Some kind person who'd like to remain anonymous bought me Forza Horizon 4 Ultimate Edition as an early Hearth's Warming present (it's getting delisted on the 15th) and I've been having a ball. I'm a decent sim driver, but this is more arcadey than I'm used to. The British setting adds a great extra dimension, though. I've been to Broadway! Anyway, back to the music of nine years ago, and as usual here's the run-down of the criteria. At least one of these must be satisfied for a song to be included:
Rule 1: Still available in the same or (1b) similar form direct from the/an original artist.
Rule 2: Available from a third party, with reason to believe the artist is fine with this.
Rule 3: So famous that it would be plain silly to leave it out.
Rule 4: Being unlisted is not, on its own, grounds for exclusion.
I managed to feature all five tracks in the relevant part of the chart last time, but no such luck this week I'm afraid. I don't want to give away the identities of the people behind no. 93, but I will say that it was a multi-person track with the singers' real-world faces in shot on the video, and perhaps those are understandably especially vulnerable. Still, I can still feature four songs, and that's not too bad! Here's the list:
95: Starlight ft. Mica – Forgotten
94: SophiiVA – Nightmares
93: skipped
92: Starlight – Glimmer
91: Synthis – The Mirror
Unless you're reading this on mobile, which a lot of you probably are, then there'll be a jump break any moment. After that, it'll be the usual mixture of embeds, info and ramblings. Off we go!
"Starlight" was a project initiated by Proctra, whose YouTube this appeared on. I'm not sure where to find Mica these days, if at all, but another artist who worked on this has remained very well known: PegasYs. It's very much a Chrysalis song, in which she plots her revenge after the Canterlot defeat. There are quite a few nods here to "This Day Aria" to underline the inspiration. At this point we'd only seen Chryssy the once in the show, and so her distorted voice is fair enough, though it does occasionally make hearing the lyrics tricky. It is rather on the long side, at only a smidgen under seven minutes. Just a couple of years ago, Ponies at Dawn featured a Quadrivia remix in the, uh, "complextro/moombahcore" genre. Yeah. Returning to the original, it's gone from Proctra's Bandcamp, but a 320k MP3 remains available on a name-your-price basis on Starlight's Gumroad. (NB: email address required.)
Rule 1: uploaded to YouTube 22 Jul 2015
I don't think I'd thought of the name SophiiVA for years, but her YouTube is still around, albeit under the name "Athy Ch. 🦉💉" (yes, with the emojis). This was apparently one of the first songs she ever wrote, in about two hours at that, and it's unsurprisingly about Luna. Inspired by "Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep?" it sees her lament how she has to fight ponies' nightmares even though she can't beat her own. It's a rather nice acoustic guitar number, and SophiiVA's voice is very nice indeed. She undersells herself by apologising "for the scuff" in the song's YouTube description; this works satisfyingly as it is. It was famous enough in its day for there to be a fine 174UDSI remix. Sadly there's no high-quality download for the original that I've found: the MP3 linked in the aforementioned YT description is only 128kpbs.
93: skipped
Here we have another song from Proctra's "Starlight" project, and again PegasYs worked on it too. And look who it's about! Kind of an inevitable subject for a project with that name, huh? In fact, rather than "Starlight – Glimmer", the track was listed on Proctra's YouTube as "Starlight = Glimmer". How appropriate! As you'll note from the release date, this song came out when all we knew of Glimmy was her turn in "The Cutie Map". This is a lot shorter than "Forgotten" at just three and a half minutes, and in a different genre: glitch hop. I rather like that style, so unsurprisingly I rather like this song! Nothing too startling in the lyrics, but they scan pretty well. As with the earlier track, it's available on the Starlight Gumtree for the price of your email address.
Synthis is one of the bigger names of this era of Pony music, and he certainly delivered with this slice of synthy electronic goodness. Indeed, Synthis himself was very pleased with it on its release. It tells the tale of a pony who looks into a mirror rumoured to show the watcher's true form... and sees a changeling gazing back. He then struggles with the meaning of what he's just seen: is it him, is it a trick by the mirror, what? The song is very solidly produced with heartfelt lyrics and fine beats, and I'm a little surprised it hasn't remained better known. Ah well, here it is anyway! On Bandcamp, the song is only available as part of the name-your-price Empty Skies album.
that's not even a Synthis track I liked enough to hang onto and it's still fantastic :D he's just so good!
ReplyDeleteI didn't even know that track before now... but yeah, it's great. :D
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