all of it is FIRE. This is the first track from their album Woman and I love the restrained grandeur of it. I read a music review where Gaspard said "If every song could have the same drama as the entrance music to a boxing match, that would be wonderful, I think."
To me this song sounds weirdly...comforting? Reassuring? Something about the delivery of the lyrics, and what the lyrics say, and also that bassline is so damn funky. Remember how Daft Punk did that live album where they mixed all their own tracks together? Justice did that too! And it's just as good!! They used this track several times on the live album, and I almost used one of those mixes but I want you to be able to look up and listen to the live album as a single coherent piece, so I did not. Please enjoy that auditory adventure at your lesiure! Also, the inescapable sound similarities between Daft Punk and Justice pleases me, because I love both of them. I love French Electronica. Man.
07. ABBA - Lovers (Live A Little Longer)
As I was looking up Justice, I found a playlist curated by Justice of various influences on their sound, and ABBA was on it. It is of course impossible to completely avoid ABBA, but I was as close as one can get, I think, partially fueled by my hatred of the song Dancing Queen. (Heard it too many times.) But that song they linked was My Mama Said and it was like no ABBA song I'd ever heard before. That weird minor key. The sense of grandeur. You can absolutely hear how Justice is descended from it! My friend Strata is Swedish and his dad, weirdly, was ABBA's DJ for a while; so I said to him "hey, is ABBA actually good" and he was like "Ciry. It is Time For An Education."
So with his help I spent like two weeks looping the entire ABBA discography and holy shit. They're amazing. They have such a strong classical??? background?? to their music that only made sense after I learned that they were all trained at The Royal Academy Of Music, which is basically Swedish Juilliard. There is something about their music that is like, mathematically designed to make you like it. It is literally impossible not to like ABBA, even though I still don't really like Dancing Queen. Morris explained to me that ABBA was the first group to really use this "mathematically designing music that you cannot dislike" approach and how that changed the entire landscape of modern music. Now when I listen to modern music I can hear the underpinning of ABBA in like every single one. I have been listening to ABBA music my entire life, and I had no idea.
Anyway of their amazing discography this is my favorite track. It's funky. The lyrics are playfully sassy and also reference scientific studies, which I find hilarious. The weird melodic descant of the chorus. The violin hook slaps and also wow they cannot escape all their classical training, huh. And of course, ABBA is very gay, which is also pleasing to me.
ABBA! They're great! I love being the last person to find this out in the year 2023!
08. Jung Kook (from BTS) - Standing Next to You
So then I listened to Michael Jackson a lot, who I intentionally did *not* put on this mix because of course none of it would be new to you. And then this song just dropped this month? And like...speaking of 80s influences in modern day music...
This is the youngest member of BTS who wanted to sing some more explicitly horny songs than his parent company would allow in Korean, so he released an English album. The song design is just fucking immaculate. You can hear the Daft Punk, the Michael Jackson (there are dozens of explicit Michael Jackson references in both official MVs), and the high disco of ABBA. And of course his voice is gorgeous, those falsetto notes, lovely. The use of the bassline as a hook. This entire song is a pile of hooks. I love high pop, man.
Also, if you like really good remix albums, the remix album for this one is GOOD.
09. Yung Bae - Disco Body Parts
This is like the last song except worse! This is a stupid white boy making songs that mimic his betters because he's never had an imaginative thought in his life. Whereas the Daft Punk influence in Standing Next To You is baked in seamlessly, in Yung Bae's music it's glaringly overt. For example, the background twang on this track is just from Voyager (my favorite Daft Punk song). In another track from this album he basically lifts Justice - D.A.N.C.E.'s primary call and response, to the point where I assume he's paying them royalties. With that said, I like the lyrics of this song track enough that I put this on the mix anyway. Something about the entire body being used as a musical instrument appeals to me and feels like how you DJ. I also really like how the chorus opens up with that "ah!" hook.
10. Matt Nguyen-Ngo - A Cruel Barbie's Thesis (Full Version)
I know you know this track already but I'm putting it on anyway because I want to. It slaps. I like how the full version keeps doing surprising things until the very end.
11. DJ Hero - Boom Boom Pow vs. Satisfaction
I actually intended to put this on raxmix vol. 10, but ran out of room. DJ Hero was a rhythm game made by the same company that made Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and tried to imitate DJing in the same way those tried to imitate guitar playing or, uh, being a rock band I guess. Some of the tracks from it went surprisingly hard. We're still riding hard on the 2010s electronica sound but the way it's mixed with Black Eyed Peas makes me laugh and also, why is it this good? Compared to the previous mashup, this one is a bit "emptier" in sound, but I still think it's fun and surprising enough that it belongs on the mix.
12. Hiirai Magnetite ft. Hatsune Miku - A Certain World's Disappearance
The vanilla ice cream track. A dreamy 11 minutes, I love how this song moves through so many genres. It's got some trance, it's got some house, it's got some reggae, it's got some industrial. This was this producer's first song and it's a good one. Also, I read their name as "Hiiragi Magnemite" for a good few weeks, oops.
Bonus Track: Yakamochi ft. Will Stetson - Sacabambapsis
Once again, a shitpost of a song. This is a musical response to this meme. Weirdly I associate this song with Salem, MA because I heard it for the first time while driving to there, and then looped it for 30 minutes like a maniac. It's SO CATCHY. Absolute earworm of a song. You're welcome for this auditory poisoning.
> DOWNLOAD <
( Youtube Playlist )
All I've been listening to this year (besides the ever-present vocaloid shit) is high pop from the 1980s. We're talking Michael Jackson and related sounds, including tracing those sounds to the present day. It's an era of music that I haven't actually spent a ton of time listening to - can you believe that I'd never listened to the Thriller album before two months ago?? - and it's been a fascinating education in where all the music I like today, came from. Hearing licks of 80s music in modern music and going "OH now I UNDERSTAND the full weight of time and history behind that sound!" has been so fucking cool.
As for the cover this time, remember Lagtrain from raxmix vol. 8? Jubeat Ave. just released last month, the first update to the game since 2018, and Lagrain is in it!! Therefore making it eligible as a raxmix cover!! So here it is. I felt like it matched some of the spooky or atmospheric music on this mix. Also, the echoing art of the character makes me think of internal family systems.
If you are not Rax but also like music, you're welcome to give this a listen too?
Bonus Track: Yakamochi ft. Will Stetson - Sacabambapsis
|
( Youtube Playlist )
01. AJR - The DJ is Crying for Help
AJR just likes being the intro track to raxmixes. Who am I to argue.
With a title like that, how could I have done anything but put it on the raxmix? I think a lot of this band's lyrics/music is wide-eyed gen Z scarcasm-despair and this is more of the same, but in a way that makes me laugh and bury my head in my hands with grief at the same time. This song is just so fucking relatable. I like the chorus the most, but they do so many small clever wordplays throughout all the lyrics. My favorite one is where they use the melodic one-two note that everyone expects to go with the word "higher" but then change it to "hired" because lol our economy is in shambles just like everything else in modern day life. Yeah. They get it! Sometimes you need to hear a song about how somebody gets it.
02. Apashe ft. Alina Pash - Witch
Weirdly, I found this song while playing Just Dance 2023, which I bought earlier this year in a bid to get into exercise. The game didn't stick, but this song did. The other stuff was straightforward exercise style techno dance but this was so different and I was like, damn, this song is actually so cool. I played it during Halloween, so it was especially timely then. The singer is Ukranian, which adds an additional Specific Nuance right now. The primal chittering adds such flavor. I like the way the song takes up space with the echoing.
03. Fever Ray - Now's The Only Time I Know
This singer is Karin Dreijer, and they're most famous for collaborating with Röyksopp. Fever Ray is their solo alias. Weirdly enough, I found them because the lyrics from this song was used as the epigraph to a porn fic on AO3. But then I was like, holy shit, wait, I'm suddenly slingshotted to 2010 when all I listened to was that particular brand of electronica. Also they're nonbinary and their shifting visual appearance is so jarring and fashion-forward, I love it. I liked this whole album but liked this song the most, maybe just from the imprinting-of-the-first-song-you-hear effect. Like a lot of other things on this mix, the appeal of this to me is in the finding of something old and recognizable in a piece of music you've never heard before.
04. Tsukiri ft. GUMI - Go To The Big City
I was letting iTunes play vocaloid music at random and this one came up. I'm not sorry for my over-fondness for chiptunes. It's GUMI, it's dancey, I listened to it on repeat for three weeks, it goes on the mix. The way GUMI is tuned gives her voice a wistfulness that's heightened by the innate nostalgia impact of the chiptune sound. To me this isn't vaporwave but it has the *feel* of vaporwave and I think that's interesting.
*Please note that these lyrics are super NSFW if you are going to play them around people who speak Japanese.
05. KIRA ft. Kasane Teto AI - WILDCARD
This song just came out! I know you know KIRA, of course, and there's a good chance if you follow their youtube channel that you've already heard this song, but I wanted to talk about Kasane Teto because she has been *hot* right now and that's so fascinating to me. Kasane Teto is from ancient Vocaloid history. Back when all we had were the impossible-to-use vocaloids of ancient V1 Meiko, Kaito, etc., and Miku was the best thing on the market, people wanted to make songs with voices that weren't Miku, but were as "usable" as her. So they found ways of tuning her so strongly in one or another direction that she sounded like a different voice bank, and those "fan made" voice banks got fan hivemind designated names and character designs. Kasane Teto is the most popular of these. This year (I think), they released an official Kasane Teto voicebank, which is crazy?! Fandom went insane. Enjoy the uncanny valley effect of "that almost sounds like Miku but it doesn't" that is Kasane Teto! And of course KIRA absolutely kills it, as usual. The music video was produced by Ookiku of REOL fame!
06. Justice - Safe and Sound
I listened to Fever Ray, and it made me nostalgic for 2010s music, so I looked up Justice, and found that they'd released several albums since their first album. And all of it is FIRE. This is the first track from their album Woman and I love the restrained grandeur of it. I read a music review where Gaspard said "If every song could have the same drama as the entrance music to a boxing match, that would be wonderful, I think."
To me this song sounds weirdly...comforting? Reassuring? Something about the delivery of the lyrics, and what the lyrics say, and also that bassline is so damn funky. Remember how Daft Punk did that live album where they mixed all their own tracks together? Justice did that too! And it's just as good!! They used this track several times on the live album, and I almost used one of those mixes but I want you to be able to look up and listen to the live album as a single coherent piece, so I did not. Please enjoy that auditory adventure at your lesiure! Also, the inescapable sound similarities between Daft Punk and Justice pleases me, because I love both of them. I love French Electronica. Man.
07. ABBA - Lovers (Live A Little Longer)
As I was looking up Justice, I found a playlist curated by Justice of various influences on their sound, and ABBA was on it. It is of course impossible to completely avoid ABBA, but I was as close as one can get, I think, partially fueled by my hatred of the song Dancing Queen. (Heard it too many times.) But that song they linked was My Mama Said and it was like no ABBA song I'd ever heard before. That weird minor key. The sense of grandeur. You can absolutely hear how Justice is descended from it! My friend Strata is Swedish and his dad, weirdly, was ABBA's DJ for a while; so I said to him "hey, is ABBA actually good" and he was like "Ciry. It is Time For An Education."
So with his help I spent like two weeks looping the entire ABBA discography and holy shit. They're amazing. They have such a strong classical??? background?? to their music that only made sense after I learned that they were all trained at The Royal Academy Of Music, which is basically Swedish Juilliard. There is something about their music that is like, mathematically designed to make you like it. It is literally impossible not to like ABBA, even though I still don't really like Dancing Queen. Morris explained to me that ABBA was the first group to really use this "mathematically designing music that you cannot dislike" approach and how that changed the entire landscape of modern music. Now when I listen to modern music I can hear the underpinning of ABBA in like every single one. I have been listening to ABBA music my entire life, and I had no idea.
Anyway of their amazing discography this is my favorite track. It's funky. The lyrics are playfully sassy and also reference scientific studies, which I find hilarious. The weird melodic descant of the chorus. The violin hook slaps and also wow they cannot escape all their classical training, huh. And of course, ABBA is very gay, which is also pleasing to me.
ABBA! They're great! I love being the last person to find this out in the year 2023!
08. Jung Kook (from BTS) - Standing Next to You
So then I listened to Michael Jackson a lot, who I intentionally did *not* put on this mix because of course none of it would be new to you. And then this song just dropped this month? And like...speaking of 80s influences in modern day music...
This is the youngest member of BTS who wanted to sing some more explicitly horny songs than his parent company would allow in Korean, so he released an English album. The song design is just fucking immaculate. You can hear the Daft Punk, the Michael Jackson (there are dozens of explicit Michael Jackson references in both official MVs), and the high disco of ABBA. And of course his voice is gorgeous, those falsetto notes, lovely. The use of the bassline as a hook. This entire song is a pile of hooks. I love high pop, man.
Also, if you like really good remix albums, the remix album for this one is GOOD.
09. Yung Bae - Disco Body Parts
This is like the last song except worse! This is a stupid white boy making songs that mimic his betters because he's never had an imaginative thought in his life. Whereas the Daft Punk influence in Standing Next To You is baked in seamlessly, in Yung Bae's music it's glaringly overt. For example, the background twang on this track is just from Voyager (my favorite Daft Punk song). In another track from this album he basically lifts Justice - D.A.N.C.E.'s primary call and response, to the point where I assume he's paying them royalties. With that said, I like the lyrics of this song track enough that I put this on the mix anyway. Something about the entire body being used as a musical instrument appeals to me and feels like how you DJ. I also really like how the chorus opens up with that "ah!" hook.
10. Matt Nguyen-Ngo - A Cruel Barbie's Thesis (Full Version)
I know you know this track already but I'm putting it on anyway because I want to. It slaps. I like how the full version keeps doing surprising things until the very end.
11. DJ Hero - Boom Boom Pow vs. Satisfaction
I actually intended to put this on raxmix vol. 10, but ran out of room. DJ Hero was a rhythm game made by the same company that made Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and tried to imitate DJing in the same way those tried to imitate guitar playing or, uh, being a rock band I guess. Some of the tracks from it went surprisingly hard. We're still riding hard on the 2010s electronica sound but the way it's mixed with Black Eyed Peas makes me laugh and also, why is it this good? Compared to the previous mashup, this one is a bit "emptier" in sound, but I still think it's fun and surprising enough that it belongs on the mix.
12. Hiirai Magnetite ft. Hatsune Miku - A Certain World's Disappearance
The vanilla ice cream track. A dreamy 11 minutes, I love how this song moves through so many genres. It's got some trance, it's got some house, it's got some reggae, it's got some industrial. This was this producer's first song and it's a good one. Also, I read their name as "Hiiragi Magnemite" for a good few weeks, oops.
Bonus Track: Yakamochi ft. Will Stetson - Sacabambapsis
Once again, a shitpost of a song. This is a musical response to this meme. Weirdly I associate this song with Salem, MA because I heard it for the first time while driving to there, and then looped it for 30 minutes like a maniac. It's SO CATCHY. Absolute earworm of a song. You're welcome for this auditory poisoning.
( Youtube Playlist )