October music thoughts
Here's some new (to me) music I enjoyed in October.
ZeroRanger Arranged Album -GREEN ARRANGE-
This was an arrange album by Resonant Union and System Erasure that got together a ton of different VGM-related composers to write arranges of songs from ZeroRanger. I haven't played ZeroRanger, but the album was so diverse that I found it really compelling regardless. The experience of listening to an arrange album without really knowing the original soundtrack was actually really fun: it was great to pick up on the little recurring motifs across songs even through the filter of each arranger. This is all to say I really enjoyed even without having any background on the original work, and I'm sure it's better if you do.
The album is available fully on Youtube, and you can buy it on Bandcamp. Here are a few of my highlights:
This is the third song in the album and it's incredible. One of my favorite VGM arrange albums of all time is the SMT Chaos Disc from 1993, because it takes a lot of relatively simple songs from SMT I and turns them into these grandiose proggy rock epics. This song kind of scratched the same itch for me.
These two songs are the first on Disc 3 and they start it off great. I love the transition from the melancholic piano of the first song to the pumping electronic sound of UNSTOPPING: it kind of feels like you're going from the quiet sadness of space to the danger of like a big starship or something.
I really like the instruments on this song: I feel like these kinds of like Maplestory-style pads and synths are a huge source of nostalgia for a lot of Gamers but they kind of get underutilized by people looking to make "cozy" music. Listening to the original version of this song is also very funny after you listen to this
This is just a very straightforwardly beautiful song to close out the album. The instrumentation is wonderful, and both Emma Kobin and Eevamari's voices knock it out of the park. I really appreciate the choice to use the Heart Sutra in Sanskrit instead of translated to some other language, too. It makes the song feel really special.
This album seems like it was reasonably successful, so I hope they end up making a similar thing for Void Stranger eventually. I think the soundtrack for that game is also pretty rich for arranging.
ウソのつきかた
I learned about this album after seeing an announcement for the 2nd installment of it, which is supposed to come out soon. It's a Kasane Teto-only collaboration album that features a lot of producers I hadn't heard about before, but I really enjoyed most of the songs in it. Some highlights:
I'm normally not that into Sasuke Haraguchi's songs but I loved this last one (even more than the other one in the same album). It hasn't wormed its way out of my brain yet. I don't even know what 反乱算数 is but I'm happy to partake in it
Suite - KAF
This is technically not really a new release, but KAF recently opened a Bandcamp and one of the albums it launched with was a collection of all of the singles released as part of the first set of Suite tracks. The idea behind the Suite series was for KAF to collaborate with composers and singers that aren't affiliated with Kamitsubaki, and I do think their selection was pretty good: Maigo Hanyuu is a fun Vocaloid composer, Hakushi Hasegawa is obviously very in right now and I really like their contribution, and Miyavi's track is cool and edgy in a way KAF songs usually aren't. It's fun to kind of see KAF try on different clothes with all these different musicians, and I particularly enjoyed it back in ~2022 when a lot of her official songs felt very same-y.
The album doesn't come with the music videos, but they're all also pretty good and diverse.
Highlights: