raxmix vol 12
Feb. 1st, 2025 02:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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likealarkThe theme for this mixtape is "These songs fuck"
This one took a long time to coalesce; sometimes that happens, I guess. This one wanders all over, and has repeat cameos of several artists from older raxmixes. I think most of the songs are very groovy though and I hope you have a good time bobbing your head as you listen. Playing-in-the-car test runs generally had me rocking out.
This jubeat cover is from Gensou Reflect. It's originally from a rhythm game that went under, Reflec Beat, but it was brought over to Jubeat so that it could live on in a new form. The cat as well as the neons reminded me of you.
If you are not Rax but also like music, you're welcome to give this a listen too?
> DOWNLOAD <
( Youtube Playlist ) ( Deezer Playlist )
01. Le Tigre - Deceptacon
Cute girl punk again. This one is a lot more playful than the girl punk I usually come across for raxmixes. Because this song is apparently old and famous?, there's a nonzero chance you know this track already but, shrug, it's new to me so it goes on the mix. I love how much the singer commits to this song.
02. FalKKonE - I Am Going To Claw (Out Your Eyes And Then Drown You To Death)
Another song you know, but probably not this exact version! This song is from Hades 2, and it plays the second time you fight the Sirens (and then randomly for matches after that). I found this symphonic metal cover and thought it packed much more of a punch than the original, which I always felt was missing something. The particular kind of sassy spiteful pettiness kind of reminded me of you, and I mean that as a compliment? FalKKonE is a composer-singer duo from Poland. I love this diss track, I love this lesbian hatemance love anthem, I love rivals, and Hades 2 is also a pretty sick game.
03. Kikuo ft. Qixuan - The Good Child and the Fox Spirit
Kikuo's latest album is his best yet, which is always a delight to be able to say about artists. I think of you a lot when I hear this, because the song is about a fox spirit, but it's also sung from the fox spirit's POV - "kon" is the Japanese onomatopoeia for a fox's bark, and the way Kikuo tunes the vocaloid to make the "kon" sound a little like an unintentional, almost coughed-out sound is so interesting to me. Here's the video if you want to read the lyrics. I'm fascinated by the story of the song, but also what's implied but never outright stated—how the fox spirit goes from cajoling to begging, and how it's not clear between the fox spirit and the child who has more power in the relationship. Kikuo's vocaloid tuning always feels alive. He uses Qixuan a lot in this album, and its voicebank is meant for Mandarin. To get such natural-sounding Japanese out of it is also a feat in and of itself.
04. Meiyo - Nothing's Working Out
This song is a pile of hooks and I love it. The music video has lyrics and is also quite relatable. For some reason it sounds pretty different from most songs I listen to, which adds to its appeal.
05. The Reign of Kindo - Just Wait
I know I've told you about this band before, years and years ago. I've been wanting to put one of their songs on a raxmix for a while now, but held off because of that, but nah, it's been 12 mixes and I still want to put them on a mix so in they go. I love their heavily jazz-inflected musicality. All the different instruments weave and out deftly. As I've gotten older, my relationship with this song has changed too; when I was younger I really felt like this song made a lot of sense, but now that I'm older it makes me feel that warm glow of nostalgia you feel when you look at young people. Iirc this is a group that came together up in Buffalo. This is off their first album back from 2007, but they're still making music! Heck yeah.
06. Aleksandr Misko - Rain & Thunderstorm
I haven't put acoustic guitar on a mix in a hot minute. This is a fingerstyle guitarist and I just love how intricate his music is and how he's able to pull so many different kinds of sounds out of a single instrument. This song moves through a lot of different "scenes" and it's fun to visualize the storm as it must be during each part.
07. Arc System Works - The Man
"Ciry, this is from a video game" okay listen "This is from Guilty Gear you put Guilty Gear on a mixtape" okay listen "You don't even PLAY Guilty Gear" OKAY LISTEN!!! So no, I don't play guilty gear, but I've always been lowkey fond of it because it's so Anime. Since I started running fighting game tournaments at Katsucon that love has only grown. The Guilty Gear soundtrack is famous for being good, but I've never been too fond of it? I mean, yes, it's good, but (fandom secret) I don't actually like the particular piercing sound of Japanese electric guitar. Do you know what I mean?
Turns out that all that was needed to make me like Japanese electric guitar was to put harpsichords in. First off, harpsichords are cool. Secondly, this is the theme song to a character named Asuka R. Kreutz who I fell EXTREMELY HARD FOR last year, to the point of studying youtube play tutorials and thinking about picking a copy of Guilty Gear Strive up. I didn't do it, but the love of the character remains. His playstyle in a fighting game entirely consists of playing cards? You're doing random draws from a deck for spells, and if you pull bad ones you're screwed, and if you pull good ones you're a god. You can shuffle and redraw but only sometimes, and you're also doing all the shuffling, deck reorganizing, and redrawing while also playing a full fighting game, you can see why I did not actually pick this character up, but also, you can see why this character makes me think of you. Asuka is supposed to be the big boss of the series; his face wasn't revealed for a long time, and when they did finally reveal him, he inexplicably had cat ears. The cat ears vanished in the new game, also without any explanation. Guilty Gear's big bad is a catgirl. It also turns out that while the series always posed him as the big bad trying to end the world, the latest game reveals that he has actually been trying, extremely badly, to stop the world from ending this entire time but it just never occurred to him to like, actually explain what he was doing to anyone or ask for help. Relatable! I love this character so much, and it helps that he has such a badass theme.
08. TORIENA - Girls Do Not Dress for Boys
I put TORIENA on the Trismix too but I'm also putting her here because these two songs sound pretty different. TORIENA came up through the chiptune scene and then eventually branched out into all kinds of EDM styles, hard rock, and also enka because why not honestly. I was between a couple of different tracks to put on the mix, but decided on this one because of the title. When you can catch the lyric and yell GIRLS DO NOT DRESS FOR BOYS along with the song, it feels like a million bucks. (I think it only happens once.) You can tell that she's come up from rhythm games from the sound, especially in the middle, but you can also tell from her delivery and her visual packaging that she's inspired by Reol, which I find very cool.
09. Kiichi ft. Megurine Luka - Virgo
Out of all the songs on this mix, I think this one fucks the hardest. When those juicy crunchy chords came through my speakers for the first time I was like WHAT is THAT??? I love so many things about this song. The artist is a complete mystery, we know nothing about him; he vanished in 2013, and then dropped a song in 2024 without warning or explanation, and vanished again. He explicitly said that his goal is to make "weird" or "ugly" music and I find that so addictive in this song. There are so many things in this song that should be gross, like those crunchy chords, or this high pitched whining noise that drones for like the first half of the song. Parts of this song are so strange that they're almost painful. But somehow, that ugliness becomes this addictive spice that keeps me looping the song over and over.
10. Dua Lipa - Training Season (Live from Royal Albert Hall)
Dua Lipa's famous, and this was a big single from this album that got a lot of radio play. The original album Radical Optimism is a wonderful high pop album, but oh my gosh this entire Royal Albert Hall live album is transcendent. I love how the weight of a full orchestra changes the song's texture.
11. Chromeo - BTS
On a mixtape of songs that fuck, here's a song about not fucking. I'm tickled by the clear mentions to the subway line that I grew up on in the first stanza. And frankly, yeah, I feel this song so much. I'm tired.
12. Jungle - Back on 74
The Motown sound is still one of my love languages. The official music video is really cool and shot in one continuous take, so definitely check it out if you have time; here's a behind the scenes take showing how the music video was made. Jungle reminds me a bit of The Avalanches. I love how the background instrumentation makes you want to shimmy, and how the song sounds very hushed/restrained but is still bursting with joy.
Bonus Track: Ryo Nagamatsu ft. ω-3 - Frothy Waters
This is a song from Splatoon 3, and it's also known as a great way to torture anyone with a music theory background! Every measure is one beat longer. I've seen this song described as "anxiety given auditory form." In-universe, the song is performed by a weird trio of salmon characters called omega-3: a timpanist, a cellist, and a DJ. In reality, this was written for a series of unique/weird extra levels that give you fiendishly difficult challenges to complete within a 100 second time limit, which seems to track.
> DOWNLOAD <
( Youtube Playlist ) ( Deezer Playlist )
This one took a long time to coalesce; sometimes that happens, I guess. This one wanders all over, and has repeat cameos of several artists from older raxmixes. I think most of the songs are very groovy though and I hope you have a good time bobbing your head as you listen. Playing-in-the-car test runs generally had me rocking out.
This jubeat cover is from Gensou Reflect. It's originally from a rhythm game that went under, Reflec Beat, but it was brought over to Jubeat so that it could live on in a new form. The cat as well as the neons reminded me of you.
If you are not Rax but also like music, you're welcome to give this a listen too?
Bonus Track: Ryo Nagamatsu ft. ω-3 - Frothy Waters
|
( Youtube Playlist ) ( Deezer Playlist )
01. Le Tigre - Deceptacon
Cute girl punk again. This one is a lot more playful than the girl punk I usually come across for raxmixes. Because this song is apparently old and famous?, there's a nonzero chance you know this track already but, shrug, it's new to me so it goes on the mix. I love how much the singer commits to this song.
02. FalKKonE - I Am Going To Claw (Out Your Eyes And Then Drown You To Death)
Another song you know, but probably not this exact version! This song is from Hades 2, and it plays the second time you fight the Sirens (and then randomly for matches after that). I found this symphonic metal cover and thought it packed much more of a punch than the original, which I always felt was missing something. The particular kind of sassy spiteful pettiness kind of reminded me of you, and I mean that as a compliment? FalKKonE is a composer-singer duo from Poland. I love this diss track, I love this lesbian hatemance love anthem, I love rivals, and Hades 2 is also a pretty sick game.
03. Kikuo ft. Qixuan - The Good Child and the Fox Spirit
Kikuo's latest album is his best yet, which is always a delight to be able to say about artists. I think of you a lot when I hear this, because the song is about a fox spirit, but it's also sung from the fox spirit's POV - "kon" is the Japanese onomatopoeia for a fox's bark, and the way Kikuo tunes the vocaloid to make the "kon" sound a little like an unintentional, almost coughed-out sound is so interesting to me. Here's the video if you want to read the lyrics. I'm fascinated by the story of the song, but also what's implied but never outright stated—how the fox spirit goes from cajoling to begging, and how it's not clear between the fox spirit and the child who has more power in the relationship. Kikuo's vocaloid tuning always feels alive. He uses Qixuan a lot in this album, and its voicebank is meant for Mandarin. To get such natural-sounding Japanese out of it is also a feat in and of itself.
04. Meiyo - Nothing's Working Out
This song is a pile of hooks and I love it. The music video has lyrics and is also quite relatable. For some reason it sounds pretty different from most songs I listen to, which adds to its appeal.
05. The Reign of Kindo - Just Wait
I know I've told you about this band before, years and years ago. I've been wanting to put one of their songs on a raxmix for a while now, but held off because of that, but nah, it's been 12 mixes and I still want to put them on a mix so in they go. I love their heavily jazz-inflected musicality. All the different instruments weave and out deftly. As I've gotten older, my relationship with this song has changed too; when I was younger I really felt like this song made a lot of sense, but now that I'm older it makes me feel that warm glow of nostalgia you feel when you look at young people. Iirc this is a group that came together up in Buffalo. This is off their first album back from 2007, but they're still making music! Heck yeah.
06. Aleksandr Misko - Rain & Thunderstorm
I haven't put acoustic guitar on a mix in a hot minute. This is a fingerstyle guitarist and I just love how intricate his music is and how he's able to pull so many different kinds of sounds out of a single instrument. This song moves through a lot of different "scenes" and it's fun to visualize the storm as it must be during each part.
07. Arc System Works - The Man
"Ciry, this is from a video game" okay listen "This is from Guilty Gear you put Guilty Gear on a mixtape" okay listen "You don't even PLAY Guilty Gear" OKAY LISTEN!!! So no, I don't play guilty gear, but I've always been lowkey fond of it because it's so Anime. Since I started running fighting game tournaments at Katsucon that love has only grown. The Guilty Gear soundtrack is famous for being good, but I've never been too fond of it? I mean, yes, it's good, but (fandom secret) I don't actually like the particular piercing sound of Japanese electric guitar. Do you know what I mean?
Turns out that all that was needed to make me like Japanese electric guitar was to put harpsichords in. First off, harpsichords are cool. Secondly, this is the theme song to a character named Asuka R. Kreutz who I fell EXTREMELY HARD FOR last year, to the point of studying youtube play tutorials and thinking about picking a copy of Guilty Gear Strive up. I didn't do it, but the love of the character remains. His playstyle in a fighting game entirely consists of playing cards? You're doing random draws from a deck for spells, and if you pull bad ones you're screwed, and if you pull good ones you're a god. You can shuffle and redraw but only sometimes, and you're also doing all the shuffling, deck reorganizing, and redrawing while also playing a full fighting game, you can see why I did not actually pick this character up, but also, you can see why this character makes me think of you. Asuka is supposed to be the big boss of the series; his face wasn't revealed for a long time, and when they did finally reveal him, he inexplicably had cat ears. The cat ears vanished in the new game, also without any explanation. Guilty Gear's big bad is a catgirl. It also turns out that while the series always posed him as the big bad trying to end the world, the latest game reveals that he has actually been trying, extremely badly, to stop the world from ending this entire time but it just never occurred to him to like, actually explain what he was doing to anyone or ask for help. Relatable! I love this character so much, and it helps that he has such a badass theme.
08. TORIENA - Girls Do Not Dress for Boys
I put TORIENA on the Trismix too but I'm also putting her here because these two songs sound pretty different. TORIENA came up through the chiptune scene and then eventually branched out into all kinds of EDM styles, hard rock, and also enka because why not honestly. I was between a couple of different tracks to put on the mix, but decided on this one because of the title. When you can catch the lyric and yell GIRLS DO NOT DRESS FOR BOYS along with the song, it feels like a million bucks. (I think it only happens once.) You can tell that she's come up from rhythm games from the sound, especially in the middle, but you can also tell from her delivery and her visual packaging that she's inspired by Reol, which I find very cool.
09. Kiichi ft. Megurine Luka - Virgo
Out of all the songs on this mix, I think this one fucks the hardest. When those juicy crunchy chords came through my speakers for the first time I was like WHAT is THAT??? I love so many things about this song. The artist is a complete mystery, we know nothing about him; he vanished in 2013, and then dropped a song in 2024 without warning or explanation, and vanished again. He explicitly said that his goal is to make "weird" or "ugly" music and I find that so addictive in this song. There are so many things in this song that should be gross, like those crunchy chords, or this high pitched whining noise that drones for like the first half of the song. Parts of this song are so strange that they're almost painful. But somehow, that ugliness becomes this addictive spice that keeps me looping the song over and over.
10. Dua Lipa - Training Season (Live from Royal Albert Hall)
Dua Lipa's famous, and this was a big single from this album that got a lot of radio play. The original album Radical Optimism is a wonderful high pop album, but oh my gosh this entire Royal Albert Hall live album is transcendent. I love how the weight of a full orchestra changes the song's texture.
11. Chromeo - BTS
On a mixtape of songs that fuck, here's a song about not fucking. I'm tickled by the clear mentions to the subway line that I grew up on in the first stanza. And frankly, yeah, I feel this song so much. I'm tired.
12. Jungle - Back on 74
The Motown sound is still one of my love languages. The official music video is really cool and shot in one continuous take, so definitely check it out if you have time; here's a behind the scenes take showing how the music video was made. Jungle reminds me a bit of The Avalanches. I love how the background instrumentation makes you want to shimmy, and how the song sounds very hushed/restrained but is still bursting with joy.
Bonus Track: Ryo Nagamatsu ft. ω-3 - Frothy Waters
This is a song from Splatoon 3, and it's also known as a great way to torture anyone with a music theory background! Every measure is one beat longer. I've seen this song described as "anxiety given auditory form." In-universe, the song is performed by a weird trio of salmon characters called omega-3: a timpanist, a cellist, and a DJ. In reality, this was written for a series of unique/weird extra levels that give you fiendishly difficult challenges to complete within a 100 second time limit, which seems to track.
( Youtube Playlist ) ( Deezer Playlist )
