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Embodiment of Frequency Modulation （2024-05-03）- 社团：+tek, blowitch, Yiter, konamiscc
FM synthesis, chip rock (mostly), digital fusion (some)
🇵🇱 🇪🇸 🇫🇷 🇦🇷
What keeps me coming back to +TEK's Touhou arrangement albums is its beefy, Sega Genesis-esque FM synth sound. The unique aesthetic helps too - when most of the FM synth arrangements in this scene are nostalgic technical exercises in recreating PC-98 Touhous, it's refreshing to hear people aim for literally any other kind of sound that's possible with this technology.
As mentioned in the Youtube stream description, the arrangements are hugely influenced by Yousuke Yasui's1 music. Style-wise, it leans towards rock with emphasis on hard rock/heavy metal riffs, as well as some funky bass playing, most notable on The Dark Blowhole and Retrospective Kyoto.
I like Yiter's tracks the most as they have interesting arrangement choices while the others keep things fairly straightforward. The soca rhythms on Candid Friend in particular makes it a fun tropical experience. +TEK's take on Alstroemeria Records' Bad Apple is another favorite as they incorporate parts from the original Bad Apple that isn't present on the arrangement. blowitch's The Dark Blowhole is also great but that's cuz I love the original track. Personal pick for most underrated ZUN song, in fact. And don't think I haven't noticed the cool textural works! The twinkly sounds and ZUNpet approximation on Reach for the Moon, Immortal Smoke is beautiful, and the subtle koto sound on Desire Drive should really be more prominent in the mix because it's such an awesome instrument.
With all that said, I am a bit sad that this series is over. I do wish +TEK would do some arrangements in the FM-synth-dnb style that led me to discover them in the first place, or some of that gothic digital fusion from their Melolignia collab album series. Still, this series did have a great run and it lead me to discover some cool musicians and games.
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TouWHO？？ 3 （2024-03-29）- 社团：Grazepoint
various EDM styles
🌐
So, the album description says this is the last Touhou album from this circle. I have some thoughts that's unrelated to the music inside, so they're in a collapsable.
Collapsable - click to toggle ->
The thing about exploring music on a constant basis is that over time you just know stuff. And that's what drew me to the circle at first - its contributor list was a surprising connection between different internet music spheres (They got Kommisar? They got two brony musicians??? And one of them is a huge contributor to the Pinkamena Party compilations???????). It was so surprising that I legit expected them to somehow get em essex or Toby Fox on a future album. Then DeBisco, one of the circle owners, DMed me to give thanks which is pretty awesome. (I don't get a lot of props for this work, I think more people recognize me from RYM and other music servers than from this wiki lmao).
Looking back at the exchange it was kinda funny. Since I listen to a lot of breakcore and DeBisco was on a few breakcore compilations, I thought he was an up-and-coming breakcore producer. It wasn't until a few days later when I realized he's been making music for more than a decade, and has been featured in multiple rhythm games. That's another thing about exploring music: there's always more to the world of music even when you've been doing it for a long time, and even if you limit yourself to a small scene. An obscure-looking artist that just popped up on your radar could actually be prolific and well-known in another community.
Something else I didn't know about this circle at that time is that both owners (the other one being Zovi, the Pinkamena Party contributor mentioned earlier) are founders of PARTY2012, a music collective that hosts many eclectic parties online and in real life. Reading this interview, I was amazed by just how many artists and areas of the online music sphere I recognize, from vaporwave to future bass to western J-core to YTPMV to furry hardcore and more.
I mention a lot of non-Touhou music on these lists for a bunch of reasons. For one, I want to introduce people to cool music, and looking at musical influences and talking about connections is a great way to do so while tying it to the album that's being talked about. Someone might look at the circle's page and think they're just another western circle, but they're connected to so many different areas of music that you can dig for an year and still have more to find. Plus, a lot of it is EDM - there's plenty of fun to be had here.
The standout to me is ZahranW's Vacant Discordant Girl, which combines ferocious chipbreak programming and elegant digital fusion licks into something awesome. The whole thing is like if Ecriss decided to go full-on chiptune and I could listen to that gorgeous intro over and over again. On the more hardcore side, elusive&two-faced dJ's Drag On! is slow but imposing gabber with a few rhythmic tricks thrown in. For something even more intense, there's Zovi's Onryou-kei: The Most Emotion, which explores Kokoro's character background with heavy industrial beats that sounds like gigadelic after a decade of working out at the factory. If this sounds super conceptual for a hardcore track, well, this is actually pretty tame compared to her more elaborate albums.
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FAKE KILL （2024-05-03）- 社团：UNKNOWN BEATS
hip hop, trap, drill
🇯🇵
Pre-listening notes:
As usual, I feel underequipped to talk about this circle, but from the preview they really tried to cover a lot of ground with the instrumentals, from the two house tracks at the start, the afrobeats H, to the UK drill of MAD and Unidentified. And with 22 tracks, more than the circle's previous two albums combined, you can tell this is some serious stuff.
As I expected, these guys cover a lot of ground in 22 tracks. While autotune is gonna continue being a hit-or-miss thing for me, I can still recognize that they're doing a bunch of different cool shit with it. The album's varity makes it difficult to predict what will happen next, and I have no idea how the circle decided on the track order. The drill songs, for example, are spread throughout the album. On the other hand, you have Unidentified, Know That, Milli Rock and Chase The Starry Sky all grouped at the end, seemingly linked by their cloud rap instrumentals featuring feathery-light and peaceful music that wouldn't be out of place in a fantasy RPG. But I can also argue that MAD and Night Awake also had that sound and wasn't put in the group.
I've mentioned a few standout tracks in the pre-listening part, but it doesn't cover the entire album - it misses Siva Slumber, which is full of phonk cowbells, and Dream Story (too poppy-repetitive for me to like it but a standout regardless), which had a distinct sugary chiptune pop sound (maybe influenced by Anamanaguchi? That's the most popular artist in that niche). Life is more laidback and r&b-ish, which makes me wonder if they'll ever try making straight up r&b as it has always had a close relationship with hip hop.
Unless something outstanding happens, I don't think anything will top this as the best Touhou hip hop release of 2024. Granted, there's barely anyone in this scene, so maybe it's time for more rappers and beatmakers to join the battle.
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III ~ Lunar Pareidolia （2024-05-05）- 社团：Holmgang Ov Gensokyo
progressive metal
🌐
more like HoG III: we doing funeral doom and blackened vaporwave now
Gonna be real here, every time I listen to this I just put Tee-Vee's xXx~D4rkAngelOfSilence~xXx on repeat. Its blackened vaporwave aspects makes the song a fascinating stylistic standout. The arranger cites Fire-Toolz as an influence, whose industrial, black metal-influenced sound made her one of the hard-to-categorize mavericks of vapormusic. Beyond that, it's also hella satisfying to listen to. I love the song's tempo shifts, which give it a sense of ever-changing momentum that I like a lot in metal. The One Winged Angel parody -> solo -> riffs -> "soothsayer, soothsayer" chorus sequence at the end sounds disjointed when I put it down in words, but somehow it just all works.
The other stylistic standout on the comp is Kuroboshi's (black metal-influenced) funeral doom Pathways, the circle's first attempt at the genre. While listening to the album as a whole, I found it undercooked and a mood whiplash coming from the heart-pumping Azure Divinity. I was more positive about it listening to it by itself, but I still think that the song could do with more craft in its atmosphere. I say this with the caveat that I haven't heard a lot of funeral doom, but what stood out from the few I've heard is the combination of ways that artists and bands create atmospheres - through guitar tones, synths, vocal styles, production, and even use of noise and ambience - and Kuroboshi doesn't make use of that toolbox other than guitar reverb. Still, another major aspect of funeral doom is having smooth transitions between sections, and here they pulled it off nicely. I like the one part near the end where the oppressive atmosphere lightens up into an acoustic section and conjures up the image of a storm breaking away.2
I said before that Pathways is a mood whiplash in the context of the album, and I feel like that's something this project will have to deal with as more arrangers join. Touhou metal arrangements are almost always energetic, but one of Holmgang's goals is to push the boundaries of Touhou metal, and that includes projects like Kuroboshi and GENSOKYOxDEFECATOR (who's in the server, just haven't made a track for the project yet) which explores metal at slow tempos and expansive song lengths. How do you fit these type of songs in without destroying the album's pacing? I don't have an answer, and maybe it's not even a problem that needs be solved. But it does feel exciting because it shows the project is pushing boundaries just like its inspiration Barrage Am Ring did.
The rest of the album is fine, I don't have much to say about them but here are some loose thoughts anyways. Azure Divinity's technicality, symphonics and use of dissonance makes for an epic but oppressive battle theme against the Watatsuki sisters. There's a bit at the end I love where the lead guitar detunes slightly, and it feels like our protagonists have been dealt a critical blow and have become disoriented in space. Destin Écarlate: Septette is vocalist UX's first published arrangement and it's an intense piece full of symphonics that's also backed with interesting arrangement choices.
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Trials of Technomancy （2024-02-03）- 社团：ProfPrac
ZUNstyle
🇮🇳
As the Bandcamp description says, the music leans into the futuristic, synthy sounds of later Touhou OSTs, as well as the sparser and atmospheric sound of Trojan Green Asteroid. The last three tracks are basically trance-influenced shmup music like the Hellsinker soundtrack, but with enough ZUNisms to still feel like a Touhou track.
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GENSOKYO WILL NEVER DIE！ （2024-12-20）- 社团：hell raven
electronic, mostly in the area of breakcore and drum and bass
[no location, artist prefers not to show it]
Looking at hell raven's discography and personal website, they seem to be part of the milleu of furry musicians influenced by Lapfox Trax/Halley Labs/em essex to run their own label with a collective of aliases, each with a distinct persona and specialty genres3. This album doesn't feature any aliases other than hell raven themselves, but it still has some variety. Before you get to the breaks, you have hakurei macchiato, which is a simple and cozy bit of MIDI bossa nova.
The dnb and breakcore parts are a mixed bag - most songs rely on undistorted amen loops without extensive choppage, and to me these types of tracks live or die on its non-break elements. For standouts, high altitude has fun choppy rave pianos and glittery chiptune synths that make the track interesting to listen to. jaded hell 665 is nice artcore dnb that sounds like an early Ecriss track. Tracks like in 120 seconds, DENSETSU NO MAKAI and Not A Single Drop show that hell raven is no stranger to distorted drums or gabber kicks (the last one even throws in tasty Jersey club grooves). My favorite track on the album, metamorphose, is an oppressive-sounding ambient arrangement of Eternity Larva's themes with stuttering quiet drums and ringing bells. It's an interesting textural experiment with percussions and I think the artist could benefit a lot by bringing the same focus on texture to their dnb/breakcore tracks.
The title track takes the lyrics to the Memories of Phantasm opening theme and puts it on a different arrangement base that you can't really call it a re-arrangement of 色は匂へど 散りぬるを. The track commentary mentions that MoP is a divisive fanwork, and while I'm certainly on the negative side of the divide, I do like that hell raven turned it into something that's distinctly theirs.
Moving away from the music, I like the custom track arts and love that the artist included the full size art in the download. Bandcamp doesn't explain this well, but when you download an album where tracks have custom track arts, the download itself doesn't include the full version of these art. At most you'll get a cropped and resized version embedded in the music file4. So from an archival standpoint, this is a really nice gesture from the artist!
Anyways go check out hell raven's other releases too! Their paige alias makes fun mashcore and speedcore tunes and the luke alias make conceptual releases with both hardcore EDM and atmospheric electronic music.
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Alicetronica 2 （2024-07-15）- 社团：Lolicecomplex
EDM
🇯🇵
Mixed bag of EDM, but coldream can do a mean glitch hop tune (mechanicaldolls), and Toorun12's digital overload, dozen-references-a-second medley approach to arrangement sure gave my brain a workout trying to figure out the originals.
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We All Escape From the Moon （2024-10-20）- 社团：magic red kids
dream pop, shoegaze
🇯🇵
It's good. The vocal writing is too J-pop-rocky for me to love but I like the arrangements.
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FAST TRAVEL （2024-12-30）- 社团：dat file records
hardcore EDM grabbag, has a few speedcore and UK hardcore bits
🇯🇵
Pre-listening notes:
really just here for the two hyperflip-inspired tracks - Sometimes it Slash and 471.5 - but the crossfade has some wild stuff beyond that. If you're curious about what hyperflip is I talk about it a bit on my currently sandboxed page about the crossover between Touhou music and netlabels under the Lost Frog Productions entry.
This is painful to say but the album is bafflingly disapointing. The two hyperflip-inspired tracks dropped the maximal vocal sampling element of that genre, and in Sometimes it Slash's case, the extreme, heavily-clipped distortion. It's still solid J-core eclecticism, but it lacks the extra layer of chaos that sample flipping brings5.
As for 471.5, it's distorted but it's the standard speedcore type of distortion, and for something that tries to do hyperflip-influenced speedcore, it doesn't play around with EDM or hip hop elements that's standard in hyperflip. Like yeah there's prominent trance synths, but that's standard for Touhou EDM and it's not distorted in any way. Plus, it's not even all that chaotic! The track before, Z2A, had two entire splittercore/extratone bits while 471.5 only gets super fast at the end. Z2A is still hardcore with trance synths (but marked as "J-doomcore" on the crossfade, wtf?), but it manages to be more chaotic than the track claiming to be influenced by a chaotic genre!
Okay, sure, this isn't meant to be a hyperflip compilation, the release page calls it a Touhou Hi-SPEED EDM album, but even then it falls on that front - circle leader 餅屋's Don't stop, run! is a modern dancefloor dnb tune, and Needle Knight is a trance tune. Neither of them are in any way fast. Even As always, which the crossfade says is uptempo hardcore, doesn't even crack 180 BPM. I do like how As always loops happy hardcore pianos a bunch so it contrasts the more distorted hardcore parts, however.
DJKurara's steroid-chugging combo of phonk house with distorted kicks and extratone is a fun twist on an oversaturated genre, as expected from a long time producer, and the sheer manic chaos and clipping production of So, who is your favorite Touhou character? channels the appeal of hyperflip better than the two claiming to be influenced by it.
I started writing this meaning to put it in the recommended section, but I like Sometimes it Slash' and Z2A, and Don't stop, run! is satisfying to listen to despite not fitting the album theme. Add the last two tracks and my opinion is more positive than negative.
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御伽宵祭 （2024-05-03）- 社团：幻妖雛
folk black metal, power metal (tr. 1), raw black metal/avant-garde metal (tr. 2)
🇯🇵
Once again a bizarre experience from this circle. 纒 lulls you into a sense of security with a melodic, power metal-ish sound. If you're familiar with 5150's symphonic black metal songs, it's is like that but with more amateur production values associated with underground black metal. Then the title track hits with a jarring contrast of raw black metal and 市姫's manic vocals, which matches SILENT DIFFERENCE's しるへい in terms of unhingedness. Add the chaotic taiko and appearance of 鈴音兎's harsh vocals and what remaining bits of triumphant energy from 纒 is replaced with dread, like a youkai just revealed its true form to you. 山査子 lightens up on the noise but still maintains its own hostility and weirdness. Like, what is up with that discordant but melodic guitar solo at 2:17? Even just reading the lyrics, I'm wowed by the sheer amount of wordplay in it.
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Slaughter in GENSOKYO （2024-10-20）- 社团：Dark Inferno
pop trap (tr.1), metalcore (tr.2), trancecore/pumpcore (tr.3), alt rock/screamo (tr.4)
🇯🇵
Pre-listening notes:
The interesting thing about this circle is that it has ties to two unique J-screamo projects with underground popularity, That Same Street and Moreru. That Same Street, a vocaloid project by the circle leader Dex, mixes screamo with soft vocaloid vocals and electronic productions. Their use of trap beats and EDM sounds (even going so far as to put a trance track in one of their EPs) makes them look too commercial for the screamo crowd, but the fact that Dex does what people would call "real screamo" the music's lack of of modern metalcore/post-hardcore influences makes them too... inaccessible (?) for the Vocaloud crowd6. Moreru, which has Dex as a drummer and vocalist and 岩本雪斗 as a noisemaker and vocalist, can really be called avant-garde screamo - not only is it raw and noisy in ways comparable to grindcore or bedroom black metal, it also has trap beats and other electronic elements. The thing about moreru, though, is that they run on contrasts. As unpalatable as they sound, they throw in poppy vocal melodies here and there. While those parts aren't super catchy, they end up more memorable because it contrasts so much with the noise around them.
It's worth noting, though, that both bands mentioned aren't just something that's only popular within the Rate Your Music user microcosm but unheard of in their home country. Moreru actually got to play a concert with Boredoms and Violent Magic Orchestra which are more popular in the Japanese experimental rock sphere; That Same Street released an EP on Siren for Charlotte, a label run by two Japanese music critics. If there's one Touhou album this year that's gonna be more popular out-fandom than in, it's gonna be this. Listening to the preview, though, it seems to be a grabbag of genres which might end up not as exciting. The last track is more in line with what I was expecting and the first track might give Unknown Beats a run for their money.
Yeah the grabbag-ness of the EP made it not as impressive as it could have been. Magica and Raining Blood stand out for the reasons I've said above, the former putting a cutesy hyperpop spin on trap that Unknown Beats hasn't done, and the latter being just a solid That Same Street song. The way that Raining Blood starts out as a midtempo alt rock song and gradually builds into ferocious screamo is beautiful. The title track I'm more mixed on - the riffs are mostly one-note 00s metalcore cliches, basically the stuff Pizuya's Cell used to make before they switched to alt metal and started being actually good. It also has autotune, but unlike circles in the scene who use autotune because they want to make cheesy mainstream metalcore or electronicore, Dark Inferno isn't aiming for that, so the autotune doesn't bother me as much. It's closer to Vocaloid singing, even.
One issue I find with a lot of Touhou circles is that they try to be eclectic over being interesting, and this is a perfect example. If the EP was four arrangements in the style of That Same Street or Moreru, it'd probably be one of the standouts of this year. Instead the two genuinely novel arrangements are countered by two generic and overdone tracks that should have been left in the 00s.
(recommended)
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