The final month of the year is here once more. Just like in recent years, it doesn't matter what one wants to celebrate along its lines -Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanza, the ever-elusive December birthdays and anything inbetween- as we're tiding the wait around here with a returning side-actuvity of ours: the Drumvent Calendar!
Once per day, this page will be updated with one 'dream pick' among songs suggested by the kind residents in our Discord server, songs that are deemed to be Taiko-worthy by each of their respective requesters that will have some of its secrets unfolded, in the style of our Song of the Week/Song Series Showcase articles. There's gonna be a new daily pick up until December 24th, but who knows if there's room for something more at the end...
Once per day, this page will be updated with one 'dream pick' among songs suggested by the kind residents in our Discord server, songs that are deemed to be Taiko-worthy by each of their respective requesters that will have some of its secrets unfolded, in the style of our Song of the Week/Song Series Showcase articles. There's gonna be a new daily pick up until December 24th, but who knows if there's room for something more at the end...
For the time being, sit back with refreshments of your choice at hand and let us delve once again inside many a Donder's Taiko-aimed lucid dreams...
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Tabiji Yoiyoi Yume Hanabi (旅路宵酔ゐ夢花火) SHOW BY ROCK!The first 'wish pick' for this year comes from server user minic, drawing us closer to the world of music idol games once more. This is one of the songs to come from a videogame-spawn mobile music game franchise, so a few words about it are a must, considering how said anime's plot hinges on it in quite the particular (and arguably isekai-ish) way!
The franchise-starter from Sanrio's first older-demographic project, Show by Rock!! (subtitled 'Gonna be a Music Millionaire!') made its debut in July 2013 as an Apple-exclusive music game/idol raising sim by developer/publisher Geechs, later down the road ported on Android marketplaces and lasting up until 2019, with its final year being managed by dev/publisher Edia instead. For the lack of better terms (and if gameplay footage of this song in action isn't enough), this was a Tapsonic-like experience in portrait mode with notes flowing vertically in 3 lanes and markers to hit when they reach the bottom in different ways, succeeded in 2020 by the Square-Enix-published Show by Rock!! Fes A Live for the years 2020-2022, playing on landscape screen orientation and 5 lanes just like many of the other contemporary idol games of the ground (see it in action here!). The original 2013-2019 mobile game also went on for the distinction of having survival boss battles for each of the featured bands, which were triggered once its respective members' Melodisian Stones are turned dark and had to be purified with one of their image songs in retailation, a trend that was also inherited by the later-releasing first Anime series of it!
As addressed in advance, the first foray of Tabiji Yoiyoi Yume Hanabi (lit. 'Enchanting Dream Fireworks of a Night Journey') was for the first eponymous anime series of the franchise, one of three to be realized by Studio Bones and spanning across 12 episodes between April and June 2015. Episode 4 not only starts the track at hand but it also draws its name from it, as it's mainly about Show by Rock's 3-members enka band performing it: Tsurezurenaru Ayatsuri Mugenan (徒然なる操り霧幻庵, lit. "Involuntarily become puppet Kirimaboroshian"), starring the tan Shiba Inu A (阿), the grey mouse Un (吽) and a red daruma by the name of Daru Dayu (ダル太夫). The first three songs of this fictional unit from the SbR universe's MIDI City were all performed by the nicknamed Saila from Unicorn Table, with everything else (this here track included!) employing the actual band members' respective voice actresses instead: Saori Hayami (早見沙織) for A, Eriko Matsui (松井恵理子) for Un and Megumi Han (潘 めぐみ) for Daru Dayu. Worth noting is how A and Un's VAs are also starring in one of Bandai Namco's idol-oriented projects- both for the Idolm@ster series' Cinderella Girls branch!
Vairocana pop'n musicWell, it didn't take too long to have an extra tie-breaker randomic decision this year! Two were, in fact, the picks proposed by user shoxk this year, with what you're seeing here being the end result of a coin-toss decision. Nerding out for neighbouring music game series is approacing fast!
This was one of the secret songs for the 12th mainline arcade in Konami's pop'n music series: the Japanesque-fashioned pop'n music 12 Iroha. Unlocking it in its hayday required arcade players to gather an assembly of ninja characters from earlier entries while exactly ending up with a 318 Max Combo value on another 12 Iroha unlockable song (a Ganbare Goemon medley, if that's not Japanesque enough!), a goroawase for 'Cyber'. Doing so would make the fabled "Cyber Gagaku" song appear as an available tune for the credit's final play. A timegated unlock would eventually make this method obsolete (in case there still were arcades still running a specific cabinet from 20 years ago!), but in case you fetch the PS2 version of this arcade entry you'll have to unlock it all the way down, although with a few changes in the method!
Behind this song was a duo of composers self-signing under the Gojoushiki Kai (五条式改) alias, taking a page from memorable landscapes in Japanese historical mythos. According to the two's impressions left on the arcade entry's website (link, archived), 12 Iroha already hosted a number of brand-new originals where Japanese-styled music with Japanese instruments were the leading daimyos of the version, so they were tasked to break this "status quo" of sorts by making a 'Cyber' Gagaku. In other words, this was the request to give out the same elegant and dignified beats of traditional music from the Rising Sun's Land... but without any of its instruments (or as little as possible)! The musical bounty was met with a song named after one of the biggest Buddha-related figures in Buddhism, so fierce at the time to ultimately become a major representative in later games for 12 Iroha's hardest songs, not only as part of the iconic 'HELL 12' challenge course, but even the later-pushed 'HELL 1~14' one, grouping together the worst evils of early-era pop'n music up until 14 FEVER! Further down the trails of time, Vairocana was also ported in the long-dead REFLEC BEAT series, also under bemani grounds.
Thanks to Vairocana appearing in later entries' artist-centric groupings in games (pop'n music 20's folder for music belonging to the unit TЁЯRA) and its credits cameo in longtime series contributor Jun Wakita's solo album Ongaku (音楽), it could be sumrised how Gojoushiki Kai was a duo alias for Jun Wakita and TЁЯRA member Naoki Maeda (前田尚紀), in his final original instrumental song for the series.
L9 paraokaHonestly, the sentiment that server user Dragonrattiger has shared alongside their request is also one I share wholeheartedly: the Taiko franchise could make use of some more Variety tunes... and to be more specific, some from the Be-Music Source competitive scenario! On that front, here's one of the more popular winners from its earlier contests from the 2000s.
One of the winners from 2001's B-1 CLimaX System-C BMS contest, L9 is the most-known piece from progressive chiptune artist paraoka (Twxttxr; SoundCloud), not only in its own composing/fancharting merits but also from the prolific inside-joke scenario in the scene of the time, with plenty of parody arrangements that range from altering the original's playing feel of sorts or just a straight-up smushed pie of random colors, with documented failures when trying to mod it inside the actual beatmania IIDX games for its rather peculiar crafting! The composer was also seen for commercial music games' scouting of both pre-existing and original works, including the ones signed under the Kojimachi Sericulture Museum (麹町養蚕館) alias like CHUNITHM's Wunderkammer (ヴンダーカンマー) and CROSSxBEATS's Strange Daeva (ストレンジ・ディーヴァ).
In May last year, paraoka announced on SNS (link) about working themselves out to the bone, requiring an undefined period of time without handling music production-related operations, although the use of former works in commercial materials could be still negotiated in this span of time, which brought among other things their Diverse System 15th Anniversary song Astra Walkthrough to lowiro's Arcaea (link) and the same L9 in many a commercial arcade family. So far, the direct-to-arcade cut of L9 that was made playable -once for Konami/bemani in SOUND VOLTEX and twice for Sega music games (maimai and CHUNITHM) is the same for all parties, based on a shorter cut of the song's long version from a previously-released Diverse System album (Side-c).
Talkie Dance (トーキーダンス) hitorie (ヒトリエ )Acidity brings us to the first Pops-versed feature of the event, although it might as well treated as a honorary Vocaloid song, given the talents behind it...
What we have here is a mini-album-debuitng piece from 2015 by the hands of the band hitorie, originally founded in 2011 as 'hitori atelier' (ひとりアトリエ) by a trio of quite the personalities in the indie music scene: prolific Vocaloid composer/lead vocalist wowaka (of which Taiko gaming was regaled with his World's End Dancehall), bassist Ygarshy (イガラシ) formerly affiliated with the Touhou Project indie rock band Sekken'ya and drummer Yumao (ゆーまお), known for his drum collabs in the Japanese scene as well as his solo-sustained Kagerou Project. The three would be joined from 2012 by the also-Vocaloid-producing sensation Shinoda (シノダ), who would eventually become hitorie's lead singer after a regretful event in early April 2019: wowaka's death in his sleep, at age 31.
Talkie dance, indeed, would go on for being one of the pieces where the late talent poured all the effort and quirkiness at one's disposal in order to let the word be spread across Japan, both for the song per-se and hitorie as a whole. Predating the release of the mini-album containing Talkie Dance -July 2015's Monochrome Entrance (モノクロノ・エントランス)- as well as the same song's MV release on his own YT channel, wowaka started gathering buzz about this release by making all of his social media posts in black and white for a sizeable amount of time in 2015, from March to early December, on top of holding impromtu solo concerts to further hype up the scene! The impromtu June solo tour known as Talkie Dance and Red Shoes (トーキーダンスと赤い靴) eventually managed to get several of its venues as sold-out events, including the extra performance in Sendai! Eventually, the song got rereleased as part of major albums/collections after wowaka's passing, including hitorie's two live concert albums -2016's one-Me Tour “DEEP/SEEK” at STUDIO COAST and 2019's HITORIE LIVE TOUR UNKNOWN 2018 "Loveless"- 2017 "IKI"- as well as the 'Best Of' two-discs publication of 2020, simply titled 4.
Ego Rock (エゴロック) Surii feat. Kagamine Len (すりぃ feat.鏡音レン)It's a rather unique scenario for this year, but in the few days and no Classical-inspired Wish List requests for this year, we've managed to bounce across each of the available music genres in the first few days in a row! Wheel randomizer's choices aside, we owe this 5th different-genre-choosing to server user Olvhuman, pointing to one of 2018's many Vocaloid-spun sensations.
A Hall of Legend song with over 48 million views for its longer cut on YouTube, Ego Rock is one of the most notable tracks from the online debut year of the nicknamed Surii (すりぃ), user of Miku and the Kagamines' voice banks for their creations. Following (and sometimes, even predating) the original song's extended single release in 2021, many a composer online offered their remix take on this song, most notably including a self-cover from Surii and another from Ado, the artist rising to fame thanks to several One Piece tie-in works!
While being wishful-thinking-only material for Taiko grounds, one can spot this dabbing-in-jacket-art Vocaloid piece across many different rhythm gaming parties, including Konami's bemani branch (pop'n music, GITADORA and two versions for Polaris Chord), Sega's maimai and Taito's ongoing / soon-discontinued music games. Not to mention the cover versions made for mobile idol games like Bushiroad's BanG Dream! and Craft Egg's Project Sekai!
Drop Syndicate Seventhrun x nora2n / beatmania IIDXWe're back to music gaming trivia, this time around by the hands of Reichisama's request of reoccurring beatmania IIDX grounds. As embarassing as it may sound, today's entry came in at the proverbial 11th hour because what we have here is a song coming from the series's latest installment with quick impressions of it on its website... which went on maintenance up until now. Whoopsie!
One of the launch songs for the 32nd beatmania IIDX arcade game (Pinky Crush), this is a collaborative work of a couple of talents: the B.B.K.K.B.K.K.-renowned nora2r (read 'Nora-two-ar') and composer/illustrator Seventhrun (Twitter; SoundCloud), another Japanese composer who's versed on UK Hardcore and Drum'n'Bass. The project came out of a happy meeting between the two composers -to the surprise of Seventhrun, for nora2r remembering some small talk from ages ago- to reunite and to talk in greater lengths about favorite music and styles of each, all under the unexpected music game collaboration mantle! The lead that was given for the piece was to make a track harping on a faulty security system, with the baddest bass base that Seventhrun could come up with and nora2r handling the harder/retro parts and "overall seasoning" to the finished project.
To better convey the idea of a bad security system, why not spotlight the most untrustworthy animal on its accompaning video, staring down at the players as they play?! That though association from inhouse VJ Ray was what lead to the choice of a humanized snake to fill those shoes. After all, in his own words, "there's no other way"!
Sakazuki (逆月) BEMANI Sound Team "HuΣeR" feat.Fernweh / SOUND VOLTEXWe're not going that much away from Konami's pastures for another consecutive day, as today's randomly-drawn pick from diamondn1nja guides us to a SOUND VOLTEX-crafted song. It's also one of a certain renown, considering it made its debut in the final edition of the Tenkaichi Otogesai cross-music-game tournament line, as its brand-new Block Tournament song!
Sakazuki bears the name of the eponymous ceremonial sake cups who are used for a traditional shared-drinks ceremony to welcome someone into a family, thus mostly having place in wedding ceremonies. You'd think such a "family-welcoming" title for a Japanese song would have been the most fitting for a cross-rhythm-game song, but alas this was one of the tracks to never leave its belonging parent company's place for the other participating series, only getting ported in later years into beatmania IIDX and DanceDanceRevolution, for both arcade and PC-donning players across the years. Alongside the other four SOUND-VOLTEX-spawned songs across all Tenkaichi editions (Gekkou Ranbu, Masakari Blade, Kyokuken and both versions of GERBERA) the song was part of the final Otogesai's National Finals songs for bemani's side of the turf: the tautologically-titled TENKAICHI ULTIMATE BOSSRUSH MEDLEY.
The composer of this track is the latest 'Bemani Sound Team' member to join the ranks of inhouse bemani artists: Aritomo Hamada (濵田有共), known in the early days as the BMS composer 8284 (goroawase for 'yatsuhashi') and for being a generally skilled IIDX player himself. Once having joined the Bemani Sound Team, the artist deleted every pre-existing social account as per contractual regulations, only having after-joining profiles like the one on Twxttxr (link) and no other independent music-sharing channels afterwards. Since joining the company, Aritomo's works are mostly signed under the HuΣeR (read: 'hummer') alias and has been a beatmania IIDX co-director ever since the 24th arcade entry (24 SINOBUZ), as well as the lone title/system BGM maker for the series ever since 26 Rootage. Singing for the track is Fernweh, one of the less-used aliases for the nicknamed Kuroa*, the female singer with the most entries in the SOUND VOLTEX series to day to come out one of its many music-making contests as a vocalist (9 thus far). We only have a brief impression of hers about the song in the final Tenkaichi Otogesai's music section (link, archived), in which she commented to have colored its vocals in a somewhat nostalgic tint, for this occasion.
Hanataba (ハナタバ ) MIMI feat. KAFU (MIMI feat. 可不)Vocaloid features have always been a constant around these kinds of fan-propelled feature, but this year we also got requests for non-Vocaloid-based songs to boot! What we have here by Def's request is a song voiced by the Vtuber-based KAFU voice bank we've already heard of in "official" lines thanks to Phony, by the hands of a mainly-Vocaloid-versed creator, of all people!
Making its online debut in late November 2022, Hanataba (lit. "Bouquet") was made by the nicknamed MIMI, an exclusively-Hatsune Miku composer since 2016, whose voice bank activities have expanded to KAVU ever since its debut, starting with the Miku/KAVUsong Kurinaru (くうになる) in January of the same year. Hanataba would be later released as part of MIMI's first solo album: late December 2023's Yoru Tsumugi (よるつむぎ), named after the eponymous album opener and released under the KAMITSUBAKI STUDIO label.
Netsu Ijou (熱異常) Iyowa feat. Adachi Rei (いよわ feat.足立レイ)
And for the second day in a row, here's a non-Vocaloid voice-bank powered tune for this year's December times, not to mention the earliest request recorded on this third Drumvent! While admittedly, we went lighter on talk about the CeVIO-hailing voice bank as we've already had a canon talk in greater detail (see more here!), that's a different story for our former coverage of a previously-unnovered UTAU from late 2019. And what a backstory it has!
The story of Adachi Rei is the story of the nicknamed missile_39, strong of an interest in Vocaloid and robotics to the point of having built an actual life-sized Hatsune Miku robot in early 2017, one that can replicate movement. In the same year, missile_39 launched a crowdfunding campaign on CAMPFIRE for the construction of another robot based on an original design of his, offering its supporters the same voice bank used for it as an UTAU: a completely human-voice-independent one, based instead upon pre-existing audio samples and modified via Audacity for the explicit aim to make it as choppy and robot-feeling as possible. Getting over 3.5 million Yen out of the 3M originally asked, the Adachi Rei robot was built and became an ongoing and renewable source of SNS posts for its creator (no seriously, go check his Twitter profile out if you don't believe me!), with the promised UTAU voice bank getting distributed in October 2019. With the approval of AI, Inc. for an eventual small-scale distribution, a second CAMPFIRE campaign was issued by the same missile_39 on March 2021 in order to turn the Adachi Rei voicebank as a REPLIVOICE bank capable not only of singing in different tones, but actually speak as well, gathering a million more Yen than the Rei robot project and receiving a commercial release on October of the same year (and May 2024 for Mac users), joining the fan-made-but-creator-approved voicebank conversions for VCV (2020) and DeepVocal (2021).
On the hot winds of the REPLIVOICE bank's release sits this here song from October 2022, a "Heat Abnormal" song made by the also-Hatsune-Miku-leaning producer Iyowa (いよわ) and also followed in the same year by a 'counterpart' song of sorts in Heinetsu (平熱, lit. 'Heat Normal'). One of the first Adachi Rei popular songs whose MV portrays the actual "robotic digital idol" instead of original characters of sorts, Netsu Ijou is often quoted as one of the major tracks to popularize Adachi Rei among Vocaloid-based music producers, after the song winning a 2022 contest for the Vocaloid-listening app VocaColle (the song's chorus is sung by Hatsune Miku, after all!). This result by association would also lead the song to be ported to Craft Egg's Project Sekai, but as the same Iyowa has used the wrong tags in the VocaColle contest, the winning song was not eligible to be picked up and the 2nd-placed track was chosen instead. By popular demand, however, the song eventually managed to get ported in the game (also with a cover version by the ingame unit 25-ji, Nightcord de.), joining Heat Abnormal's arcade-versed ports on Sega's music game series (maimai and CHUNITHM, specifically).
The Time Ripper Battle Theme Limbus Company
These three past years we're doing this thing, I've always snuck in my name on the list entries as a joke of sorts, considering how usually fares my luck on these kinds of randomic draws of sorts. However, with the spin of the wheel fishing me in the first half of the month AGAIN(plus the fact that I'm the only one among the TT blog editors/contributors effectively pitching in a request, this year),
at this point I feel some sort of obligation to appear and validate the
wheel's will! After all, considering this pick of mine is from a gacha
game, chance is definitely a related factor to count on for today...
Released worldwide on February 26th, 2023 and currently ongoing, Limbus Company is the third videogame from Project Moon, further telling the happenings of the multi-districtual urban conglomerate known as the City, as a follow-up to the events of both the developing house's preceeding games (Lobotomy Corporation and Library of Ruina) and webcomic-started works, primarily The Leviathan and The Distorsion Detective - Pursuing the Distorsion. The character players of the game impart their commands as is Dante, a red-coat-donning amnesiac person with a flaming clock for its head who was being saved by (and soon after, forcibly appointed as the Excecutive Manager of) the Limbus Company's Bus division, tasked to travel across the City's districts in the search for power-wielding branches known as the Golden Boughs, remnants from the long-gone Lobotomy Corporation. The game is a turn-based strategy game in a similar vein to the preceeding Library of Ruina, with the player being able to form a team out of the LCB division's other 12 employees -the Sinners- with either their regular abilities or foreign ones acquired thanks to the powers of the LCB bus's unique engine, with which it's possible to extract from parallel realities both alternate identities of each Sinner and the so-called E.G.O. from the Project Moon universe's many Abnormality entites.
In one of the game's "minor" Main Story chapters of sorts, the LCB division explores the color-drenching District 20, a place where time is treated as literal money that can be used both for goods exchanges and tax collection purposes. Here, higher-ups of the ruling entity of the district -the T Corporation- task the company branch to investigate on the whereabouts of the Time Ripper, an entity who is said to attack the time-wealthiest people of the District in order to erase it completely. When ultimately cornered by the LCB division into battle, it's possible to hear this unique jazz-step theme for it, one of the many tracks composed for the game as a whole by South Korea's prolific Studio EIM music production agency, already supplying music for over a thousand games across mobile and PC/console platforms, including titles from Neowiz Games (Lies of P) and Nexon (Maplestory above all!). From the song's official upload up here, we come to know of the Time Ripper Battle Theme having a sole creator: the nicknamed Hox2. Unfortunately, having this ancient YT channel as the lone SNS hook to the artist, the only thing to add beside former composing credits is that apparently this guy has a "disease" that forces him to eat chicken at least once every three days. Make of that what you will!
Fractured Angel DJ Raisei / Phigros
At the proverbial 11th hour, the pick for this edition's 11th day! Back into general music gaming with sixsixonefour's request, we're not barging into a world of light and conflict (or lack thereof) by the wheel's will, but instead onto Chinese developer Pigeon Games' passion project to come out as an increasingly-expanding free-to-play mobile music game. Surprisingly enough, we've got something at our hands to tie all of us Taiko Time blog editors' shared online past together, in the process...
Launched on August 31st, 2019, Phigros presents an imput approach of tap/hold/flicks for markers falling down to an "input-receptive" in the same page of other music games before it (C4Cat's Dynamix first and formeost), with the unique twist of both the falling notes AND said note-input line moving around in many a different formation according to the song and chart at hand, for an alternate and dynamic twist to the formula. Receiving constant updates across the years, the game got its own story mode as well as separate song releases per artists, most of which getting included in the 'Singles Collection' like this here track. As you can see from the background on the video, we're talking about something shying away from your average rhythm game song transplant.
In fact, DJ Raisei (Twitter; SoundCloud)'s Fractured Angel was originally a commissioned song made by everyone's favorite multi-music-game simulator of choice: osu!, one of the commissioned tracks made for 2022's Round-of-32 Expert Global Taiko Showdown tournament, as that phase's tiebreaker. Not only that, the same composer was called again this year to make a sequel out of it in Fractured Heaven, this time as the Grand Finals of the tournament in question, 2024's Taiko World Championships! Fractured Angel also found another non-sim house to call its own across the years, thanks to KBH Games's A Dance of Fire and Ice.
Dance de Bakoon! (Danceでバコーン！) ℃-ute
Berdstep's request for this year takes us to the world of retired idol units, as we take a gander at one coming from Up-Front Promotion's Hello! Project musical collective. We're talking about the same division of the renowned Morning Musume act, after all!
Often rendered in Japanese as C-ute or even キュート, the band was founded in 2005 out of members of the collective's younger-talents subdivision Hello! Project Kids, all passing auditions starting from 2002. The act was produced by the former Sharam Q lead singer Mitsuo Terada (寺田光男), more commonly known by his art name of Tsunku♂ (つんく♂)... that's right- the lead musical direction manager behind Nintendo's Rhythm Tengoku/Rhythm Heaven games! ℃-ute's final lineup upon disbanding in 2017 consisted of Maimi Yajima, Saki Nakajima, Airi Suzuki, Chisato Okai, and Mai Hagiwara, with some of the former H!P Kids members -Megumi Murakami, Erika Umeda and Kanna Arihara- also appearing for the act's final concerts.
Dance de Bakoon! was ℃-ute's 13th single, released on August 25, 2010 under the zetima label and peaking 8th place at Oricon charts, while trailing not that much behind on the Billboard Hot 100 front (19th). Maimi Yajima, and Airi Suzuki were the center dancers for it, with the former also dealing with lead singing duties for it. In a former interview, producer Tsunku♂ insisted on wanting to express the "explosiveness" of the song with an onomatopoeia in the title, hence why "Bakoon!" is rendered in katakana in juxtaposition to the Romanized-leaning name.
L＜＞R The Idolm@ster
Moving back into Game Music department, here's a little something from the Namco home turf, by jC's request! It's an arrangement of music from an lod arcade game which already got some official Taiko no Tatsujin representation, but since its day has yet to come across Song of the Week features, we might as well start the introductiory talks right here...
Released in Japanese arcades on December 1983, Libble Rabble (リブルラブル) was Namco's first foray in the game center landscape with a 16-bit game, running on a Motorola 68000 processor-based custom board -the Namco Libble Rabble- which would only be used by a handful of subsequent games, including 1986's Toy Pop. This is a twin-joystick game in which players control two colored arrows at the same time: the red Libble and the blue Rabble. Within the time limit given in each stage (or 'Season', as they go by ingame), players have to surround and gather a set of four cap-donning creatures called Mushlins by trapping them inside an area formed by the line that dynamically links the same Libble and Rabble, while avoiding the effects of other line-disruptive enemies and unearthing treasure chests to have access to bonus stages. This was a project closely followed by Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani (岩谷徹) after the weird idea found at a disco dancefloor to wrap people around a rope and throwing them away, a project that was later left to producer Makoto Sato due to Iwatani's other impending projects at the time. For as many discarded elements this quirky arcade had from its tentative name of Potato to a canned North American launch through Midway Games, Libble Rabble eventually managed to get ported across several (still Japan-exclusive) ports for the FM Towns Marty, X68000 and Super Famicom, with the original arcade later receiving international ports through Hamster's Arcade Archives emulation series on modern Sony/Nintendo systems and on Blaze Entertainment's Evercade handheld system.
This one music arrangement of Libble Rabble's score by Nobuyuki Ohnogi (大野木宜幸) was made for the first in Famison 8BIT☆iDOLM@STER, a series of five album releases in 2008 to tie in the world of Namco's arcade retrogaming with the ongoing Idolm@ster series, each starring both Im@s songs under the featured Namco retro games' soundboards and drama talk, down to brand-new musical arrangements with the 765 Production idols singing for those! Longtime Idolm@ster series composer Hiroto Sasaki (佐々木宏人) and lyricist Megumi Nakamura (中村恵) were respectively behind L< >R's arrangement and lyrics, with singing duties owed to the Futami sisters' voice actress Asami Shimoda (下田麻美). Originally making its debut in the first album in such a cycle -March 2008's Famison 8BIT☆iDOLM@STER 01 Yayoi Takutsuki / Ami & Mami Futami (ファミソン8BIT☆iDOLM@STER 01 高槻やよい／双海亜美・真美)- it would be later revived for the compilation album that would be released three years later: Famison 8BIT☆iDOLM@STER BEST ALBUM (ファミソン8BIT☆アイドルマスター BEST ALBUM).
Machine Love Jamie Paige feat. Kasane Teto SV
As you're reading these lines, the multi-platform Donderful/Rhythm Festival is having three consecutive months with a new playable song starring the digital voice bank of Kasane Teto... not that this is a factor for preventing other fan requests starring the digital singer to pour over here, mind you!
The pick of Discord user tana for this year is a brand-new release from Western Vocaloid producer Jamie Paige, most commonly known for her musical contribution to the Internet-famous webseries Homestruck. We've never really delved into Kasane Teto's backstory in full detail, but for the time being it's enough to know that she originally was made in 2008 on April Fools as a 'troll' Vocaloid launch on anonymous chat board 2ch's VIP section, with the voice provider hiding their name behind the one of the historical Doraemon VA Nobuyo Oyama. Despite the jokey-grounds she was born for, the Teto project started getting serious recognition in late 2008 when people started making songs with her and has eventually risen up to become an official VCV-UTAU voice bank in October 2009, garnering the same fame in the same places other Vocaloids were know for, while Teto herself never being one to begin with!
June 22nd's Machine Love of this year is an author-credited tribute to one of Kasane Teto's earliest popular tunes: MimiroboP (耳ロボP)/nwp8861's Mimi no Haru Robotto no Uta (耳のあるロボットの唄) from June 2008, a song which got interpolated inside Jamie Paige's musical tribute of it. As noted by the also-in-description credits page for the song, more than a person is behind the many artworks/video montage of Machine Love, also including the song producer's own girlfriend!
Help!! Kobo Kanaeru
We've got quite the massive Vtuber campaign in 2024's first half, so it's quite logical to assume a similar user resonance around these parts! What the returning Heap's Abode pushed as a Drumvent Calendar request is the latest single to come out of one of Hololive's "third-generation" talents from Indonesia.
Joining Hololive in early 2022 with SNS/YT channel activities starting out on that year's March 27th, the (literally) water-haired Kobo Kanaeru (こぼ・かなえる) dons a persona of being the latest blood-inheriting "Rain Shaman" of her own family and as a way to prove them she's worthy of such powers, she's boasting an online presence as a way to prove that supplying such shamanic services is a breeze by comparison. Over 2.6 million people are subscribed to her YouTube channel and the energetic antics on display through streams was somewhat rewarded by two consecutive years of being nominated for the "Most Chaotic Vtuber" category in the recently-issued VTuber Awards online ceremony, winning the 2023 edition out of the two.
More that 20 million views were gathered with the song Help!!, Kobo Kanaeru's fifth and latest single, made on the day of her 2nd-anniversary sisnce beginning her activities as well as a 2D avatar model update to animate her signature umbrella inside livestreams. The song was made by independent YT artist natori (なとり), in activity on the platform since 2021.
M@GICAL☆CURE! LOVE ♥ SHOT! SAWTOWNE feat. Hatsune Miku
At long last, a pick from one of the TnT Discord server's moderators! Nabix's pick for this event's 2024 edition is one of the uncommon instances of popular Vocaloid songs that are based of the involved voicebanks' non-Japanese packages. It's barely a year old, too!
Employing Hatsune Miku's V4 English engine, this was originally submitted as a contest entry for the 10th Miku Expo concert lines, famously bringing along the digital diva in concerts across the world as a hologram (and in recent times, via more-common LCD screens). It actually was said competition's winner too, eventually leading to being played live on Western-versed Miku Expo concerts this year (for all scheduled dates in North America, Europe and New Zealand), as well as its later inclusion in Project Sekai as one of the few Global-version-exclusive tracks!
Producing the song is the nicknamed SAWTOWNE, an artist who made its online musical debut with human-vocals tracks in 2018 and its Vocaloid-versed one in 2020, via a Miku cover of the song Neppa (熱波) by Tephe, originally starring the nicknamed Butter's vocal skills. The composer was also known for illustration and tuning works for other Vocalo-producers, skills that are also reflected on their craft over the years; the same M@GICAL☆CURE! LOVE ♥ SHOT! model of Miku was entirely made on Blender from scratch, as a matter of fact! The composer's really energetic attitude goes beyond the flowery description on his MV releases, to the point of leading to funny occurrences that are also tied to this song, with SAWTHONE accidentally announcing its Project Sekai port ahead of the target game's SNS outlets!
Macarena Samba de Amigo
I've got to shrink down the usual length of this kind of December event this year due to impending IRL-related things happening in December, and... waddayouknow, I still happened to skip a day due to happenings beyond my reach. As disappointing as it may be, this and the following entry are covered in the same day in order to properly play catch-up with the schedule.
Requested by rockzoneami, what we have here is one of the most popular one-hit wonders from the 2nd Millennium's tail end: Macarena from the Spanish duo Los del Río ("Those of the River"), consisting of
Antonio Romero Monge and Rafael Ruiz Perdigones. The inspiration behind the song's creation lies in one of Los del Rìo's South America tour of 1992, being invited for a private party in Venezuela by the impresario Gustavo Cisneros. There, Romero of the duo got extremey impressed by the dancing skills of the flamenco teacher having a live performance performance -Diana Patricia Cubillán Herrera- to the point to come up on the spot with what would eventually be the chorus for their next song, "¡Diana, dale a tu cuerpo alegría y cosas buenas!" ("Give your body some joy, Diana!"). As a token of gratitude for the patron making this meeting possible, the resulting flamenco song would eventually be themed and titled after Gustavo Cisteros's daughter Esperanza Macarena and became the top track of Los del Río's first studio album release: December 13th, 1993's A mí me gusta.
Trying to capitalize on Macarena's potential success on the dancefloor, RCA Records released the song as a single alongside two electro/house remixes commissioned to Madrid's electropop duo Fangoria, one of which -the so-called River Remix 103BPM- eventually becoming the version of the song that we most commonly catch in popular media these days, requestiong Dumvent user's music game series of choice included. It also begs mentioning another remix of the original Macarena that would eventually eclipse all preceeding versions on worldwide music charts: a mid-1996 remix made by the Bayside Boys (Mike Triay and Carlos de Yarza) that added additional English vocal bridges along the way and climbed many a national music charting record across nations, from the US to several European countries! For one last round of collective notoriety on store shelves, all versions of Macarena were included in 1996's Fiesta Macarena, Los del Río's final album release.
The Macarena's River Remix, as anticipated, would be the base for all the song portings into one of Sega's earliest music games to date: Samba de Amigo. Starting out as a Sega-NAOMI-powered arcade title in 1999, this is a series of games where players are asked across entries to swing in the air a couple of stick-shaped objects to mimick the shaking of maracas in one of 6 possible directions, with several instances of assuming specific poses in the middle of the song to move forward. The really warm reception of the arcade entry was lead to a port of the game for the Sega Dreamcast in the year 2000, coupled with maracas-shaped controllers just like the game centers's big brother counterpart. Nintendo's wires-free controller gimmickry proved to be Samba de Amigo's greatest ally across the years, proving to be fertile grounds for a Wii entry by Gearbox (2007) and a brand-new sequel for the Nintendo Switch: last year's Samba de Amigo: Party Central, with a same-day port release of the same game on Apple devices but under a different title (Party-to-Go). It doesn't matter which game among these you're going to pick- you can be sure that Macarena sits front-and-scenter in each of these's starting tracklist!
Sakurabana Remarks (桜花怨雷) Yuma Mizonoguchi feat. Ai Ohsera (溝口ゆうま feat. 大瀬良あい) / Paradigm: Reboot
Here we have another unspoken-in-detail-about music game on these lines, with one of its 2024 original songs that was requested by v2 for well-rounded writing! Since we've already heard plenty about its creators across original for actual Taiko gaming (here and here), it's not like there's that much left to be covered up now, is it...
Launching on December 8th, 2022 as an Android game (and 10 days later for Android storefronts), TunnerGames Studio's Paradigm: Reboot offers yet another aproach to the time-tested formula of 3D-layered markers coming towards the player, by featuring an inner area at the center of the screen in which all interactive note markers come across for players to either tap or slide accordingly. Not only the sides of such a quadrilateral area can have markers to tap but the inner area as well, with squared markers spread within! This here track from the season-themed Spring SP DLC pack is the second release for the game from composer Yuma Mizonoguchi after the Version 2.0.0 single song RE; Boot. Nothing much about the artist as this year goes, other than one unfortunate instance of having his original SoundCloud account stolen, so... Falalalala, lala la la...
Furimukanai Yomi no Michi (振り向かない黄泉の道) Touhou Juuouen ~ Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost
It's pretty easy to sort out the Drumvent requests of 'Taiko Time-contributing regulars' from the rest due to the shared tendency of rethreading past topics multiple times in a row. I, for example, have picked songs from Project Moon games twice in a row now, while Discord server admin jorj is versed in asking Touhou Project original tracks for this celebration, twice in a row... and from the same game, too!
Indeed, the track whose title can be translated as "The Path to Yomi Where None Turn Back" comes from Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost, the same official Touhou game which contained the previously-featured Itsudatsu-sha-tachi no Mugekō 〜 Kingdam of Nothingness. While that track was the stage music from the 19th mainline game's incident perpetrator Zanmu Nippaku, this here track instead belongs to her trusty subordinate: Hisami Yomotsu (豫母都日狭美), a youkai working as a "catch" to attract living beings and drag them to Hell afterwards for a remuneration. Her ability of "never letting anything slip her grasp" are well shown in many of the Touhou game's individual character storylines, as most of the 'incident-solving' wannabes of sorts end up being dragged in front of Zanmu, so she can efficiently stall for time in order to try seeing her Hell-ruling plans to fruition.
As the name might suggest, she's based on the mythological figure of the Yomotsu-shikome (黄泉醜女), an "Ugly Woman of the Underworld" which was first heard in early Japanese literature tellings about the myths of the creation gods in Shintoism: Izanagi-no-Mikoto and her spouse Izanami-no-Mikoto. After Izanami's death by giving birth to the couple's final son Kagutsuchi, the enraged Izanagi set to depart into the Underworld to try bring her spouse back to the surface, only to find out of her already eating of the Land's deadly spoils and unable to leave. Shocked by the revelation and agape by the rottingappearence of her deceased spouse, Izanagi ran away in her sleep, but Izanami tried to stop him and keep him down with all of the Underworld's forces, including the Yomotsu-Shikome who was the closest to the pursuit to drag him down for good, only to ultimately fail and Izanami sealing the access to the Underworld by blocking the entrance slope with a huge boulder.
Hisami Yomotsu's theme is one to set up for the player a very specific scenario in accordance to ZUN's notes of the song ingame, describing its bizarre tempo as a force to push someone from behind and into someplace from where it's not possible to turn back. In his own words, it's Stage 5 music material, so you can be sure to be facing the incident-facilitator-in-second when you start hearing it ingame!
Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow! jschlatt
Good thing that the track of yours I was more interested to research around was eventually drawn by the wheel! However, it's less due to user Tenmak's request based on a classic song from frosty times and more for the fact that I've seen this smarmy smug mug in the thumbnail reposted a bunch of times across the period that the Wish List requests channel was open to ramp up my curiosity on it!
The original song this is based on is an eponymous piece from 1945, coming from a couple of renowned artists of the time: American lyricist/songwriter Sammy Cahn and Brodway-renowned musical composer Jule Styne from London. In a post-WWII climate, the two were in California on July of that year lamenting another kind of bothersome climate -that is to say, the Summer heatwaves- to the point of wishing for cooler atmospherical conditions... and inadvertitedly coming up with the short tune's core concept! What would be later known as Let It Snow! was recorded on Fall of the same year by baritone/Big Band leader Vaughn Wilton Monroe and the song was released after 1945's Thanksgiving day, leading to the piece to be played when Winter-y times are knocking at the door, not limited to the Christmas season!
Needless to say, many a performer has released cover versions of this Winter classic from America, but the very-recent version we're looking at is born out of some peculiar circumstances and marks the commercial musical debut of jschlatt, an American gaming-related content creator bolstering a few brands beyond the usual streaming antics, including a gaming beverage brand and a content creator network in One True King. In collaboration with fellow compatriotic streamer Ludwig Ahrgen, he also curates a channel for original royalty-free recordings of classical and gaming-inspired music to be used for everyone's content media creation needs, under the name of Lud and Schlatts Musical Emporium.
With the rise in recent years of artificial intelligence services, more and more musical deepfakes started spreading around the Web, ranging from song covers with cartoon characters to living beings of past and present times... including the same jshlatt, who in response has decided on December last year to fight back the rise of deepfakes, with a song cover on his own of Frank Synatra's My Way. Despite the warm reception, the cover was taken down by the copyright-upholding Unioversal Music Records on the charge of copyright infringement, so the popular streamer has bided the wait for an entire year... up until this very December's beginning, with the release of his commercial debut album A Very 1999 Christmas with many an original cover of traditional Christmas and Winter-affine holiday songs. The project was highly supported by saxophonist Thomas Wright Scott -formerly affiliated to The Blues Brothers band, no less!- for the creation of all invlved music sheets, with select singles being uploaded on his own YouTube channel. Despite having his first upload -a cover of Santa Clause is Comin' To Town- was shunned due to the same copyright-claiming accuses, the official one for Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow! still stands strong!... I mean, not that fans re-uploading content from popular content creators has ever stopped the works of the Web- just ask the Plastic Love fans!
Vatrum Laur vs Tatsh
This choice piece requested by bol comes from an M3-debuting album release from last year: End-April's Eternal Scale by Tatsuya "Tatsh" Shimizu, in the album's collaboration piece with NO Chimimouryou composer Laur. What's interesting about this album release among many is its ties with a freely-accesible isekai webnovel on pixiv from late October 2020, by the title of HARMONIX. Most of Tatsh's latest album doujin releases draw their jacket art from said webnovel's many related artworks that are available on the same pixiv profile, too!
Since we've had plenty of times to talk about the foundations of Laur and Tatsh (as if three Song Series Showcase pages weren't enough for the latter), we might as well have some lip service for the latest individual projects surrounding the two composers in recent memory. For the 'no Mai'/Rose/JP Shinto creationism gods trilogy songs maker, we can nover the remix of Massive New Crew's song VELVET for an official Groove Coaster-related remix album (November 2023's Groove anthem party.) and he got another of his 'X' songs (Xepher and Taiko's Xa among former entries) released for the mobile music game Arcaea, as Xanathos. The same lowiro rhythm game is also relevant to Laur, seeing how he won one of its latest contests with the song Arghena, co-composed with artcore artist Feryquitous.
Trash Metal 垃圾金属 Varghskelethor
These past years, we've seen at least one (non-Vtuber) gaming content creator for the Drumvent writeups, but thanks to the drawn pick from Discord user Jarvis, we're doubling up the dose!
Hailing from the 2010-founded streaming media website Vinesauce, the 31-aged Joel Varg Johansson from Sweden has been one of its most popular content creators, spearheading the charge with streams based on cramming Windows-based operating systems with as much malware as possible, not to mention rundowns on shareware software from yesteryears. On top of the streaming venue, he's also entertaining a solo metal musicia carreer with a number of independent album releases, including this one track from April 2023's Skeletor Metal X. Most of the album's songs are remastered releases from either earlier Skeletor Metal albums or YouTube-exclusive upload, but this one Track 15 was specifically made for the album!
Twister G5 Project
...okay, while this song's title might lead some to believe about a clever segway for more Varghskeletor lore talk, this song's origins are nothing of the likes! This pick from caaiitlin, in fact, comes from one of Masahiro Aoki's earlier musical acts, one of the firsts for which he was only known by his "Godspeed" alias!
Twister is the 2nd track in the album-debut bearing the same name of the unit behind it: G5 Project, of Godspeed's own ViViX label. Joining the 10-years-lasting act are also Takashi "Takaji" Nagisawa (長澤 孝志), Yamato Masaoka (正岡大和) of current affiliation with the INSPION sound company and the nicknamed-ones Nike(ニケ) and a2c, the latter also a member of fripSide and MintJam, the duo that regaled Taiko gaming with the Namco Original Growing Up. Later on, Twister was also reprinted for the G5 Project's final album release: November 2016's G5 10th Anniversary Best, this time around as the 3rd-listed track.
Beat Syncer (ビートシンカー) DIVELA feat. Hatsune Miku (DIVELA feat.初音ミク)
Right on cue for Christmas Eve, the final Vocaloid song request for this edition was drawn. I'd be apologizing for Discord user caaiitlin to mistakengly misquoting the request for yesterday's drawn pick to them, but it turns out their actual request was the next one drawn up for the day after, so I guess everything is fine now!
Premiering online on July 20th in 2018, Beat Syncer was one of the tracks of the nicknamed DIVELA to release on the hot trail of the composer's firat major Vocaloid hit METEOR, the winner of 2018's Hatsune Miku Magical Mirai concert line's song contest og just 4 months prior. Always in the same year, the Hall of Fame later-to-be song would receive its single debut on November of the same year, only to be featured on September 2019 inside DIVELA's first album: the Hatsune Miku-centric Mirai Connection (ミライコレクション). Notably enough, the song became playable as part of the 7th Vocaloid DLC pack in the ongoing Groove Coaster Wai Wai Party for the Nintendo Switch (link), currently the lone entry in the series to receive support to this day.
IZANA t+pazolite vs P*Light / Arcaea
We made it once more- Christmas Day! We've got really few Wish List-y requests left on the drawing board this year so I'm ditching the draw of they year and have all three leftover requests barge in!
We start with numbertworen's request, coming from an UK-based company's longrunning mobile music game: Arcaea. It's a game thas was often described among players as the "mobile SOUND VOLTEX", due to the presence of cyan and magenta sliders (in the same color scheme as SDVX's) to drag your fingers around the screen with for gameplay means, alongside the more-conventional tap-only markers. With time, the came became for known for its story (along the unconventional ways to progress forward on it) and the many many collaborations and song transplants from music games, both arcade and console/mobile-versed ones.
One of Arcaea's recurring collaborations, however, lies with the HARDCORE TANO°C label and its artists, coming back about once every year-and-a-half to deliver a bunch of original songs, with the first round including mostly-collaborative songs with 2+ artists on, including the BATTLE NO.1 that's also available in Taiko gaming. Among its originals is IZANA from t+pazolite and the UK Hardcore/freeform composer P*Light, with a girl in ts album jacket art (Nami) who eventually would become available as a playable Navigator in later years' TANO*C collaboration event. While the digital single release has happened simultaneously with the Arcaea collaboration project on June 20th, 2020, its extended version had to wait for three more years to be baked and being ultimately included in t+pazolite's FAKE CIRCUS album from April 2023.
Haunted Dance Mr.Asyu / Tone Sphere
With oatshmeal's request, we strike the foreign music game iron one last time in 2024! It's for a game from the key lead composer behind the original Cytus's story-linked music, too.
Yasutaka Senoo (妹尾泰隆), more commonly known by the Sta alias, is indeed the lone driving force behind the mobile rhythm game Tone Sphere, strong with his previous visual works for BMS songs, including some of composer sasakure.UK's earliest hit like the BMS-contest-famed Jack-The-Ripper◆. While the dynamic background flashes before your eyes, a barrage of circular notes appear and have to be tapped with the right rhythm, alongside other special markers to make you simul-tap and flick your finger around in a set path.
Originally announced via livestream on May 2019 for a playable outing later in the year, Haunted Castle is made by chiptune-attuned composer Ms.Asyu (YouTube; SoundCloud). Likewise with IZANA, we have a select character in the related jacket art to become more relevant among the game's fanbase lter on; for this one song, that is owed to the little scribble ghost in it, one whose name was originally revealed by Sta himself over Twitter (link) but that eventually became known in the fanbase as "Unesko" instead, due to a machine traslation reading of the quited tweet giving out UNESCO instead, as in the namesake human-patronage association. It even spawned a female ghostly counterpart in YUnesko and load of inner jokes, culminating on April Fools 2022. Because yeah, if the original hardest difficulty of the song is enough to give you nightmares, the so-called Haunted Melon is sure one to give headaches for week to end!
Christmas? Nani Sore? Oishi No? (クリスマス？なにそれ? 美味しいの？) Hyadain
We end things off this year with Nedmara's song request, one that surprisingly ties in nicely with Taiko Time and its reading base across the years... and no, it's not for how Christmas is perceived as a romantic holiday in Japan, as you're about to read!
Indeed, the day set to commemorate the birth of the Christian New Testament's messiah Jesus Christ has had all sorts of parallel readings across countires and time periods and while it's mostly for that jolly old guy giving gifts across the world, in places like Japan it's also a holiday for couples, in the same light of Japan's takes on Valentine's Day and the White Day but involving both partners. In such rough times to be a single in, Kenichi Maeyamada (前山田健一) -the ever-popular anime and videogame parody/remix composer known as Hyadain (ヒャダイン)- stepped in to arrange a Jingle Bells parody from the point of view of an unlaid single in Christmas, part of the joke being in the title itself (lit. "Christmas? What's That? Does It Taste Good?"). It was also released as a commercial single by the end of 2011, where it peaked 59th and 51st respectively at Oricon and Billboard HOT 100 charts of that year's end.
If you're asking what has this song to do about our Taiko no Tatsujin blog's past, despite not being a Taiko-playable song itself is... once again, thanks to you guys' support across the years! Back in 2014, for the year's final Song of the Week we've taken a more experimental approach based on one of our discontinued fanchart-sharing featurettes of sorts (ie.: the "Made By You" blog entries) and had a couple of songs with fancharting in front and center... and wouldn't you know it, the Hyadain song picked was actually one of the two tracks in question (the 2011 single release, that is)! Sure, the original fanchart video is long gone since then but it stands as a testament to how much we owe to you guys the support we keep receiving across the years. It's part of why silly side-features like this are born- to give back some of that appreciation in return, despite the curve balls on free time that come along the way!
Once again, thank you so much for your renewed involvment for this year's antics and merry Christmas!
Netsu Ijou (熱異常) Iyowa feat. Adachi Rei (いよわ feat.足立レイ)And for the second day in a row, here's a non-Vocaloid voice-bank powered tune for this year's December times, not to mention the earliest request recorded on this third Drumvent! While admittedly, we went lighter on talk about the CeVIO-hailing voice bank as we've already had a canon talk in greater detail (see more here!), that's a different story for our former coverage of a previously-unnovered UTAU from late 2019. And what a backstory it has!
The story of Adachi Rei is the story of the nicknamed missile_39, strong of an interest in Vocaloid and robotics to the point of having built an actual life-sized Hatsune Miku robot in early 2017, one that can replicate movement. In the same year, missile_39 launched a crowdfunding campaign on CAMPFIRE for the construction of another robot based on an original design of his, offering its supporters the same voice bank used for it as an UTAU: a completely human-voice-independent one, based instead upon pre-existing audio samples and modified via Audacity for the explicit aim to make it as choppy and robot-feeling as possible. Getting over 3.5 million Yen out of the 3M originally asked, the Adachi Rei robot was built and became an ongoing and renewable source of SNS posts for its creator (no seriously, go check his Twitter profile out if you don't believe me!), with the promised UTAU voice bank getting distributed in October 2019. With the approval of AI, Inc. for an eventual small-scale distribution, a second CAMPFIRE campaign was issued by the same missile_39 on March 2021 in order to turn the Adachi Rei voicebank as a REPLIVOICE bank capable not only of singing in different tones, but actually speak as well, gathering a million more Yen than the Rei robot project and receiving a commercial release on October of the same year (and May 2024 for Mac users), joining the fan-made-but-creator-approved voicebank conversions for VCV (2020) and DeepVocal (2021).
On the hot winds of the REPLIVOICE bank's release sits this here song from October 2022, a "Heat Abnormal" song made by the also-Hatsune-Miku-leaning producer Iyowa (いよわ) and also followed in the same year by a 'counterpart' song of sorts in Heinetsu (平熱, lit. 'Heat Normal'). One of the first Adachi Rei popular songs whose MV portrays the actual "robotic digital idol" instead of original characters of sorts, Netsu Ijou is often quoted as one of the major tracks to popularize Adachi Rei among Vocaloid-based music producers, after the song winning a 2022 contest for the Vocaloid-listening app VocaColle (the song's chorus is sung by Hatsune Miku, after all!). This result by association would also lead the song to be ported to Craft Egg's Project Sekai, but as the same Iyowa has used the wrong tags in the VocaColle contest, the winning song was not eligible to be picked up and the 2nd-placed track was chosen instead. By popular demand, however, the song eventually managed to get ported in the game (also with a cover version by the ingame unit 25-ji, Nightcord de.), joining Heat Abnormal's arcade-versed ports on Sega's music game series (maimai and CHUNITHM, specifically).
The Time Ripper Battle Theme Limbus CompanyThese three past years we're doing this thing, I've always snuck in my name on the list entries as a joke of sorts, considering how usually fares my luck on these kinds of randomic draws of sorts. However, with the spin of the wheel fishing me in the first half of the month AGAIN
Released worldwide on February 26th, 2023 and currently ongoing, Limbus Company is the third videogame from Project Moon, further telling the happenings of the multi-districtual urban conglomerate known as the City, as a follow-up to the events of both the developing house's preceeding games (Lobotomy Corporation and Library of Ruina) and webcomic-started works, primarily The Leviathan and The Distorsion Detective - Pursuing the Distorsion. The character players of the game impart their commands as is Dante, a red-coat-donning amnesiac person with a flaming clock for its head who was being saved by (and soon after, forcibly appointed as the Excecutive Manager of) the Limbus Company's Bus division, tasked to travel across the City's districts in the search for power-wielding branches known as the Golden Boughs, remnants from the long-gone Lobotomy Corporation. The game is a turn-based strategy game in a similar vein to the preceeding Library of Ruina, with the player being able to form a team out of the LCB division's other 12 employees -the Sinners- with either their regular abilities or foreign ones acquired thanks to the powers of the LCB bus's unique engine, with which it's possible to extract from parallel realities both alternate identities of each Sinner and the so-called E.G.O. from the Project Moon universe's many Abnormality entites.
In one of the game's "minor" Main Story chapters of sorts, the LCB division explores the color-drenching District 20, a place where time is treated as literal money that can be used both for goods exchanges and tax collection purposes. Here, higher-ups of the ruling entity of the district -the T Corporation- task the company branch to investigate on the whereabouts of the Time Ripper, an entity who is said to attack the time-wealthiest people of the District in order to erase it completely. When ultimately cornered by the LCB division into battle, it's possible to hear this unique jazz-step theme for it, one of the many tracks composed for the game as a whole by South Korea's prolific Studio EIM music production agency, already supplying music for over a thousand games across mobile and PC/console platforms, including titles from Neowiz Games (Lies of P) and Nexon (Maplestory above all!). From the song's official upload up here, we come to know of the Time Ripper Battle Theme having a sole creator: the nicknamed Hox2. Unfortunately, having this ancient YT channel as the lone SNS hook to the artist, the only thing to add beside former composing credits is that apparently this guy has a "disease" that forces him to eat chicken at least once every three days. Make of that what you will!
Fractured Angel DJ Raisei / PhigrosAt the proverbial 11th hour, the pick for this edition's 11th day! Back into general music gaming with sixsixonefour's request, we're not barging into a world of light and conflict (or lack thereof) by the wheel's will, but instead onto Chinese developer Pigeon Games' passion project to come out as an increasingly-expanding free-to-play mobile music game. Surprisingly enough, we've got something at our hands to tie all of us Taiko Time blog editors' shared online past together, in the process...
Launched on August 31st, 2019, Phigros presents an imput approach of tap/hold/flicks for markers falling down to an "input-receptive" in the same page of other music games before it (C4Cat's Dynamix first and formeost), with the unique twist of both the falling notes AND said note-input line moving around in many a different formation according to the song and chart at hand, for an alternate and dynamic twist to the formula. Receiving constant updates across the years, the game got its own story mode as well as separate song releases per artists, most of which getting included in the 'Singles Collection' like this here track. As you can see from the background on the video, we're talking about something shying away from your average rhythm game song transplant.
In fact, DJ Raisei (Twitter; SoundCloud)'s Fractured Angel was originally a commissioned song made by everyone's favorite multi-music-game simulator of choice: osu!, one of the commissioned tracks made for 2022's Round-of-32 Expert Global Taiko Showdown tournament, as that phase's tiebreaker. Not only that, the same composer was called again this year to make a sequel out of it in Fractured Heaven, this time as the Grand Finals of the tournament in question, 2024's Taiko World Championships! Fractured Angel also found another non-sim house to call its own across the years, thanks to KBH Games's A Dance of Fire and Ice.
Dance de Bakoon! (Danceでバコーン！) ℃-uteBerdstep's request for this year takes us to the world of retired idol units, as we take a gander at one coming from Up-Front Promotion's Hello! Project musical collective. We're talking about the same division of the renowned Morning Musume act, after all!
Often rendered in Japanese as C-ute or even キュート, the band was founded in 2005 out of members of the collective's younger-talents subdivision Hello! Project Kids, all passing auditions starting from 2002. The act was produced by the former Sharam Q lead singer Mitsuo Terada (寺田光男), more commonly known by his art name of Tsunku♂ (つんく♂)... that's right- the lead musical direction manager behind Nintendo's Rhythm Tengoku/Rhythm Heaven games! ℃-ute's final lineup upon disbanding in 2017 consisted of Maimi Yajima, Saki Nakajima, Airi Suzuki, Chisato Okai, and Mai Hagiwara, with some of the former H!P Kids members -Megumi Murakami, Erika Umeda and Kanna Arihara- also appearing for the act's final concerts.
Dance de Bakoon! was ℃-ute's 13th single, released on August 25, 2010 under the zetima label and peaking 8th place at Oricon charts, while trailing not that much behind on the Billboard Hot 100 front (19th). Maimi Yajima, and Airi Suzuki were the center dancers for it, with the former also dealing with lead singing duties for it. In a former interview, producer Tsunku♂ insisted on wanting to express the "explosiveness" of the song with an onomatopoeia in the title, hence why "Bakoon!" is rendered in katakana in juxtaposition to the Romanized-leaning name.
L＜＞R The Idolm@sterMoving back into Game Music department, here's a little something from the Namco home turf, by jC's request! It's an arrangement of music from an lod arcade game which already got some official Taiko no Tatsujin representation, but since its day has yet to come across Song of the Week features, we might as well start the introductiory talks right here...
Released in Japanese arcades on December 1983, Libble Rabble (リブルラブル) was Namco's first foray in the game center landscape with a 16-bit game, running on a Motorola 68000 processor-based custom board -the Namco Libble Rabble- which would only be used by a handful of subsequent games, including 1986's Toy Pop. This is a twin-joystick game in which players control two colored arrows at the same time: the red Libble and the blue Rabble. Within the time limit given in each stage (or 'Season', as they go by ingame), players have to surround and gather a set of four cap-donning creatures called Mushlins by trapping them inside an area formed by the line that dynamically links the same Libble and Rabble, while avoiding the effects of other line-disruptive enemies and unearthing treasure chests to have access to bonus stages. This was a project closely followed by Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani (岩谷徹) after the weird idea found at a disco dancefloor to wrap people around a rope and throwing them away, a project that was later left to producer Makoto Sato due to Iwatani's other impending projects at the time. For as many discarded elements this quirky arcade had from its tentative name of Potato to a canned North American launch through Midway Games, Libble Rabble eventually managed to get ported across several (still Japan-exclusive) ports for the FM Towns Marty, X68000 and Super Famicom, with the original arcade later receiving international ports through Hamster's Arcade Archives emulation series on modern Sony/Nintendo systems and on Blaze Entertainment's Evercade handheld system.
This one music arrangement of Libble Rabble's score by Nobuyuki Ohnogi (大野木宜幸) was made for the first in Famison 8BIT☆iDOLM@STER, a series of five album releases in 2008 to tie in the world of Namco's arcade retrogaming with the ongoing Idolm@ster series, each starring both Im@s songs under the featured Namco retro games' soundboards and drama talk, down to brand-new musical arrangements with the 765 Production idols singing for those! Longtime Idolm@ster series composer Hiroto Sasaki (佐々木宏人) and lyricist Megumi Nakamura (中村恵) were respectively behind L< >R's arrangement and lyrics, with singing duties owed to the Futami sisters' voice actress Asami Shimoda (下田麻美). Originally making its debut in the first album in such a cycle -March 2008's Famison 8BIT☆iDOLM@STER 01 Yayoi Takutsuki / Ami & Mami Futami (ファミソン8BIT☆iDOLM@STER 01 高槻やよい／双海亜美・真美)- it would be later revived for the compilation album that would be released three years later: Famison 8BIT☆iDOLM@STER BEST ALBUM (ファミソン8BIT☆アイドルマスター BEST ALBUM).
Machine Love Jamie Paige feat. Kasane Teto SVAs you're reading these lines, the multi-platform Donderful/Rhythm Festival is having three consecutive months with a new playable song starring the digital voice bank of Kasane Teto... not that this is a factor for preventing other fan requests starring the digital singer to pour over here, mind you!
The pick of Discord user tana for this year is a brand-new release from Western Vocaloid producer Jamie Paige, most commonly known for her musical contribution to the Internet-famous webseries Homestruck. We've never really delved into Kasane Teto's backstory in full detail, but for the time being it's enough to know that she originally was made in 2008 on April Fools as a 'troll' Vocaloid launch on anonymous chat board 2ch's VIP section, with the voice provider hiding their name behind the one of the historical Doraemon VA Nobuyo Oyama. Despite the jokey-grounds she was born for, the Teto project started getting serious recognition in late 2008 when people started making songs with her and has eventually risen up to become an official VCV-UTAU voice bank in October 2009, garnering the same fame in the same places other Vocaloids were know for, while Teto herself never being one to begin with!
June 22nd's Machine Love of this year is an author-credited tribute to one of Kasane Teto's earliest popular tunes: MimiroboP (耳ロボP)/nwp8861's Mimi no Haru Robotto no Uta (耳のあるロボットの唄) from June 2008, a song which got interpolated inside Jamie Paige's musical tribute of it. As noted by the also-in-description credits page for the song, more than a person is behind the many artworks/video montage of Machine Love, also including the song producer's own girlfriend!
Help!! Kobo KanaeruWe've got quite the massive Vtuber campaign in 2024's first half, so it's quite logical to assume a similar user resonance around these parts! What the returning Heap's Abode pushed as a Drumvent Calendar request is the latest single to come out of one of Hololive's "third-generation" talents from Indonesia.
Joining Hololive in early 2022 with SNS/YT channel activities starting out on that year's March 27th, the (literally) water-haired Kobo Kanaeru (こぼ・かなえる) dons a persona of being the latest blood-inheriting "Rain Shaman" of her own family and as a way to prove them she's worthy of such powers, she's boasting an online presence as a way to prove that supplying such shamanic services is a breeze by comparison. Over 2.6 million people are subscribed to her YouTube channel and the energetic antics on display through streams was somewhat rewarded by two consecutive years of being nominated for the "Most Chaotic Vtuber" category in the recently-issued VTuber Awards online ceremony, winning the 2023 edition out of the two.
More that 20 million views were gathered with the song Help!!, Kobo Kanaeru's fifth and latest single, made on the day of her 2nd-anniversary sisnce beginning her activities as well as a 2D avatar model update to animate her signature umbrella inside livestreams. The song was made by independent YT artist natori (なとり), in activity on the platform since 2021.
M@GICAL☆CURE! LOVE ♥ SHOT! SAWTOWNE feat. Hatsune MikuAt long last, a pick from one of the TnT Discord server's moderators! Nabix's pick for this event's 2024 edition is one of the uncommon instances of popular Vocaloid songs that are based of the involved voicebanks' non-Japanese packages. It's barely a year old, too!
Employing Hatsune Miku's V4 English engine, this was originally submitted as a contest entry for the 10th Miku Expo concert lines, famously bringing along the digital diva in concerts across the world as a hologram (and in recent times, via more-common LCD screens). It actually was said competition's winner too, eventually leading to being played live on Western-versed Miku Expo concerts this year (for all scheduled dates in North America, Europe and New Zealand), as well as its later inclusion in Project Sekai as one of the few Global-version-exclusive tracks!
Producing the song is the nicknamed SAWTOWNE, an artist who made its online musical debut with human-vocals tracks in 2018 and its Vocaloid-versed one in 2020, via a Miku cover of the song Neppa (熱波) by Tephe, originally starring the nicknamed Butter's vocal skills. The composer was also known for illustration and tuning works for other Vocalo-producers, skills that are also reflected on their craft over the years; the same M@GICAL☆CURE! LOVE ♥ SHOT! model of Miku was entirely made on Blender from scratch, as a matter of fact! The composer's really energetic attitude goes beyond the flowery description on his MV releases, to the point of leading to funny occurrences that are also tied to this song, with SAWTHONE accidentally announcing its Project Sekai port ahead of the target game's SNS outlets!
Macarena Samba de AmigoI've got to shrink down the usual length of this kind of December event this year due to impending IRL-related things happening in December, and... waddayouknow, I still happened to skip a day due to happenings beyond my reach. As disappointing as it may be, this and the following entry are covered in the same day in order to properly play catch-up with the schedule.
Requested by rockzoneami, what we have here is one of the most popular one-hit wonders from the 2nd Millennium's tail end: Macarena from the Spanish duo Los del Río ("Those of the River"), consisting of
Antonio Romero Monge and Rafael Ruiz Perdigones. The inspiration behind the song's creation lies in one of Los del Rìo's South America tour of 1992, being invited for a private party in Venezuela by the impresario Gustavo Cisneros. There, Romero of the duo got extremey impressed by the dancing skills of the flamenco teacher having a live performance performance -Diana Patricia Cubillán Herrera- to the point to come up on the spot with what would eventually be the chorus for their next song, "¡Diana, dale a tu cuerpo alegría y cosas buenas!" ("Give your body some joy, Diana!"). As a token of gratitude for the patron making this meeting possible, the resulting flamenco song would eventually be themed and titled after Gustavo Cisteros's daughter Esperanza Macarena and became the top track of Los del Río's first studio album release: December 13th, 1993's A mí me gusta.
Trying to capitalize on Macarena's potential success on the dancefloor, RCA Records released the song as a single alongside two electro/house remixes commissioned to Madrid's electropop duo Fangoria, one of which -the so-called River Remix 103BPM- eventually becoming the version of the song that we most commonly catch in popular media these days, requestiong Dumvent user's music game series of choice included. It also begs mentioning another remix of the original Macarena that would eventually eclipse all preceeding versions on worldwide music charts: a mid-1996 remix made by the Bayside Boys (Mike Triay and Carlos de Yarza) that added additional English vocal bridges along the way and climbed many a national music charting record across nations, from the US to several European countries! For one last round of collective notoriety on store shelves, all versions of Macarena were included in 1996's Fiesta Macarena, Los del Río's final album release.
The Macarena's River Remix, as anticipated, would be the base for all the song portings into one of Sega's earliest music games to date: Samba de Amigo. Starting out as a Sega-NAOMI-powered arcade title in 1999, this is a series of games where players are asked across entries to swing in the air a couple of stick-shaped objects to mimick the shaking of maracas in one of 6 possible directions, with several instances of assuming specific poses in the middle of the song to move forward. The really warm reception of the arcade entry was lead to a port of the game for the Sega Dreamcast in the year 2000, coupled with maracas-shaped controllers just like the game centers's big brother counterpart. Nintendo's wires-free controller gimmickry proved to be Samba de Amigo's greatest ally across the years, proving to be fertile grounds for a Wii entry by Gearbox (2007) and a brand-new sequel for the Nintendo Switch: last year's Samba de Amigo: Party Central, with a same-day port release of the same game on Apple devices but under a different title (Party-to-Go). It doesn't matter which game among these you're going to pick- you can be sure that Macarena sits front-and-scenter in each of these's starting tracklist!
Sakurabana Remarks (桜花怨雷) Yuma Mizonoguchi feat. Ai Ohsera (溝口ゆうま feat. 大瀬良あい) / Paradigm: RebootHere we have another unspoken-in-detail-about music game on these lines, with one of its 2024 original songs that was requested by v2 for well-rounded writing! Since we've already heard plenty about its creators across original for actual Taiko gaming (here and here), it's not like there's that much left to be covered up now, is it...
Launching on December 8th, 2022 as an Android game (and 10 days later for Android storefronts), TunnerGames Studio's Paradigm: Reboot offers yet another aproach to the time-tested formula of 3D-layered markers coming towards the player, by featuring an inner area at the center of the screen in which all interactive note markers come across for players to either tap or slide accordingly. Not only the sides of such a quadrilateral area can have markers to tap but the inner area as well, with squared markers spread within! This here track from the season-themed Spring SP DLC pack is the second release for the game from composer Yuma Mizonoguchi after the Version 2.0.0 single song RE; Boot. Nothing much about the artist as this year goes, other than one unfortunate instance of having his original SoundCloud account stolen, so... Falalalala, lala la la...
Furimukanai Yomi no Michi (振り向かない黄泉の道) Touhou Juuouen ~ Unfinished Dream of All Living GhostIt's pretty easy to sort out the Drumvent requests of 'Taiko Time-contributing regulars' from the rest due to the shared tendency of rethreading past topics multiple times in a row. I, for example, have picked songs from Project Moon games twice in a row now, while Discord server admin jorj is versed in asking Touhou Project original tracks for this celebration, twice in a row... and from the same game, too!
Indeed, the track whose title can be translated as "The Path to Yomi Where None Turn Back" comes from Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost, the same official Touhou game which contained the previously-featured Itsudatsu-sha-tachi no Mugekō 〜 Kingdam of Nothingness. While that track was the stage music from the 19th mainline game's incident perpetrator Zanmu Nippaku, this here track instead belongs to her trusty subordinate: Hisami Yomotsu (豫母都日狭美), a youkai working as a "catch" to attract living beings and drag them to Hell afterwards for a remuneration. Her ability of "never letting anything slip her grasp" are well shown in many of the Touhou game's individual character storylines, as most of the 'incident-solving' wannabes of sorts end up being dragged in front of Zanmu, so she can efficiently stall for time in order to try seeing her Hell-ruling plans to fruition.
As the name might suggest, she's based on the mythological figure of the Yomotsu-shikome (黄泉醜女), an "Ugly Woman of the Underworld" which was first heard in early Japanese literature tellings about the myths of the creation gods in Shintoism: Izanagi-no-Mikoto and her spouse Izanami-no-Mikoto. After Izanami's death by giving birth to the couple's final son Kagutsuchi, the enraged Izanagi set to depart into the Underworld to try bring her spouse back to the surface, only to find out of her already eating of the Land's deadly spoils and unable to leave. Shocked by the revelation and agape by the rottingappearence of her deceased spouse, Izanagi ran away in her sleep, but Izanami tried to stop him and keep him down with all of the Underworld's forces, including the Yomotsu-Shikome who was the closest to the pursuit to drag him down for good, only to ultimately fail and Izanami sealing the access to the Underworld by blocking the entrance slope with a huge boulder.
Hisami Yomotsu's theme is one to set up for the player a very specific scenario in accordance to ZUN's notes of the song ingame, describing its bizarre tempo as a force to push someone from behind and into someplace from where it's not possible to turn back. In his own words, it's Stage 5 music material, so you can be sure to be facing the incident-facilitator-in-second when you start hearing it ingame!
Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow! jschlattGood thing that the track of yours I was more interested to research around was eventually drawn by the wheel! However, it's less due to user Tenmak's request based on a classic song from frosty times and more for the fact that I've seen this smarmy smug mug in the thumbnail reposted a bunch of times across the period that the Wish List requests channel was open to ramp up my curiosity on it!
The original song this is based on is an eponymous piece from 1945, coming from a couple of renowned artists of the time: American lyricist/songwriter Sammy Cahn and Brodway-renowned musical composer Jule Styne from London. In a post-WWII climate, the two were in California on July of that year lamenting another kind of bothersome climate -that is to say, the Summer heatwaves- to the point of wishing for cooler atmospherical conditions... and inadvertitedly coming up with the short tune's core concept! What would be later known as Let It Snow! was recorded on Fall of the same year by baritone/Big Band leader Vaughn Wilton Monroe and the song was released after 1945's Thanksgiving day, leading to the piece to be played when Winter-y times are knocking at the door, not limited to the Christmas season!
Needless to say, many a performer has released cover versions of this Winter classic from America, but the very-recent version we're looking at is born out of some peculiar circumstances and marks the commercial musical debut of jschlatt, an American gaming-related content creator bolstering a few brands beyond the usual streaming antics, including a gaming beverage brand and a content creator network in One True King. In collaboration with fellow compatriotic streamer Ludwig Ahrgen, he also curates a channel for original royalty-free recordings of classical and gaming-inspired music to be used for everyone's content media creation needs, under the name of Lud and Schlatts Musical Emporium.
With the rise in recent years of artificial intelligence services, more and more musical deepfakes started spreading around the Web, ranging from song covers with cartoon characters to living beings of past and present times... including the same jshlatt, who in response has decided on December last year to fight back the rise of deepfakes, with a song cover on his own of Frank Synatra's My Way. Despite the warm reception, the cover was taken down by the copyright-upholding Unioversal Music Records on the charge of copyright infringement, so the popular streamer has bided the wait for an entire year... up until this very December's beginning, with the release of his commercial debut album A Very 1999 Christmas with many an original cover of traditional Christmas and Winter-affine holiday songs. The project was highly supported by saxophonist Thomas Wright Scott -formerly affiliated to The Blues Brothers band, no less!- for the creation of all invlved music sheets, with select singles being uploaded on his own YouTube channel. Despite having his first upload -a cover of Santa Clause is Comin' To Town- was shunned due to the same copyright-claiming accuses, the official one for Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow! still stands strong!... I mean, not that fans re-uploading content from popular content creators has ever stopped the works of the Web- just ask the Plastic Love fans!
Vatrum Laur vs TatshThis choice piece requested by bol comes from an M3-debuting album release from last year: End-April's Eternal Scale by Tatsuya "Tatsh" Shimizu, in the album's collaboration piece with NO Chimimouryou composer Laur. What's interesting about this album release among many is its ties with a freely-accesible isekai webnovel on pixiv from late October 2020, by the title of HARMONIX. Most of Tatsh's latest album doujin releases draw their jacket art from said webnovel's many related artworks that are available on the same pixiv profile, too!
Since we've had plenty of times to talk about the foundations of Laur and Tatsh (as if three Song Series Showcase pages weren't enough for the latter), we might as well have some lip service for the latest individual projects surrounding the two composers in recent memory. For the 'no Mai'/Rose/JP Shinto creationism gods trilogy songs maker, we can nover the remix of Massive New Crew's song VELVET for an official Groove Coaster-related remix album (November 2023's Groove anthem party.) and he got another of his 'X' songs (Xepher and Taiko's Xa among former entries) released for the mobile music game Arcaea, as Xanathos. The same lowiro rhythm game is also relevant to Laur, seeing how he won one of its latest contests with the song Arghena, co-composed with artcore artist Feryquitous.
Trash Metal 垃圾金属 VarghskelethorThese past years, we've seen at least one (non-Vtuber) gaming content creator for the Drumvent writeups, but thanks to the drawn pick from Discord user Jarvis, we're doubling up the dose!
Hailing from the 2010-founded streaming media website Vinesauce, the 31-aged Joel Varg Johansson from Sweden has been one of its most popular content creators, spearheading the charge with streams based on cramming Windows-based operating systems with as much malware as possible, not to mention rundowns on shareware software from yesteryears. On top of the streaming venue, he's also entertaining a solo metal musicia carreer with a number of independent album releases, including this one track from April 2023's Skeletor Metal X. Most of the album's songs are remastered releases from either earlier Skeletor Metal albums or YouTube-exclusive upload, but this one Track 15 was specifically made for the album!
Twister G5 Project...okay, while this song's title might lead some to believe about a clever segway for more Varghskeletor lore talk, this song's origins are nothing of the likes! This pick from caaiitlin, in fact, comes from one of Masahiro Aoki's earlier musical acts, one of the firsts for which he was only known by his "Godspeed" alias!
Twister is the 2nd track in the album-debut bearing the same name of the unit behind it: G5 Project, of Godspeed's own ViViX label. Joining the 10-years-lasting act are also Takashi "Takaji" Nagisawa (長澤 孝志), Yamato Masaoka (正岡大和) of current affiliation with the INSPION sound company and the nicknamed-ones Nike(ニケ) and a2c, the latter also a member of fripSide and MintJam, the duo that regaled Taiko gaming with the Namco Original Growing Up. Later on, Twister was also reprinted for the G5 Project's final album release: November 2016's G5 10th Anniversary Best, this time around as the 3rd-listed track.
Beat Syncer (ビートシンカー) DIVELA feat. Hatsune Miku (DIVELA feat.初音ミク)Right on cue for Christmas Eve, the final Vocaloid song request for this edition was drawn. I'd be apologizing for Discord user caaiitlin to mistakengly misquoting the request for yesterday's drawn pick to them, but it turns out their actual request was the next one drawn up for the day after, so I guess everything is fine now!
Premiering online on July 20th in 2018, Beat Syncer was one of the tracks of the nicknamed DIVELA to release on the hot trail of the composer's firat major Vocaloid hit METEOR, the winner of 2018's Hatsune Miku Magical Mirai concert line's song contest og just 4 months prior. Always in the same year, the Hall of Fame later-to-be song would receive its single debut on November of the same year, only to be featured on September 2019 inside DIVELA's first album: the Hatsune Miku-centric Mirai Connection (ミライコレクション). Notably enough, the song became playable as part of the 7th Vocaloid DLC pack in the ongoing Groove Coaster Wai Wai Party for the Nintendo Switch (link), currently the lone entry in the series to receive support to this day.
IZANA t+pazolite vs P*Light / ArcaeaWe made it once more- Christmas Day! We've got really few Wish List-y requests left on the drawing board this year so I'm ditching the draw of they year and have all three leftover requests barge in!
We start with numbertworen's request, coming from an UK-based company's longrunning mobile music game: Arcaea. It's a game thas was often described among players as the "mobile SOUND VOLTEX", due to the presence of cyan and magenta sliders (in the same color scheme as SDVX's) to drag your fingers around the screen with for gameplay means, alongside the more-conventional tap-only markers. With time, the came became for known for its story (along the unconventional ways to progress forward on it) and the many many collaborations and song transplants from music games, both arcade and console/mobile-versed ones.
One of Arcaea's recurring collaborations, however, lies with the HARDCORE TANO°C label and its artists, coming back about once every year-and-a-half to deliver a bunch of original songs, with the first round including mostly-collaborative songs with 2+ artists on, including the BATTLE NO.1 that's also available in Taiko gaming. Among its originals is IZANA from t+pazolite and the UK Hardcore/freeform composer P*Light, with a girl in ts album jacket art (Nami) who eventually would become available as a playable Navigator in later years' TANO*C collaboration event. While the digital single release has happened simultaneously with the Arcaea collaboration project on June 20th, 2020, its extended version had to wait for three more years to be baked and being ultimately included in t+pazolite's FAKE CIRCUS album from April 2023.
Haunted Dance Mr.Asyu / Tone SphereWith oatshmeal's request, we strike the foreign music game iron one last time in 2024! It's for a game from the key lead composer behind the original Cytus's story-linked music, too.
Yasutaka Senoo (妹尾泰隆), more commonly known by the Sta alias, is indeed the lone driving force behind the mobile rhythm game Tone Sphere, strong with his previous visual works for BMS songs, including some of composer sasakure.UK's earliest hit like the BMS-contest-famed Jack-The-Ripper◆. While the dynamic background flashes before your eyes, a barrage of circular notes appear and have to be tapped with the right rhythm, alongside other special markers to make you simul-tap and flick your finger around in a set path.
Originally announced via livestream on May 2019 for a playable outing later in the year, Haunted Castle is made by chiptune-attuned composer Ms.Asyu (YouTube; SoundCloud). Likewise with IZANA, we have a select character in the related jacket art to become more relevant among the game's fanbase lter on; for this one song, that is owed to the little scribble ghost in it, one whose name was originally revealed by Sta himself over Twitter (link) but that eventually became known in the fanbase as "Unesko" instead, due to a machine traslation reading of the quited tweet giving out UNESCO instead, as in the namesake human-patronage association. It even spawned a female ghostly counterpart in YUnesko and load of inner jokes, culminating on April Fools 2022. Because yeah, if the original hardest difficulty of the song is enough to give you nightmares, the so-called Haunted Melon is sure one to give headaches for week to end!
Christmas? Nani Sore? Oishi No? (クリスマス？なにそれ? 美味しいの？) HyadainWe end things off this year with Nedmara's song request, one that surprisingly ties in nicely with Taiko Time and its reading base across the years... and no, it's not for how Christmas is perceived as a romantic holiday in Japan, as you're about to read!
Indeed, the day set to commemorate the birth of the Christian New Testament's messiah Jesus Christ has had all sorts of parallel readings across countires and time periods and while it's mostly for that jolly old guy giving gifts across the world, in places like Japan it's also a holiday for couples, in the same light of Japan's takes on Valentine's Day and the White Day but involving both partners. In such rough times to be a single in, Kenichi Maeyamada (前山田健一) -the ever-popular anime and videogame parody/remix composer known as Hyadain (ヒャダイン)- stepped in to arrange a Jingle Bells parody from the point of view of an unlaid single in Christmas, part of the joke being in the title itself (lit. "Christmas? What's That? Does It Taste Good?"). It was also released as a commercial single by the end of 2011, where it peaked 59th and 51st respectively at Oricon and Billboard HOT 100 charts of that year's end.
If you're asking what has this song to do about our Taiko no Tatsujin blog's past, despite not being a Taiko-playable song itself is... once again, thanks to you guys' support across the years! Back in 2014, for the year's final Song of the Week we've taken a more experimental approach based on one of our discontinued fanchart-sharing featurettes of sorts (ie.: the "Made By You" blog entries) and had a couple of songs with fancharting in front and center... and wouldn't you know it, the Hyadain song picked was actually one of the two tracks in question (the 2011 single release, that is)! Sure, the original fanchart video is long gone since then but it stands as a testament to how much we owe to you guys the support we keep receiving across the years. It's part of why silly side-features like this are born- to give back some of that appreciation in return, despite the curve balls on free time that come along the way!
Once again, thank you so much for your renewed involvment for this year's antics and merry Christmas!
