Darker than Black shareholder applauds Serious Business

(Progress: 25/25)

But disapproves of child labour soldiers.


Of the mysteries surrounding Hei, be it his lack of a payment scheme although he ate a lot, or his un-Contractor-like irrationalities, it never occurred to me that he is the only Contractor in the series to wear a mask. I shrugged it off for the usual reasons, like he might be recognized by the authorities, but he didn't commence operations starting episode one, and no other Contractor took measures to hide their face.

In the beginning, there was a clear distinction between Hei as a regular person and Hei as a Contractor. The lightning bolt on the mask isn't some dishonest bluff. When he puts on the mask, he puts on lightning, on at least two levels. Later on, we see that he uses his abilities without the mask, a symbolic blurring of divisions.

People have long feared corporations. Images come to mind of mindless drones, the stereotypical company man defined only through his work, labouring under the equally dispassionate leadership that rules with an iron fist and is concerned only about its immediate interests. What is a Contractor if not a model cog, supposed to carry out orders unquestionably and without regard for the effects it may have on others?

How ironic is it then, that the reaction against Contractors is embodied in a group that is organized and called the Syndicate. With that knowledge, many of the missions that take place can be framed in the context of dealing with rogue Contractors or any objects related to the Hell's Gate.

Darker than Black has been open-ended on a number of items, one of them being the Syndicate/Organization/Illuminati. It is claimed that they essentially own the world's intelligence agencies, and yet the Russian FSB had sent out two Contractors to gather intelligence on the Syndicate.

What was the Syndicate attempting to accomplish by smuggling Dolls? When would this supposedly all-powerful organization resort to that kind of means for fund-raising?

The series concludes with an incomplete view of the world and its major players. Partial pictures have a disadvantage to more fleshed out views, partly because there is the suspicion that even the writers don't have a definitive idea of where things are going. It also allows such things as the springing of arbitrary surprises at the last minute, like Hei's sister's full abilities and the mechanism behind the disappearance of the Heaven's Gate.

At the end of the day, Darker than Black is not a series with instant appeal. There are no broke bounty hunters to instantly relate to (the broke part, of course). Its subject matter touches upon issues that can hit a little too close to home at times, pointing out things that we may not wish to acknowledge - let alone discuss - about ourselves or others in general. There isn't much in the way of answers, either, just a push to consider and compare their world and ours. I think I did see one message, which may or may not have some relevance outside of the series:

Behind every Contractor there is a human. One only has to afford them the dignity of being one to see that.

Miscellaneous

DtB 25 was the first episode watched on my new system, in a resolution exceeding 704x400. I could get used to this. When in doubt, just throw more hardware at the problem.

Or new hardware. I witnessed first-hand the bursty activity that compressed video can generate when trying to watch video sourced from external storage over USB 1.1. In scenes with either lots of movement (Gurren-Lagann ED) or localized high-speed motion (Gurren-Lagann OP with the circling Mugans) over many frames, the USB 1.1 connection is saturated.

The high-level reason is that something like DivX is unable employ large amounts of prediction between frames. The other extreme is a still shot, with will compress much better. It's easy to predict the position of a motionless object.

704x400 can still saturate the poky USB 1.1 connection on occasion, but in general it requires a pause to fill up the buffer and clear the bottleneck, so I've generally stuck to 704x400 resolution in the past. Of course, there's no problem with USB 2.0.

What about moving higher resolution media to internal storage for playback? I had never de-fragmented my old hard drive, and since it is more or less at capacity in addition to being almost four years old, it can have a hard time serving up the necessary bandwidth for stall-free playback. Yes, it was that fragmented. Playing back live performances, at relatively uncompressed 10,000 kbps MPEG-2, was not a good experience, if it could be called even that.

On the topic of new stuff, this current theme is broken in my latest installation Firefox, with grey flooding into the sidebar. It looks like the hunt is on for something different, unless I can get this resolved.

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Darker than Black: The Hell's Gate Cult

(Progress: Episode 24)

In addition to Tensai Okamura and Yoko Kanno, add Bones and falling stars to the list of things that Cowboy Bebop and Darker than Black have in common.

Maybe I'm a little late in making the connection — the South American entity was called Heaven's Gate, after all. In my defence, 10 years ago is a long time, and I had a narrow(er) world view back then. Budget cuts and teacher's strike were terms that were infinitely more relevant at the time, as they lead to no school.

The term works on a couple levels, like how there was a cult, the fact that millions died (although who knows if that's the case if they can't set foot in the area around the gate), and how a war was fought around and possibly over Heaven's Gate.

Contractors are an odd sort. They are generally described in the vaguest of terms as self-interested and having no conscience. Neither trait is special. One would have to have no conscience to take on killing people as a job, and being self-interested and apathetic to most other things unrelated to survival comes with the turf.

What is curious is how Contractors have continued to put up with killing each other and important people for over a decade. I'm not quite sure how risking one's neck to kill someone else serves one's interests better than, say, a cushy desk job. I suppose being in essence a mercenary does have a pigeon-holing effect.

The fact that there's a chicken and egg problem — that if you just quit then others Contractors will come after you, so no one is particularly inclined to leave — may also have something to do with it. And if nothing else, non-Contractor special forces teams have proved perfectly capable of taking their marks to the cleaners, although those can turn into messy affairs.

It seems that the amount of free-will that a Contractor exercises is proportional to their effectiveness as a killer. Wei is so bad-ass that he develops pride and ambition. The irony is that like Maki, that ridiculously powerful bomber kid, the human flaws he exhibits on the job lead to his downfall.

Hei's situation is blurred by the possibility that he may have inherited his powers as opposed to being arbitrarily assigned them along with a shiny new star, and thus may not have signed the boilerplate employment agreement (unless his payment is to eat a ton and never get fat), but he's still one of the best Contractors in the field. How does he demonstrate his free-will? By rescuing his teammates, because he can.

I don't think that most of the sub-ordinates of Evening Primrose have free-will so much as they are rational people acting on the information given to them. If someone went up to Mai and told her, That accelerator you're defending will kill you if switched on, she would surely think twice about toasting Amagiri and Brita. Enlightened self-interest does have enlightenment as a prerequisite.

As the show gets set to conclude, we see Contractors serving their true employer. They may do so only reluctantly and without the zealotry one might expect of a cult, but they are inextricably bound to its existence. It's the worst kind of working relationship.

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Tsukiakari GET

Someone at the mixer board must have adjusted the balance in the two most demanding passages of the full length version [YouTube], but the change in dynamics is only slightly perceptible. I don't think it's a range thing, but more of a conscious decision to not step up, which I don't understand. Those two sections are the worst points of the song to take a backseat to the backgrounds. If you've got it, belt it out!

Her live performance was pretty [YouTube]. No pitching problems, but still her upper register is muted. She also clipped her phrases short. Still pretty though.

For reference, I commented that the TV version was weak. Not fragile, weak. I extend that opinion to the full length version.

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Latin is back, in black

In keeping with anime as a gateway to music that I wouldn't otherwise listen to, most of the instrumental stuff I have comes from OST's. Still, I haven't given an OST serious consideration in ever, and to be honest I wouldn't have given the Darker than Black OST a spin were it not for the enthusiasm of an early adopter.

From the 15.24 km view, Darker than Black's soundtrack is another dominantly jazz themed score similar to Cowboy Bebop. I didn't ever see Cowboy Bebop to its conclusion, but all of my friends liked the soundtrack even though, as noted before, they wouldn't normally listen to jazz. They liked it, then, for the novelty factor. I didn't find it as awesome as my peers did, with really only Tank!, Piano Black, Blue, and Green Bird being stand-out pieces, and even Tank! was pretty dry for a big band jazz work.

If nothing else, Darker than Black's original soundtrack is a better effort by Yoko Kanno, sticking closer to some of the influences that define the pieces. I'm not a student of contemporary music and have nothing to back that (or the following) up with, but I think that most of the pieces don't suffer from the cookie cutter effect that Tank! did.

Still, most of these tracks are necessarily pure exposition, and generally aren't allowed to go anywhere throughout their mostly less than 3 minute windows. The reality is that an OST is not a score, just a collection of incidental music that is taken for granted even when consumed with the animation content.

Specifics after these messages.

Update: For a third opinion, see A Gabriela Robin Site.

Update 2: Another review, off Anime Nano.

* * *

GO Dark is pretty straightforward jazz rock (fusion) with a few standard hooks. Trumpets feature prominently, whether they're wailing in the commotion or punctuate the sax solo.

Howling is, well, Howling. It's dark, it's hard rock, and it's got a decent amount of contrast packed into 1.5 minutes. Heck, it's even got vibrato. It's not written by Yoko Kanno, so I'm not going to add anything further.

High heel Runaway is probably an Afro-Cuban jazz form, maybe a fast rumba. I can't pick out the rhythm on the high hat, but it would probably yield a good indication of the style. Prominent piano with stylistic runs and improv section. Nice fade (to black!) tricks the unsuspecting first time listener. There is no back beat — most Latin jazz is played straight up — but energy is derived from syncopation heavily laced throughout the piece.

Tenderly sounds like Take Five. It's not quite quintuple-time (it's phrasing in two major groupings of triplets), but it's got that light, game show music atmosphere. Subtle back beat due to emphasis on the second group of triplets.

Sid is…I won't even try to guess. It's rustic and does not conform to any Western music scale. I suppose that in keeping with the Latin music trend it could be a Latin rustic style, maybe a flamenco derivative. Oh, I did say I wasn't going to try to guess. I'll stop now.

Was — the great urban jungle. Opens with a line sounding like Morse Code, the symbol for all things that beep electronic. Even though there's a wistful guitar line, it yields to the genre that holds greatest influence on this piece: drum and bass. It's hard to mess up drum and bass since it's just pure atmosphere. It's also why drum and bass tracks tend to be insanely long and it can be hard to tell one from the other.

Since Ulrich Schnauss is epic unto himself, I will gratuitously throw in two of his drum and bass pseudonyms, Ethereal 77 and View to the Future. Moving on.

Outside — standoff-ish reverb in chords, with periods of "dead space" (stop time) where the percussion fades out and the guitar is allowed to drift, but where meter is never lost. Problem is, I don't know what the meter is. My best guess is a use of two or more odd-numbered meters that are always in flux. Polyrhythm is always disconcerting and puts the listener on edge because it's an unstable and thus tense temporal situation.

No One's Home is a jazz ballad, and a fairly straightforward one at that. It's not Blue epic because it's not as ethereal and has less build up. At only 2 minutes 43 seconds, length might have something to do with that.

Guy is a typical detective funk theme and gives the character more coolness than he deserves. That sax has way too much real guts for a guy (hah!) who just bumbles around. Nice pentatonic twist gives this piece an asian flavour. It's too bad that the sax doesn't get to expand on that pentatonic rift in the beginning.

ScatCat features, what else, scat singing. Usually scat singing is much faster, using the voice as an instrument in its own improv section. In this case, it's transplanted into a much more laid back blues, hearkening back to the days of the traveling solo performer. Can you picture it? He's muttering in a raspy voice to while sitting alone outside a deserted train station.

Keiyakusha is another big band piece, this time a tightly performed samba. Characteristic bass and percussion patterns provide most of the drive. That energy is counterbalanced by the somewhat uninspired and hollow harmonies of the trumpet line leading into and out of the trumpet solo. Nice bridge, though, which serves as a small modulating playground over sustained trumpets.

Good dancing music, and by extension, fight music, as attention is usually on the participants of either. If everyone's watching the band, there's something wrong.

Shadow is likely Afro-Cuban influenced, given the clave rhythm. The simple intro, outro, and middle passages are present to serve up and round off the two solo sections, the first for piano and the other for guitar. Overall, muted and lazy. Feels like being in a darkened bar in the middle of the afternoon, staring out at the beach.

Kuro reminds me of Hitomi no Theme, one of my favourite pieces from the Escaflowne OST. Both have that cool night atmosphere, and the guitar plays a role in both, Kuro being the more prominent employer. The opening bars gave the impression that it might have been Hitomi no Theme ported over to Latin instrumentation and composition. This isn't as sparse or fragile but it's just as solitary.

Deadly Work — dark, distorted, with vocals. Didn't find anything of interest. Kanno's English vocal work has always been a mixed bag for me. This one is going into the "nothing special" bin. It's better than the "abusing Maaya's upper register and making her sound like a nuisance underneath Steve Conte" bin.

Tentai Kansukou features cavernous piano, ethereal and haunting. Typical stargazing music, if a little short.

BlueCat — cautiously optimistic, like watching dawn break after pulling an all-nighter. That you're not holed up in your room by that point either means you're done whatever it is, or you're slacking, in which case this is the wrong music to be listening to.

Eclectic mix of instruments, keeping the Latin percussion.

Tsukiakari is more to my liking than the OP. It starts off like a casual folk song with warm piano and vocal, builds towards a high point with increased layering of strings and backing vocals, and drops out suddenly leaving Rie Fu alone in the spotlight for a brief moment before closing out. I only wish that the layering didn't dominate her upper register. She sounds so weak in the build up.

Maybe it's worth looking into the full length version.

Water Forest — urban electronica, hazy and open-ended like the future. Brings back memories of Miles-Gurtu. It's a good fit for the preview scene.

Blend in — another victory(?) for adult contemporary. Also going into the "nothing special" bin.

In no Piano is a Romantic era influenced piece with rolling arpeggios and a singing style after Chopin. Decently played, although a bit light on the touch.

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