The future is a thing of the present... once again!
The Future of the Taiko Drum Taiko de Time Travel 2765/Camellia
The Future of the 太鼓ドラム / 太鼓 de タイムトラベル平 2765/ かめりあ
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| AC Nijiiro |
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★5 (301) |
★7 (388) |
★8 (655) |
★10 (976) |
★10 (1400) |
79-348
???Right after the rock-hard conclusion to 2021 in Taiko no 2000, here comes another fine specimen of 'charting ultra-violence' as one of the year's first heralds, coming from a faraway epoque by the hands of a contemporary music game artist. I feel this might be one of the few times when an artist introduction might already feel redundant for some of our readers due to his wide reach, but everyone deserves an equal-grounds shot in our Saturday trivia-cataloguing quest!
Hailing from Asahigawa, Hokkaido, on September 1992, Masaya Oya (大箭将也; Twitter; YouTube; official website) has made a name for himself over the years in the EDM landscape as a Vocaloid artist at first and later on branching onto different genres with an assorted slew of fast-paced pieces to boot, mostly signed under the Camellia (かめりあ) or Cametek aliases. Not only holder of his own label, KmaelCamellia (かめるかめりあ), he's also part of a number of labels and doujin circles over the year, including the Vocaloid-rooted EXIT TUNES label, Masayoshi Minoshima's circles (Alstroemeria Records, most notably) and even a recurrent cameo artist for multi-composer circles such as HARDCORE TANO*C and Diverse System, as well as a recurring musical partnership with vocalist Nanahira (ななひら).
The lion's share of his music gaming ascension is made out of the many bemani-rooted contests he joined, most prominently the SOUND VOLTEX BOOTH FLOOR competition that crowned him victor more than once, side to side with commissioned works in-between (among both camps, Blastix Riotz and Dyscontrolled Galaxy). Camellia in general boasted a strong hold on Konami's rhythm gaming subsidiary to pop up, step by step, in nearly each of its currently-running music game series with both originals and arrangements/remixes (notable examples for beatmania IIDX, BeatStream, DDR and DANCERUSH STARDOM, jubeat and pop'n music), up to become part of the nowadays-in-disuse beatnation Records label. He garnered quite the following elsewhere in no time the same: at first in the Project Diva arcade series, he later branched with different aliases in both CHUNITHM and the Marvelous otoge freshman WACCA. Much like Silentroom whom we talked about a few weeks back, on PC grounds he became an osu! featured artist, but the feat is 1-upped with a branch of songs being ported to the VR sensation Beat Saber! Last but not least are Camellia's mobile gaming forays, from your 'conventional' music games (Arcaea; Cytus II) to gacha tie-ins in the likes of D4DJ GROOVY MIX.
For his Taiko debut, Camellia has been tasked for one of the final Taiko de Time Travel songs, one that leaps forward in time for its theme rather than backwards. Imagined as a piece coming from the musical trends of the year 2765, here's a song that's also on the case to prove how Taiko drumming is still going to be a big player, given the callback to Taiko times with the 765 goroawase being prominent in the song as the commonpace BPM... alongside the actual Taiko times of the past! Once that the patent-just-freshly-renewed trippy barlines(TM) signal the coming of a 'time skip', brief music clips representing in order parts 2 to 10 of the former eras and styles explored within the Taiko de Time Travel song series are briefly touched upon, before returning to Camellia's super future shenanigans. This is also one of the few songs where the visual barlines shenanigans continue for a bit, even when the song's playable portion is already over!
In order to match the tone of "offering music from a very distant future to be made understandable to today's audience", Taiko Team notecharter Marimo Institute (まりも研究所) embraced the very same philosophy for her own mode set for The Future of the Taiko Drum, full of hypenated cluster signatures to match under unfathomably-high speeds on tone... More to the poing where nearly 1.5 times the amount of notes are to be accounted for the song's Ura Oni setting! In both however, the worst offenders are the mono-color clusters at the end, which deceptively ramp up the BPM in-between the stream to over 300 and can be quite tricky to be hit at all... never mind with 100% Gold accuracy!
