applecinnabun

So this one's finally done. It was chaos but I eventually managed. I have a lot of thoughts about it -- hopefully mostly-coherent ones.

The idea for this is that it's a bootleg based on a SICK HACK New Year's Eve concert (or thereabouts -- based on the venue Shinjuku FORT is based on, they don't tend to have live events on NYE; a Christmas Eve concert with Kessoku Band opening is mentioned in the comics).

SICK HACK are known for varying up their live arrangements significantly from their album releases; everything you hear in this song is basically accurate to the edited 'live' performance from the anime (as compared to the studio recording included in one of the Japanese blu-ray releases). I used this as an excuse to expand the song into basically twice as long as it would normally be. Trying to create a jam session in a tracker is basically a losing battle, but I was inspired by a number of older psychedelic and prog music; the bulk of it is basically identical to Oye Como Va¹².

Eliza Shimizu, the guitarist, isn't the primary composer but is known for bringing in influences from a lot of unusual genres. She's into denpa anime music and jazz explicitly; I've extrapolated this to mean she's really into weirder, freer jazz and musical comedy. To my mind this means that she's really into Frank Zappa and Adrian Belew³, and probably also into stuff like Steely Dan, They Might Be Giants, and maybe a little Manfred Mann Chapter Three. (OK, fine, that last one is mostly from me, but I've managed to construct an entire backstory in my mind where she, at a pretty young age, borrowed Umjammer Lammy from a friend, it made a massive impact on her and made her want to play the guitar, and then found the pink album in her parents' music collection, found something about the graphic design of the cover art compelling and decided to listen to it and it basically rewrote her brain. After that she discovers the Momoiro Clover Z and KISS collaboration and that does even more wild things to her brain and played a major role in her eventually getting massively weeb-ified. A lot of the older stuff she listened to probably came from her parents, who, being English, might have seen Mann Chapter Three or Belew-era King Crimson live pretty easily. and probably knew a few bootleggers themselves.)

I felt obligated to develop this backstory for Eliza in order to get a better sense of what her solos would sound like. There's a quote at the start of the instrumental section of Albert Ayler's Ghosts as a cheeky little joke on the nature of the song. I imagine that Eliza quotes other pieces during that section; probably on the aforementioned Christmas concert she might have quoted Ornette Coleman's Lonely Woman. Maybe at another time she quoted Mort Schuman's Machines.

Similarly, Kikuri is clearly pretty skilled at fairly impromptu accompaniment, as based on the performance of Ano Band in the anime. To that end I've tried to imply that the jam session near the middle of the song is actually much more open-ended than the pattern suggests; Eliza outlines a few chord arpeggios and then Kikuri is responsible for finding a suitable vamp over them. That's sort of the idea here -- same with the phrase that Eliza plays before starting on the triplet pattern meant to indicate the end of the jam and transition into the drum break, as you'll hear Kikuri playing it back during that section.

SICK HACK have also derived their name from a Buddhist concept. I considered this evidence that at least some Buddhist theming ought to convey in the work. Along with the idea of the "New Year's Concert" I decided to adapt the idea of ringing 108 bells to symbolize the purging of the 108 earthly temptations. It's also based on the way in which Manfred Mann's Earth Band ended the drum solo in an instrumental piece in their 1978 concerts, of which I've only found a single bootleg.⁴. I've envisioned the bells as appearing to even the band to be, for a moment, an ethereal presence, though I envision the sequence actually being controlled by Shima (the SICK HACK drummer) using a small controller/sequencer hidden behind the bass drum.⁵ Funnily enough, while the linked bootleg only refers to the song as "drum solo", savvy fans of the band will recognize the tune as the instrumental section of a tune that had been a live staple for a while, called, I shit you not, Buddha. I debated making reference to the piece as it felt too on-the-nose, but this song developed in such a way that the references to the piece felt integral to the nature of the work.

Channel management was fun. I used a single channel for the bass, three for guitar (either for reverb when playing solo/melody/effect lines or to fill out chords) and a final FM channel for cymbals, and used Furnace Tracker's 'dual PCM' option to have three total drum channels.

I've tried to mostly make it possible to do what Eliza would be doing on here on a real guitar. If you've got the tuning of the bottom three strings to something like G#, D#, and G#, she'd be able to play the power chords with her index finger, and could tap out the trills with her other hand. Something like what you see in this video covering a section of a Russian Circles song. Katsuya Shimizu can be seen doing something similar in Butsumetsu Trishna⁶.

Guitar tone in the solo especially is a bit more inspired by the kinda jangly tone that Zappa used in the later 80s especially, like in performances of The Torture Never Stops.

Drums are relatively easy to arrange under the presumption that Shima has two hands and two feet. My idea then is that most of the cymbal sounds are a single hat mostly played as pedal open-and-close to keep her hands free for more technical work on the snare and toms, though when she's not playing the toms is able to sometimes hit the open hat for a little more expression. There's also a pair of crash cymbals, one of which I've represented with a crash. One of the struggles was trying to maintain energy in her drum patterns, especially during the drum break section, without it dwarfing the intensity of the double-time pattern in the final chorus.

I went with a particularly heavy-attack bass sound, to try to replicate the sound that would match the plectrum Kikuri uses in the story, basically a really heavy pick. Since the one I started with sounds kinda awful taken down an octave, I used one with lower base harmonics to represent the lower-octave playing. Overall since I could do just about everything I wanted to do with a single channel there isn't a lot else to say about how the bass was done.

While a few of the licks are chosen because they're inspired by 88kasyo junrei, they're actually old ones from a single ancient MIDI file that was part of the same Phantasy Star fan music project I've been writing about relatively recently; designed as a boss encounter for Dark Force, it played up weird 70s jazz-fusion influences to a degree that it feels a little corny in retrospect. Editing it down to its best part gives us 3-4 different sections that became part of this song. One of the benefits of coming up with a narrative excuse for a shared Zappa influence, then going back to my own most Zappa-influenced music, I suppose. You can download the MIDI file if you're really interested, though I think it's mainly of interest to see how some of the ideas develop in a slightly different musical context -- all the good stuff's here already.⁷

I maintain what I said before; this is fundamentally a Castlevania song. Traces of Castlevania 3's Beginning (esp the Naoto Shibata remix) over a whole lot of Castlevania 2's Monster Dance. If I'd been quicker in my VGM Vault posting I could explain why these two choices are probably the ones that make the song feel like it was plucked from my brain without my permission, but suffice it to say that those are sources for two the oldest Genesis-style covers I'd done, and of the early stuff probably the two I'd say I was most proud of, aside from at least one other song that deserves its own post.

The closing lick owes a little bit to MMEB's Buddha again (the kinda funky technical riff at the end of the 78 concert; you can hear a different performance of it in better quality from the pinkpop bootleg recorded the year before), probably more of Sonic Adventure 2 than I'd like to admit⁸, and probably would sound more like the studio version but for the fact that's what I was reminded of hearing the intro to ohenro3.

VGM file (which, due to the way dual-PCM streams are handled in furnace tracker, is actually larger than the mp3!!):

1. Remember when I said I was in a | G#m7 | C#6add9 | mood? That was about this. The 6add9 is more in line with what Zappa would do to arrange certain chord progressions, like in some parts of Montana. Using an "open" chord as the second one in the shuttle was also a justification to get a little bluesier in my licks.

2. Oye Como Va came up in discussion earlier today because it was playing in the restaurant I was eating brunch at with my family. Apparently my parents had a pretty early date to see Santana; they also mentioned that . I was not thinking of the song while I was writing this -- I wanted something that felt like a Zappaesque take on Yuurakuchou-sen. At times the fate of my creative decisions feels less like the result of the bader-meinhof phenomenon and more the direct mocking of a vengeful god, who hates letting me think I've created an original work.

3. If you go on Wikipedia and look up 88kasyo junrei you'll notice that, among others, Margaret Hiroi cites King Crimson and Katsuya Shimizu cites Steve Vai as influences. It is delightful that I can come up with an excuse for why someone as screwball as Eliza would be in a band like SICK HACK; she's basically into the exact same source material as the real-life inspiration is.

4. Two thoughts. (And, yes, it's those guys again.) First, I swear I managed to stumble on a video bootleg from 1978 of this song where the bell is actually accompanied with a back-projected image of Big Ben, which is entirely in keeping with the way that the band chose visual accompaniment to their performances in the wake of their success with Blinded by the Light. I, however, cannot now for the life of me figure out where I found it, and have the vague suspicion I may have hallucinated it. Second, I asked about trying to add 'prog rock drum solo' to increase the number of earthly temptations to 109, but was informed that Buddhism doesn't work that way and also I must leave the temple immediately and never come back.

5. And, yes, a reference to those guys yet again, with the way they react to the piped-in choral backing in a piece that would be released on an album with the title Glorified Magnified.

6. BTR fans will recognize this as the song that got parodied in one of the chapter intro splash panels. It is long enough that I can't remember, but I feel like I must have heard this song back when it was close to new and I was a bit more focused on Polysics, since it's probably the song of theirs most in line with their style.

7. I imagine one of the main reasons that I was never told to listen to 88kasyo junrei before Bocchi the Rock's anime happened is that enough of my music was built from similar influences that people thought I was already listening to them, which was probably reinforced during the time when I was going by display names like 最高★キラ on social media, which is certain akin to the kinds of puns they like to make in their song titles.

8. I know, I know. It keeps happening. It's a fucking curse, I swear. I'll spare you all the Hedgehog Masque Replica tag this time.