transientem

Version F.0

2009-11-12T04:37:08+00:00

Before we get started, I would like to extend my most insincere congratulations to Random Curiosity for their acquisition of a marvelous device, known as the "time machine." Because truly, how else is it possible that an assessment could be written 6 days before the street date?

For obvious reasons, the channels of procurement for these wonderful contraptions is a tightly guarded secret, but I must confess that I too would be interested in a time machine of my own, and if anyone were to be so magnanimous as to refer me to the proper avenues, I would be most deeply in your debt, and not the kind quickly repaid by foreseeing where the stock market is headed.

All right the gig is up. I'll stop with the flowery language. Also the naivety.

It may surprise you, or not, to know that I watched Macross F, because I don't particularly care for the franchise as a whole. Gundam's scthick is/was to appeal to ~~pseudo~~ hard science fiction, and Macross' pretty much continues to be to sweep people off their feet through sheer force of camp, and I don't respond well to either. But the director's cut pilot episode held out the prospect of Macross Zero-esque flight (and fight) scenes; in other words, instant buy-in.

There were shades of Macross Zero, in a very literal sense, but there was also obvious scene recycling, not to mention story recycling, and character design recycling, but you could chalk that up to a very successful hat tipping effort. As an attempt to actually advance the Macross universe, we get at best a modest evolution, a fresh look wrapped around a dated core.

Conjecture: People upgrade their entertainment more often than they do their operating systems.

It doesn't take a fan to note that so much hat tipping and saluting the past can be dangerous. Given that Macross F is a culmination of sorts, it wouldn't have taken much for Macross F to become Macross the Highlight Reel or worse, Macross the Remix. Anyone with a vested interest should hope that Macross' consolidation is not also its high-water mark.

The Budokan concert in many ways is a wrapper on a wrapper: big stage production, ceremony, theatrics, feel-good songs. I guess that's where the musical aspect comes from, but we should not kid ourselves, because musicals don't last 9 hours and have 5+ reprises.

That's almost what we get over the course of 3 hours, whether it is through medley(s) or encore. More recycling does not impress, but if you want to be swept off your feet Macross style, it would be in your best interest to overlook this.

That aside, what about the performance itself?

Well, they do say that first impressions are everything, although I cannot fault anyone for going cross-eyed trying to hold a pose for more than a minute.

That aside, I think May'N and Megumi Nakajima could be commended high praise for endurance alone. Megumi in particular, for singing about 20 minutes non-stop, without enough time in between songs for water, and with only a bit of an airy voice at the end of it all.

Generally speaking the songs play out like what you might expect out of a studio album, except better, because this is one take and there's nowhere to hide, unless you want to be cynical and invoke the miracle that is post-processing.

But I think not, because there is the odd flat pitch in what turns out to be a remarkably on-target affair, and a lot of those are in obvious places like sustained pitches. Also, you would think those hypothetical audio engineers would correct for May'N.

Oh yes, I just went there. You could say a few things about the timbre of May'N's singing voice:

Powerful
Raw
Passionate
Stringy (in a quavering violin way)
Weepy, when applicable (Diamond Crevasse)

You could also say a few other things:

Strident
Scratchy
Strained
Reedy (as in, a junior clarinet/oboe student)
Tight
Pinched
An overdriven amplifier

Okay, so maybe the last point is a bit obtuse, but power is where the problem most clearly manifests itself. The songs that she is known for have been written for a power singer, but I am unconvinced that she's cut out to be one.

Anyone can project power by virtue of shouting; it takes something more to not smear sound all over the place, and for all the talk about the musical aspects of the series, there is something definitely un-musical about May'N's unfocused performance.

Since Diamond Crevasse occupies such a prominent position in the series and the concert, it's worth mentioning that this is a song that may have been written for May'N, but could have easily been written for someone else.

Diamond Crevasse is to Macross F what Blue was to Cowboy Bebop, and practically demands someone of Mai Yamane's stature to render a respectable performance. Mai Yamane, May'N is not.

On a side note, I would pay money to see Mai Yamane take a run at Diamond Crevasse.

Megumi Nakajima sings in a rounded fashion, by way of comparison. The use of "oh" as opposed to "ah" means that she does have a tendency to drift flat on long notes (see above on sustained pitching), but it's not as if she misses outright. To compensate she has a solid lower register and put on a well-tempered performance. You know, over the course watching this concert I came to a realization that probably everyone else has come to already, but I'll say it anyway:

Megumi Nakajima could be the next Maaya Sakamoto.

Heck, she could be Maaya Sakamoto. Over the headphones, she is a dead ringer. She sings the same easy ~~mode~~ listening tunes of the YK-MS era, and she even gives Maaya a run for her money with her work on Triangler. On any given day, it might even be better.

Could you imagine how weird it would be if Megumi Nakajima wound up in a similar collaboration?

Or rather, how awesome?

The only song where she struggled was the encore of, coincidentally, Diamond Crevasse. It's probably not fair to take anything away from those shaky several minutes, though, in part because she was holding back tears. And by way of Utada Hikaru's Concert Rule of 2004 (in Budokan), you must not judge anyone if they're choked up.

What you should be taking away instead, and elsewhere, are two: she is on the quiet side relative to the band, and the unflattering display of her paper thin upper register.

Or not?

Perhaps a more accurate assessment is that both singers backed off when heading higher, but Megumi can literally be there one moment, and gone the next. And then she'd be back on the very next note, and it seems that she has this pitch threshold, above which she is only willing to tread as if on eggshells.

For obvious instances of the Megumi Fading phenomenon, refer to:

The end of the finale medley
Aimo OC, single pitch fading
Do You Remember Love?. Especially DYRL

The DYRL of the 21^st century is a lot less grandiose and reverby than its predecessor, rendering the contemporary version incompatible with the past, but still a very appropriate update. Megumi was on track to delivering a satisfactory, if dynamically timid, performance, and then she fades into the coda and never recovers because it's all upper range territory.

One of the things that made the original DRYL work was that haunting motif in the coda, and by haunting I don't mean a whisper verging on death. The coda requires softness and focus, and to do so means more intensity than had when singing at a comfortable mezzo dynamic.

The coda demands nothing less than piercing, laser-like intensity that you simply don't get when the intensity of your voice gives out.

And the short interjecting lines by May'N were totally incompatible, because there is too much mismatch between timbres. What the coda could have used instead was a bit of harmony, something also found at points in the original coda.

Speaking of which, there wasn't enough harmonizing overall, rather than letting the two singers go about their own lines that only occasionally linked up. But I suspect that I'm in the minority. I mean, harmony is something only a snob could love, right?

Or a Yuki Kajiura fan. But it's not like those two are equivalent or anything.

P.S.

How about those trumpets? Unfortunately, they needed to be at least twice as loud during Fold Out!. They should be ripping the air and carrying the day, but instead they got washed out, and talking about trumpets getting washed out is unusual, at least for me.

Megumi sings Ao no Ether better than Maaya Sakamoto, although it's live versus studio.

The DVD's audio is a rather pedestrian LPCM stereo. Well, it wouldn't be so ho-hum if the BD version came with the same, which it does, but why would you want that when it also offers 5.1 channel audio? Why not put surround sound on the DVD version, even at the cost of an extra disc?

It's not how your pits are made

2009-10-13T07:33:15+00:00

Although there has yet to be an announcement on Eminence's site, it seems that their next project [via] is going to be the orchestration of the Tenmon-Shinkai connection, a selection of pieces from 5 cm/s, Voices of a Distant Star, The Place Promised in Our Early Days, and She and Her Cat. This seems to be a pretty tenuous mix, and I struggle to imagine what half the orchestra would be doing if Eminence tries to stay aligned with Tenmon's sparse — and at times ultra-sparse — composition.

I think a chamber interpretation of Tenmon-Shinkai would have more success, but I have a bias. Generally speaking, I prefer Eminence's chamber projects to the orchestra stuff. Or maybe that's because Yuki Kajiura's music lends itself to smaller numbers of musicians.

At any rate, I'm willing to be surprised for 2800 yen which, for a CD album pressed in Japan, is actually a bit of a bargain. I coughed up more for THYME's first 9uality.

However, if Promise had a cheaper option in the form of a "regular" CD, I'd take that in a hearbeat over the HiQualityCD (HQCD). Why the press release dares mention this piece of junk is beyond me. Maybe because they know that people will think that anything with the word "quality" must necessarily imply a superior product.

It's a topic that should have been beaten to death even before HQCD's conception, but in reality will never be. I don't think that OST collectors will have encountered this attempt on their bank accounts, but I think it worth mentioning anyway.

You see, HQCD is suspiciously like the Super High Material CD (SHM-CD, pronounced sham) in construction, but probably modified enough to avoid having to pay royalties to JVC and Universal. Functionally, both are identical to the Blu-spec CD (BS-CD, pronounced *censored*).

As a matter of fact, they all play on old, boring, Red Book players. Could it be that these things are nothing more than pricier versions of boring, old, Red Book CD's?

Yes? Yes. Nod your head, please.

If you care to know why, my attempt at an explanation follows. Otherwise, remember that you should only pay more for shiny metal circles if a) there is no choice, or b) it is a remastered version.

Physical Layer

The two most important system parameters to a listener are unchanged. You still get 16 bits per sample, with a sampling frequency of 44.1 kHz. The only way a digital master could sound better on another disc format is if there was a higher sample resolution, a higher equivalent-sample resolution (for sigma-delta modulator formats), optionally coupled with a higher sampling frequency. HQCD and friends have neither, because they do not deviate from Red Book in this regard.

A better master may appear on one of these things but whoever decides to release two masters at the same time should be fired on the spot, for being an asshat. On the other hand, a better master may appear at a later date, so if you want to be less cynical, you could make the case that HQCD, SHM-CD, and BS-CD are to Red Book what Red Book was to vinyl.

Then again, a better master may one day appear on a boring old Red Book CD.

The only difference any of the three can claim is in the fabrication of the disc. Looking at the English pitch for HQCD, they claim that the transparent material used by HQCD (and SHM-CD) results in, essentially, a more consistent pressing of pits, such that they are all of equal length, or more equal than what is possible with regular polycarbonate.

Paired with a more reflective backplane of silver alloy, this is supposed to give better sound quality. How? By reducing data clock jitter, as evidenced by their bar graph. Jitter is down, great, but jitter affects sample phase error, which translates into read bit error rate. The act of reading is not the act of composing, performing, or mastering.

It's like claiming that because a ball-point pen doesn't leak ink all over the place, that you will write a better story. Uh, no. Your text could be readable from a meter away and still suck. It could be typed and presented on a screen in something that is not Comic Sans, and still suck.

Moving on to the second figure, we have a voltage graph of … something. Presumably the voltage across the photo-diode of a CD player for multiple pit to non-pit (land) transitions. Great, a 410 mV peak-to-peak swing! Better signal to noise ratio! The eye pattern opens up meaning less opportunity for indecision! Less indecision means less sampling error!

Except, that is not an eye pattern.

The image at the top of this entry is a real eye pattern appropriate for two-level modulation, where there is only one indecision level, as opposed to two. The HQCD "eye pattern" is really just the adjacent plot zoomed in, but what do I know?

As for the final figure, recall that the master is not the disc. Anyone who tells you otherwise is just pretending to be an audio or signal processing engineer on the internet.

Okay, but isn't a lower read error rate objectively better? Of course. I didn't say it was bad, just that it was irrelevant, and definitely not worth paying more money for. These days, if you are seeing a ton of read errors, it's because:

Your CD player is dying on you
Your ride is really bumpy and your player lacks anti-skip.

How often has either occurred to you in the past year? Be honest.

If you happen to be plagued by either of the above, simply buy a cheap CD player with anti-skip protection. High error rate suddenly disappears. So what problem is being solved by HQCD again? Other than the problem of extracting more money from your wallet?

But suppose that the reader randomly gets a bit or two wrong purely through thermal or shot noise. Hey, it could happen, albeit with something like a one in trillion possibility.

Will the audio quality degrade?

No.

But the reader got a bit wrong!

It could get ten bits wrong, and nothing would happen.

Really?

Really. No one suspects the error correcting code. Maybe that's because none of these marketing things ever bother to mention it, since it largely invalidates the product they're trying to push.

But suppose that some bit errors propagate through and fool Mr. Reed and Mr. Solomon, resulting in a, as in one, wrong 16-bit sample. Will you notice?

Assuming that your digital to analog converter is absolutely brick-wall perfect in frequency response, and there is no signal loss between the speaker and your brain, and there is no noise whatsoever, and you are sharp enough to detect a sample that lasts for 22.675 microseconds, then yes! Yes, you will notice the difference.

Which is to say, no you won't because, among other things, a truly noise-free environment can only be had at absolute zero, in which case the electronics would have long frozen over and likely shattered, the universe would have frozen over, and you would be dead.

Did I mention that your heartbeat is also a source of noise, so your heart would have to stop, in which case you would be dead?

If you must insist on listening to music using a CD player in the afterlife (as opposed to, say, having Chopin play for you in person), and are so unhappy with your one in trillion, 22.675 microsecond error, how about you listen to the track again? Probability says that you can expect an error about 6 hours later; a CD is 74 minutes.

Conclusion and Future Work

We have argued that you should not pay more for something that is typed because it will not make the writing any better, only easier to read. But since you already know how to read, marginally clearer text will not impact your reading experience.

And on the off chance that a word is missing a letter, or two, or three, you can quickly figure out what the word is, because you already know how to read. Your reading prowess is such that even a missing word will not prevent you from reconstructing a sentence. You are that pro.

P.S.

There is one real hypothetical advantage, a contradictory statement if there ever was one. The supposedly better input materials may make your disc less decomposable. I say may.

But don't you just rip your CD's and encode to FLAC anyway? If I were worried about disc rot, then I'd also back up to flash storage. If I were absolutely paranoid, then I would back up to two flash drives.

Articulated flow

2009-09-14T06:42:12+00:00

You may have heard that everyone is a critic. You may have even heard that critics are all sorts of jaded, bitter, cynical, flippant, crochety and snobbish. I have a hard time reconciling the two, because I see plenty of counter-examples: the people that actually like stuff. And it just so happens that lots of said people don't do the stereotypical critic thing and write "reviews."

In fact, most of them don't write about those things at all.

But for those that do, the bar's not set very high, is it. On average, we get a list of N Things stitched together with a bare minimum of canned connectors and boilerplate structures. At worse, an outburst that amounts to little more than a drawn-out squeal. Why?

Many want to share. Few look forward to actually explaining themselves.

Conflict is something that will never cease to colour our Ring 0 processes. A question is an avenue of attack, one that demands an answer lest we be defeated on the Plains of Logos. Constructing a piece that is simultaneously declarative and pre-emptive rebuttal is exhausting. It's why people will choose fine art without justification, but when pressed for reasons, they will choose kittens instead.

They don't call it a thesis defense for nothing.

Articulation leads to devaluation. We have always known this implicitly. The Devil is in the details, after all. Why not quit while ahead, and save yourself a trip to the ironworks? The Japanese were okay with that, at least at one point in time.

So I accept that you will say that you were speechless when, if that were the case, you shouldn't be saying anything at all. I accept that you shed MANLY tears when you really didn't. You are only trying to communicate your enthusiasm without diminishing it in the process.

What's at issue is how much of the world — life, the universe, and everything — should be simply intuited, and how much should be expressed in minute, unambiguous detail. I can see the beauty of spontaneous alignment that occurs when everyone experiences the same thing, feels the same way, and converges to more or less the same reaction.

It's a generalization of the knowing look, the unspoken exchange, a phenomenon that occurs over and over again in a smug but endearing static cyclicality.

But I find the predictability desperate, like a lost wanderer seemingly stumbling forward, but doomed to sweep out a large arc, eventually dying of thirst on the n-th lap. Were I floundering in the dark, I don't suppose that I'd mind, much less be aware of what was happening. But I do a disservice to not seek out the light switch when I know that it exists.

By now I think you know where I stand, but maybe I ought to undertake that most perilous of journeys, and endeavour to defend my post. Into the ironworks we go.

I think one of the things that makes us so unhappy, besides the similarity to the act of pleading one's case, is the implicit notion of taking apart an entity that is greater than the sum of its parts. I mean, how could we ever hope to convert an image into words, even with a budget of 1000 of them, and not lose something in the process? That's just lossy compression.

You'd be expending energy, to smash your own pedestal, in order to see how it was made. But it's perfectly fine the way it is! So why bother?

But we stand to gain much more by atomizing our world. The endless sinusoid has an articulation that is elegant in its own right, a beauty that is as interconnected as it is intrinsic. Decomposition does not only destroy, it is a necessary step towards ever increasing complexity. It's insight, that ethereal stuff that turns your ruined pedestal into a towering pagoda.

I want to perceive the world not from its floor, but from a perch atop that pagoda.

Or just maybe, the shoulder of a giant.

P.S.

To those aware enough to drop the pretense and just use HTML list elements, I salute you.

Watercolour chaser

2009-09-13T16:24:51+00:00

Aoi Hana is the first instance where I've read the source material before the anime aired. It's impossible for me to set the manga aside and not compare, in the same way that it would be silly to consider a theme and variations as several isolated works.

I'll reserve my opinions about the manga for later. It's not even halfway through the second arc, and there's enough fuel in the tank to get to a third, at least. I don't see any point in speculation, but I will offer one: I hope that it doesn't become a revolving door of incoming and outgoing characters.

Here's a brief bit of context:

The anime ends, roughly, at the intersection of Volume 3 and Volume 4
The manga is in the early stages of Volume 5
The anime has generally followed the manga closely
The manga is 5 years old

The obvious exception is the final episode. As noted elsewhere, the last episode deviates significantly from the manga (see Appendix), leaving the ending with a sense of finality, yet offering the possibility to pursue a second season without too much of a break in continuity. That could be at least 2 years away at the current rate of output.

But there is a case to be made for there being no second season, ever, and it's not because the source material is a long time coming. Many have praised the idyllic and pastoral nature of the anime, from the backgrounds to the soundtrack. The series concludes with Fumi's transformation into someone happier and more assertive. The only notable rough stretches are those scenes that establish the parallels between Fumi and Yasuko (rejection, rebounds, and pending weddings).

I don't seem to be helping my case at all, but bear with me. The "Sugimoto Arc" (Vols 1-3) is also idyllic and pastoral, but less so. Yet it has all those things mentioned above, and more. Certainly the anime has added some scenes, but it's not about the additions; it's the subtractions.

As a result of a couple dodges, the series and manga have diverged in tone, and things could not continue tracking the source without a contrast change that could be alienating in its suddenness.

Some will argue that this is in fact immaterial, because things get interesting regardless. I don't think being interesting was ever the point. Or rather, being interesting in that sense will shatter the idyllic setting that everyone has come to love.

If I were in the business of recommending anime titles to people, I would start by maintaining three lists: unconditional recommend, unconditional dismiss, and uncomfortable.

Uncomfortable is a union of guilty pleasures and border cases that I might recommend, but never with a straight face. Or without immediately trying to justify myself. Either way, these require careful sizing up of the subject, specifically whether or not they will judge me after reading up a bit on what those series are all about, and even then it's hard to muster any conviction.

Into that third list would go Kannazuki no Miko and Strawberry Panic, but not Aoi Hana. Yet I would be leery about recommending Aoi Hana had you not seen at least Strawberry Panic. I think I need a fourth hypothetical list, called prerequisites.

Maybe it's because the smallness of the community concentrates opinion, but I perceive a bias towards the "ordinary" that is rarely not strident. Seeing people fawn over something like Rica 'tte Kanji!? or more recently, Aoi Hana, is akin to making a daily toast, in praise of toast.

It's perfectly acceptable to curse your alarm clock, every single darn day. I could get behind that.

Maybe those seemingly ordinary depictions of life are realistic, maybe they're not; I don't know. I do know that they're inoffensive, and that people have a tendency to point at inoffensiveness and scream "realism" at the top of their lungs.

It's an easy trap to fall into — the two are not mutually exclusive. Plus, "realistic" packs a bit more punch than "plain potato," which is what the boosters really are after. There are those out there who have been burned out (or just burnt) by the existence of shoujo-ai/yuri as a bullet point on many a series' marketing document. They're sick of histrionics, or the snide danglings of subtext. Who can blame them for jumping all over something that is none of that?

In the early days of Aoi Hana's anime run, I got the sense that this was a watershed moment, a show that could be proudly held up as some counter-example to all the exploitation that came before, and will inevitably come after. I suspect, however, that they can do this only amongst each other, or to those kind non-judgemental friends who will politely entertain their soapboxing.

Appendix: Notable dodges

Family tension between Kou's and Kyouko's, although this thread remains undeveloped
Yasuko and Kyouko reconcile in a sense, in person (not by text message)
Akira and Kou's shopping trip exposes not just Fumi's insecurities, but her jealous streak
Fumi's internalized epiphany in the finale is given voice in the manga, a jealous outburst prompted by Akira recounting a childhood crush

This Is (Not) The One

2009-09-12T07:32:54+00:00

$11.99. Three dollars below the price of retail. It's also the price of being disappointed, if you don't count the tax, and one month + street date it took to get it with free shipping. This is admittedly a rather small sunk cost, all things considered. I wonder if Utada Hikaru feels the same way.

A little less than 5 years after the release of Exodus, she has basically written it off. In another 5 years or so, will she dismiss This Is the One as well? In trying to be accessible, one cannot escape a confrontation with the disposable realities of trying to appeal to as many people as possible.

Disposable won, yet it will probably never make gold in the target market, let alone platinum.

With this second English album, her contract ought to be fulfilled, a notion that I entertain with relief. Island Def Jam might be relieved as well since, at this rate, TITO might not even outsell Exodus. Proof perhaps that trying to put the artist in front of their music is not going to work, even if it's Utada Hikaru we're talking about.

But it's not like they haven't tried this before. It all started with that press kit for Exodus, which was less of a promotion of the CD as it was a promotion of her past. First Love! Biggest CD in Japanese history! Almost 9 million copies! Past performance guarantees future returns!

It's not a cause, but just one aspect of a theme that describes her time in America. How do her interviews start? With few exceptions, the interviewer kicks things off by gushing about how many CD's she's sold in Japan. What do they ask her next? What it's like writing in English.

And for a follow up? New York vs Tokyo.

Oh, and if the interviewer doesn't ask this, the fans always ask if she'll ever tour in the US. With the advent of the internet, people ought to know by now that she gives the exact same canned answer, every single time. Getting asked the same questions by ignorant people is awkward as foobar, and it shows since the number of non-awkward interviews she's done can be counted on three fingers.

By the way, isn't being asked something whose answer is obvious, by someone who purports to be a fan, a local maximum of disrespect? Also, not likely, unless she performs at clubs or small indie venues. Utada Hikaru + large concert venue + Exodus + TITO = 0/0.

People need to think of better questions. Or just think.

Speaking of fans, who showed up to all those meet and greets? Fans exclusively of Exodus and TITO? Give me a break. These people came to see the woman who wrote and sang Addicted to You, First Love, and Hikari. You know it, I know it.

If IDJ feels that they must have Utada Hikaru speak for her music, when she has always tended to let it speak for itself, what does that say? There's no conviction in the merits of her work. That's a point that anyone going into TITO must realize.

Nowhere is this more evident than what she says whenever she tries to talk TITO. Inevitably she brings up Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence - FYI and how it has a Star Trek reference. It is a statement delivered with barely a straight face, and why should we expect otherwise?

Is anyone going to run out and buy the album because one of the tracks has one token geek reference? I put token geek references into my entries all the time. What on earth is nerdcore if not rap with a whole lot more than one geek reference?

Things might have been better if she didn't have to spend her time in farcical attempts to justify herself. Then again, it may not have mattered, because the same lack of conviction is zip-loc'ed into the album itself, presumably with the express purpose of keeping the meh-ness.

Racy, but unconvincing. Emulation, but with no personal stamp. When the best (overall?) track flirts with getting stuck in the mud, you know that someone's not pushing hard enough.

Maybe they don't want to.

P.S.

Best songs, in order:

This One (Crying Like A Child)
Me Muero
Apple and Cinnamon

Appendix: Track-by-track

On And On has a loop of some guy yelling and it goes, well, on and on. Backing instrumentals are predominantly: club synth, bass drum, yelling guy loop. That's it.

Lead vocals are airy, and vocal backing is almost non-existent. Texture is consequently flat. It's understood that this is supposed to hypnotically minimal. Great trance-lite work is rare; this is not one of them.

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence - FYI, apart from the movie sampling, is notable for its random second verse and bridge lyrics. This is also one of those fine examples where there are not enough syllables to fit the melody, and holding over or repeating the ends of words is resorted to.

Mr. Lawrence occupies this precarious no man's land between nonsense and "Let's make out," vulnerable to MP3 player bombardment courtesy of Captain Picard who is, apparently, flossing. In Star Trek: TNG do people even have to brush their teeth?

If you want to go all the way, then go all the way. Where's the conviction? Oh wait, there isn't any.

Apple And Cinnamon has me thinking of Heaven or Las Vegas. The two have nothing in common, but maybe I feel that the chorus could have been Cocteau Twins inspired. Equalized strings, post-processed vocal effects, etc. The chorus, with its octave voice leaps, makes the third track: it's longer than the second verse. Everything else is serviceable, if standard. Lyrics are repetitive in a Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V sense. This gets pretty awkward in the section before the recapitulation.

Oh I know, this is what Cocteau Twins might have sounded like if they went minimalistic. I don't mind the sparse texture here as it's fitting with the mourning tone.

Taking My Money Back is deceptive in its opening. For a moment, it could have plausibly gone all Cascada on us, a fate preferable to the 90's R&B that results. As a cover of those times, there is nothing wrong with it, other than the repetitive lines in the chorus (see a trend emerging?), and the fact that anybody with more vocal power could have done a better job.

This One (Crying Like A Child) is hands down the best track on this album. Most cohesive lyrics, repetition that (gasp!) actually works, the only aspect of the lyrics that is tiresome is the use of similes while invoking Freddie Mercury and Simon and Garfunkel. The insecurity of acoustic guitar and piano in the verse gives way to a plaintive electric guitar line in the chorus. For 4 minutes and 31 seconds, the writing is aligned. Shame it couldn't go for longer.

Automatic Part II is, 10% autobiographical, 10% self-promotion (for those who pirated the thing?) and 80% random. I think I'm being generous in that assessment. The composition is about as sparse as On And On, except lounder and with plenty of synth interjections, but the lyrics are left to carry the day, and 80% random is not going to cut it. There are moments of brilliance like that pun on Virgin Records, but the effort is misplaced.

This could have been the Animato of the album, a quirky, vibrant and self-referential track. Instead, we get something distinctly industrial, and all the negative aspects of being mechanical.

Dirty Desire is another 90's era track. Maybe early 90's, updated modestly for the twenty-first century by adding a more prominent electronic element in the bridge and chorus. I know that in general this album is supposed to be mainstream, but I didn't read the memo that IDJ was delivering to 1998. Adds a whole new dimension doesn't it?

There is nothing modest about the lyrics, although I am generally unfazed even after a rather awkward stereotype is thrown into the mix. There is a decent outro that has no business being in this song, but I'll take what I can get.

Poppin', wherein a English accent is attempted, and flops, because the word "like" was used on two consecutive lines. If I were the type of person to fall out of my chair, I would have fallen out of my chair and and tumbled down a flight stairs. It would be about as slick.

If you can get over that hurdle, and the shrill sections, and can accept a song about women running around a club without a certain undergarment, then you have a decent spy track, specifically jazz rock. Opens with a passage of call and response, but the highlight was the vocal harmony, but unfortunately there are only two vocally fleshed out chords of it in the entire song.

[Why on earth are all these song titles officially fully capitalized?]

Come Back To Me was written for somebody that is not Utada Hikaru. Somebody who can put a little more power into the chorus, with a little snap to clean up the ends of phrases, more dynamic span in general, and whose range doesn't peter out into a squeak during the climax of the song.

Regrettably, this optimal singer would have to sing the lyrics of the second bridge and said climax without dying of embarrassment, a pretty tall order. That's in addition to the extreme repetitiveness of the chorus, but by now that's par for the course.

I would pay money to see if she can play that piano opening, shades of Grieg's Piano Concerto in A Minor (No. 1). In all this griping I almost forgot to mention that she managed to work "Photoshop" into the first verse, but that's not going to salvage a flat performance and spots of awkward writing.

Me Muero opens with bossa nova elevator music, and someone has taken a fancy to the E. Piano mode of a Yamaha Clavinova or equivalent. Good imagery, in both writing and music, evoking second-hand smoke and tall ceiling fans.

Undercurrent in acoustic guitar, but this track is a dominantly vocal affair and backgrounds are, while not sparse, pretty light. On the other hand there is ample voice layering, and the song stands out for having the richest vocals of any in the album.

The bonus tracks on the CD were two versions of Sanctuary and Simple and Clean. I don't care for any of the three since they're just Passion and Hikari with English lyrics shoehorned in. It was a slog to write those lyrics, and it's obvious. I'll stick with the originals.

A tale of two CD covers

2009-08-31T02:19:13+00:00

The implied commentary is more than sufficient.

Precipitating resonance

2009-08-30T21:47:10+00:00

Intuitively, you already know what resonance is. It's what happens when someone "strikes a chord." It's the timing of your leg action that swings you ever higher. It's the reason why people say, "Se, no!" or "One, two!" or "Heave, ho!" with the same tempo. It rips bridges apart, is a dial you adjust to get your favourite radio station when radios still had dials. It gives instruments their voice.

Resonance is all about making things tick, even if that ticking leads to structural collapse. Structural collapse is serious business — the prevention of, that is — and so we (yes, you!) are very interested in discovering resonance, before resonance discovers us and presents us with a ticking time bomb from Tacoma.

When inquiring about what makes bridges fail or whistles wail, we usually take a black box approach. We are less concerned about why there is a sweet spot, and more interested in where that spot is. We enumerate the possibilities (frequency sweep) and take notes. In this way we characterize non-chocolate cornets and clarinets, buildings, antennas and filters; even the digital ones.

Could we, perchance, characterize ourselves in a similar fashion?

It sounds a bit loony on the surface, and slightly degrading just beneath. First, it makes absolutely no sense to frequency sweep a human, except for maybe a hearing test. But frequency is just an abstraction for all the bumping, twisting, swinging and shaking that goes on in the time domain. So what if I modified the proposal to sweeping for abstractions? Aren't we affected by abstractions?

Aren't we, colloquially speaking, affected by ideas?

Fan art. *cough*

There are tons of ideas to run through, but on a typical day this place is about anime, and the abstractions there are pretty well defined. We have established spectrums for genre, setting, character, and relationships. Don't believe me? I'll see your skepticism and raise you … an Absurdly Powerful Student Council. That's right! And there's more where that came from.

The resonance response that we tend to be interested in is (logarithmic) magnitude, one that bears no indication of its penchant for productivity or destruction, so it stands to reason that resonance is the umbrella that embraces love and hate.

Taken alone this is an elegant duality — love and hate, awful and awesome — but application-specific considerations compel us to add the analogue of phase: "like" is positive, "dislike" is negative.

A complete picture would give us three pieces of information: what you like or dislike, how much you like it or dislike it, and the transition that occurs as we move between related items.

So this can be done. It may get unwieldy, but we could characterize the anime fan to some arbitrary degree of granularity. What could we do with this information? Design a performance that hits as many of the right notes as possible, maybe? Get compensated for doing so, maybe?

Why is it that when engineers do this, it's called meeting customer requirements, but when the anime studios do this, it's shameless pandering? Both give the customer what they want. It pays the bills and puts food on the table. They are functionally equivalent.

If there is a legitimate difference, it's that the customer (or their consultant) issues a request for what they want. It's a whole other matter when someone shows up at your door and tells you that they have what you want, and they're right.

And to do it through black box analysis! What are we, caps and coils? How could we possibly be understood in the span of several graphs? Or surveys and focus groups? How does a server farm in the back office of the marketing department know you better than you know yourself?

This has been the reality long before data mining was a buzzword but we are, increasingly, becoming tractable problems, neurons to numbers, solved in silicon. It's a notion that is sometimes horrifying, sometimes humbling, sometimes humiliating: someone is out there, smashing minds for fun and profit, and r00ting our wallets. Or perhaps, rooting through our wallets.

Cringely figures that entertainment is software. But with software comes malware, and won't somebody come along and patch our kernels? Nope. No one has come, no one will come, save maybe the collection agency. You can detune, tune out, be apathetic or what-ever, but a grey world is a double-plus unfun one. Might as well just uninstall.

You, me, the drooling fan, the snobby artsy, we're all fair game, can be gamed, will be gamed, all the while enjoying said gaming. So maybe we should stop complaining. After all, we're just a bunch of black boxes looking to have our buttons pushed.

Fly me to the Earth

2009-08-30T00:48:42+00:00

Freedom has a face that launched a ship. And then another, and then seven more. Funny how there are seven episodes in all. Still, there's a sense of scale, even if the quantity is two orders of magnitude less than 10³. Rocket engines are kind of a big deal, igniting them moreso.

There's also a bit of grandeur in general about the whole thing, a characteristic indispensable to any good adventure. And road trip. Not an episode goes by without a hefty amount of wheels spinning. Rest assured that it's productive rotation; people are going places, in 3D CG style with a Planetes palette. The downside is the exaggerated but lackadaisical character movements.

Is the story the point? I'm not so sure. More like the story, like most adventure threads, is a vehicle, hopefully to new experiences. Or old experiences run through some novel filter. Normally the Earth shot follows the Moon shot, so at least that's new.

What's maybe not so new is running the world through the post-apocalypse transform. Las Vegas hasn't been destroyed nearly as many times as, say, Tokyo, but seeing things wrecked is old regardless. Paradoxically, wrecking stuff never gets old.

Imagining how things look after we've wrecked it all will always fascinate the people doing the wrecking, so pretty much everyone. It's kind of comforting to know that in the future, Vegas is as chaotic and messed up as it always was, just with less people.

If on a road trip, might as well take pictures, especially one that is as picturesque as the fourth episode. It's an optimistic post-apocalyptic world not unlike YKK but with a pace of progress that is anti-slice of life.

Going back to this sense of scale thing, it works on at least two levels. The moon bumpkins have none, at least at first. Pick up a radio station? Must be close by! If by close you mean 2577 miles. I suppose they could be forgiven since thinking big was something totally alien to them up till recently. It's interesting to link the expansion of their horizons with the size of the rockets launched.

In that regard the message rocket is a bit of an anomaly. Saving it in the face of a weather anomaly was also a bit of an … never mind. As a symbol of selfishness, though, it works, reinforced by Takeru's own admission of his small thoughts, that somehow landed him on a pretty big planet.

On and off, I try to wrap my head around the fact that an OVA about oppression and space flight was funded by purchases of Cup Noodles. ~~I'm a Nong Shim person myself~~ It's so orthogonal, like Microsoft deciding to host the Feynman lectures for free. Wait, they did what?

At any rate, (the) Nissin has landed, I walked away with a bunch of pretty pictures. Let's call it even.

Lest I forget, Freedom has a ripping OP. We knew that Utada Hikaru is geeky, but fancy her on something very much of a classical lineage (Akira). I seem to be forgetting something. I swear she's also done something similar, maybe around the same time.

Beach eighths

2009-08-28T21:37:40+00:00

When the Ai suru Hito / 愛する人 single came out, I gave it a brief hearing but something approximating fear kept me from additional listening. Excepting possibly their indie releases, this is THYME's first stab at a ballad, and after covering a ton of non-ballad territory with every song on first 9uality, it almost feels like someone is checking off an obligatory list item.

No repertoire is complete without a ballad or two, right?

On top of that, I have what you might call an arbitrary ballad bias, where I will borderline ignore a well composed and executed ballad unless it's associated with some external entity, like reputation (artist) or show (OP/ED). There are just too many good ballads — nay, there is simply too much good music in general — such that a piece needs to be something quite extraordinary in itself to garner anything more than a sideways glance.

In this one respect, I finally pulled my head out of the sand and realized that Ai suru Hito was the credits track for the movie adaption of Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto: Natsu no Sora. The PV is the prettiest of the four, although what movie footage is included pales in comparison to the anime, except the dolphin scene.

As far as ballads go, it is — get this — well composed and executed. But I think it worth pointing out the 6/8 meter, which is pretty infrequent as far as songs go, let alone ballads; so much so that I have a tendency to point out 3/4 family meters in songs on the off chance that I happen to run into them.

The triplet figures that appear first in the piano and then elsewhere are a key factor in maintaining a relaxed, walking pace; power not through measured movement, but in casual honesty. I was tempted to say "lounge" but obviously there is too much motion, even though there is a decidedly blue chord in the secound half of the chorus.

But what's this? For a fleeting moment there is nothing but thyme, a quiet time-keeping snare, and a piano with undecorated accompaniment: lounge tranquility.

The band comes back in, and off we go, but sometimes you treasure those moments of rest above all the rich textures and busy lines.

keep on my way is (probably) the band's darkest work to date, like a defiant and distorted version of my kitten. I like my linearity, so hard dissonance and tone fuzz is uncharted territory for me, but the short erhu interjection in the first verse (replaced with electric guitar in the second), and the levity of the piano part provide a bit of balance.

THYME — 晴天

2009-08-21T21:15:19+00:00

Words : thyme
Music : 清水哲平
Arrange : 清水哲平　/　星野孝文

飽きるほど　雨が降り続く季節
そろそろ着る服がない!
そんな　ありふれた小さい苛立ちを
君にぶつけた

それなのに　また今日も抱きしめてくれる　ねぇ

眩しいよ　君の笑顔が
嬉しいよ　傍にいることが

誰もいない　深い暗い夢の中で
君を探して　泣いてた
目覚めたら　寝顔はそこにあって
涙こぼれた

ふと見た窓の外は　久々の晴天!　ほら

眩しいよ　君の笑顔が
嬉しいよ　また会えることが

君が笑う度に記念日　だからふたり　いつも隣りで
テレビ見たり　歌をうたったり
「当たり前」　を　「特別」　にしよう!　It’s　OK?

眩しいよ　君の笑顔が
嬉しいよ　傍にいること　また会えることが

Fine weather

Lyrics: thyme
Composition: Shimizu Teppei
Arrangement: Shimizu Teppei / Hoshino Takafumi

I'm sick of the rainy season.
Soon I won't have any clothes to wear!
Such ordinary and trivial irritations
Are directed at you.

And yet, I want to hug you today as well. / Hey

You have a dazzling smile
That I'm happy to be near.

Alone in a deep, dark dream,
I was crying and looking for you.
When I open my eyes, on my sleeping face are always
Fresh tears.

Suddenly outside the window, for the first time in a while, fine weather! / Look

You have a dazzling smile
That I'm happy I could meet again.

Every day you laugh is a day to treasure;
That's why the two of us should always be together.
Watching TV, singing songs,
"Ordinary" with "special." It it okay?

You have a dazzling smile
That I'm happy to be near, once again.

Just sing it, sing no matter okay!
So why not sing it again? Yeah!
Repeat x2
Just sing it, sing no matter okay!

Remarks

Effort expended: 10
Effort misplaced: 10
Family name - Given name ordering
Corrections welcome and greatly appreciated

The work flow could only be described as The Founder and Flounder show, a lethal concoction consisting of Denshi Jisho, WWWJDIC, and a helpful forum tip.

I've strugged with this relatively short piece of UTF-8 for longer than I care to admit. I lacked any sort of context, but once I began to entertain the idea that the song is about the sun, all the disparate parts pieced themselves together.