Code Geass note list

• First OP: Good
• Second ED: Good
• Irrelevant school drama: Bad
• Recap episodes: Cheap
• Combat tricks: Clever

For someone who wants to take over the world, Lelouch's life has had little in the way of politics, at times arbitrarily so. But even glossing over that little incident where diplomacy just kind of failed because The Writers Said So, talking with people just isn't how Lelouch rolls. He's great at talking to and talking at people, but when it comes to mutual exchange of ideas, drop the mutual.

If actions have consequences in Code Geass, and there's some indication that they do most of the time as opposed to when it is convenient, then Lelouch cannot possibly win with his current angle of attack. But is it ever a great vehicle for rousing the rabble. Nothing unites the masses quite like a series that says, Screw the rules, I've got hax. I myself will confess to having fallen victim to God Mode Syndrome on numerous occasions. If that term hasn't yet been taken, it's mine. You read it here first.

There is something incredibly satisfying with watching God Mode in action. Perfect situational awareness? Wall hax. Firing on a patrol group through the wall? Typical Counter-Strike highlight reel clip. Large Hadron Collider Cannon and various one-man army robots? Cheap, but effective when used in moderation. They're pushing the boundaries a bit there.

I can hear the horn of an oncoming train in the distance. My feeling is that the writers wrote themselves into a box, and any continuation into the second season will either be utterly brilliant, like two Shanghai maglev trains passing each other at 300+ km/h, or it will be, well, yeah.

Best moment of the two episode finale? Seeing what was arguably the underdog defenders rally and counter-attack across no man's land. The Empire proved to be the better belligerent of the day, able to regroup despite a fallen commander. Where the Black Knights' centralized hierarchy fell into disarray following the flight of their leader, Britannia's forces had capable commanders who took the initiative when orders from the top ceased to trickle down.

Random moment of the two episode finale? Ougi being shot. Villetta goes all ninja to escape/kill some rioters, infiltrate the school, just to shoot one guy whose incapacitation is nothing compared to having the Napoleon call a snap vacation. One scene that could have been done without.

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Hitohira: Of drama queens, dreams, and partings

All good lies contain a hint of truth. Hitohira weaves the stage into the world outside of it that simply pulls in the viewer. It's not surreal so much as it's reality exaggerated. And sometimes, there is no suspension of disbelief required.

Presenting Exhibit A

Even if it was brief, Nono's indiscriminate use of her acting skills to bring terror upon her foes friends others was a great tie-in. Contrast this to Mugi's inability to act her way out of having to go to practice.

Introducing the N-1000

Structurally, Hitohira could have, should have, ended at episode 11. The series isn't worse off because of episode 12, but episode 11 was a high note whereas episode 12 meandered and felt awkward, especially in the second half.

On dreams

First Planetes, and to a (much) lesser extent Moonlight Mile, and now Hitohira. Moonlight Mile is actually pretty pragmatic, with little in the way of moral dilemmas, while Planetes deliberates much upon the cost of dreams from the perspective of the dreamer. Hitohira is all about how to come to terms with the dreamer and the hurt that they cause, real or imagined.

The Mirei-Nono dynamic is more straightforward to comprehend than Mugi-Kayo, partly owing to the fact that it's much more severe. Mirei acts partly out of guilt — even though the cause of Nono's condition is never known — and partly out of fear of the unknown. Nono will likely require surgery in the future, as her condition worsened prior to the performance. She could wind up with a breathing tube in her throat for the rest of her life.

Who is being inconsiderate here? Nono, who would and does lay it on the line for one last shot at stage acting? Or Mirei, for interfering in Nono's business and attempting to deny her free will?

The series has an answer, and it's an unsatisfactory one to me, in the case of Nono, but one that is perfectly fine for Mugi.

Not everyone can be a Hachimaki or Locksmith and put their own dreams ahead of others. Kayo apparently struggles with her dreams throughout the series, and perhaps Hitohira warrants a re-watch in some key sections to see if there are signs of this.

I found it a bit trite that Kayo would draw support from a Mugi, on a stage, who didn't believe the words she uttered then and doesn't believe them in the immediate aftermath of the play. That aside, the problem lies with Mugi, who eventually comes to terms with the situation and lets Kayo go.

The answer, which was also embedded in the play, is common enough. Tough times are inevitable, but everyone rides them out. By extension, there's no point in hiding from them, and trying to only aggravates the pain and regret. Consequently, you should support yourself and support others.

Does it make sense, then, only because Kayo has less to lose? She's only going abroad to study; it's not as if she will never come home. She will probably do fine regardless. But what about Nono? Her scenario has more grim outcomes, and it could be (or could not be) aggravated by her acting.

Is it better to go out like a meteorite then? Live briefly but brilliantly? There is no middle ground when it comes to Nono. To go out with no regrets is great, but it's as if she has decided her voice is terminal. It's strange to think of Nono as simultaneously courageous and dignified, yet defeatist, but that's because she's so extreme in her thinking.

You may not agree with Nono (and I do not, if that wasn't clear), but she does get things done. She is better at apologizing later than seeking permission first.

On partings

I wonder at times whether the amount of emotion involved in saying goodbye is proportional to the strength of bond between those parting. Or is to be emotional just a sign of weakness and, in Mugi's case, selfishness? I should preface this question by saying that I ask about casual partings. No one's being sent to a war zone, no one's leaving a war zone.

Being the most recent, and thus most relevant, I offer the reader my university experience. I can say that it doesn't particularly pain me to part with my classmates. I made some good friends, some who will be in town, some who have had to move back home, and some who have plain left the country for work or school. I shed no tears, and I doubt they did either.

A shaking of hands. A hug. A promise to keep in touch. That's all there is to it.

What good does it do anyone to cry? It's bittersweet, yes, but is it sad? Are we all gathered on the last day of class, or the day of convocation, to mourn the passing of our undergraduate lives? No! It's a time to celebrate new beginnings, to wish others success and exchange contact information.

I will say that I have cried when my parents told me how proud they were. It happened on two occasions, but for convocation they just wanted to know if I was going to find a job for the summer. We've all become a bit more pragmatic, I think.

Perhaps Hitohira's message is lost on myself and those around me, but I think I will be touched by the sometimes brutally frank interactions of the characters for a while to come. I'm not sad to see it end. Rather, we'll keep in touch.

Edit: Most of the above was written having not finished the final episode. Seeing the rooftop scene made me think that perhaps Mugi did finally understand what I felt about partings. It's a big world out there, willing to accommodate everyone with a dream. It's an optimistic world, yes, but one that anyone that holds hope must believe in.

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Beautiful World at 192 kbps

Utada Hikaru enters the teens in her twenties. For more of Hikki's rebellious look, see U.BLOG

Thanks to Kuroshiro for the lyrics translation. Definitely written about Shinji, but from someone else's perspective. It's a bit too solemn to be from Asuka, though, and Rei is just this black box.

So! A few days have passed since a full length, non-radio rip version leaked. There's no sense in delaying the inevitable, so I am here today to answer the $11.99 question (plus shipping and handling) question: How does it loop?

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As Beautiful World opens with ethereal synthesizers and echoing percussion, anything can happen. When the piano chords enter like it's 1996 at the height of the dream music craze, the realization hits that it's going to be pretty good.

Beautiful World has elements in common with both This is Love and Keep Tryin'. Like Keep Tryin', Beautiful World opens with atmospheric ambivalence before getting into the song proper with the chorus. In between the verse and chorus, there is a distinctly contrasting bridge in singing style, key, and harmony.

Structurally, both Beautiful World and This is Love have no significant instrumental breaks until the end, although this is a bit of a tenuous connection given that This is Love has a second verse section in the middle.

In the lower range there's this earthy, tribal feel to the song. It's a good foundation for the lines that float gracefully above. I have heard quite a few good piano parts as of late, and Beautiful World just adds to the collection.

There's just one aspect that prevents Beautiful World from topping best atmospheric electronic track, Making Love off ULTRA BLUE, but it's a big strike.

There isn't enough contrast.

There is a lack of a range jump between sections. This is Love had a brief break right before the chorus, Keep Tryin' breaks into the chorus with a bang, and Making Love experiences its own dramatic register shift.

You could argue that Beautiful World is a lot more dignified than either of the above three, so register skips would contradict its character. Fair enough. There are other ways of generating contrast, and the first one I can think of is change in texture.

I suspect that Beautiful World suffers from a lack of sufficient texture primarily in the chorus. The verse is actually pretty spare in terms of accompaniment. The chorus needs some serious bulking up. It should be like some gigantic steamroller of a chorus, with bottomless bass support while Hikki belts out her alternating low and high register lines.

Beautiful World sits in an awkward place. It's supposed to be more energetic than Keep Tryin' but fails to top Making Love for intensity. As a result, it doesn't loop as well as either of the above. It's also not a ponderous work compared to the 800 pound compositional gorilla known as BLUE.

Last criticism, honest. Why does Hikki's voice crack during her final lines before the outro? It's likely deliberate, but it just reeks of a mistake.

The extended outro is probably the other best part of Beautiful World. I can never return to the days of Dreamland without feeling that it's just a bit hokey, but this outro section fills in the gaps while retaining the dreamlike core. The continuously running piano, the ghostly backing voices, and the synthesizers are pure ambiance.

If Beautiful World/Kiss & Cry ever made it to iTunes outside of Japan, I'd probably cherry-pick this track from the single, although I don't hold out much hope since the current iTunes selection is all album material. The other tracks are blah, but I can elaborate later.

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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.

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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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Doujin Work drives a hard bargain

Shamelessly cheap on the art. Sets up a misunderstanding and rides that pony for all its worth. If the writers have really hit gold, like in episode 3, they can carry it for the entire 11 minutes.

I liken it to some of those less than 10 minute shorts that appear on YouTube. Most of the time the production values aren't there — other than some dude with a camera and a shaky hand — but it doesn't matter because it's YouTube. Just saying the name automatically sets expectations (toward the basement end). But if there's anything to be learned from YouTube, it's that content doesn't have to be pretty to be profitable.

Doujin Work is probably going to net someone a decent reward given the amount of effort involved. It does what it does well, which is to deliver one or two moments per episode with minimal effort. Whether the venture is jaded or gutsy, I can't decide, but I'll respect both.

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Fire those retro rockets

There are some things I wouldn't willingly listen to, like atonal music and by extension most pop music. Oldies are included in that list and I've only ever wanted to listen to that stuff due to purely academic reasons, like passing a contemporary music history course.

It's not that old music is strictly bad, but I am not a child of that era or, it seems, any era at all, so I feel this generational disconnect. Although digital recovery from analog sources has worked wonders, it's a strike against me for not being able to shake off the stigma that songs still sound old even if they are light years better than before.

It is probably also a strike against me for using anime as an excuse a gateway into the past. Well, whatever works. I know of several people who would never in their right mind listen to big band jazz, but for whom the jazz soundtrack contributed to Cowboy Bebop's appeal.

So far Doujin Work's ED is the only stand out feature amid a standard OP and mostly mindless content. Mai continues her fun retro schtick in Yumemiru Otome [320 kbps], hauling in a Dixieland band, walking bass, and backup vocals. Jazz clarinets defy classical conventions perhaps solely because they're not played in a classical fashion. Thin reeds, bright sound.

The rhythm section keeps things on a pretty even keel. Only the clapping falls on the back beat. There isn't much in the way of typical jazz syncopation other than in the instrumental breaks, and Mai's accents tend to fall on all of the beats. This is written like a march, something that most songs try to avoid if at all possible. But, as Yumemiru Otome proves, marches don't have to be dry and boring affairs. They can be, dare I say it, fun.

Nakashima Mika is listed on her profile as one of her favourite singers. That's hard to see, as the two seem only connected through the very large umbrella known as jazz. Within that sphere, their singing styles are polar opposites with Mai so far being much brighter and upbeat.

I'm still impressed that she is only 15. She carries a maturity and understanding usually possessed by singers at least 3 years her senior, although whenever I think this I should remember that Utada Hikaru and Tamaki Nami, among others, hit it big at 15. Miracles seem to happen more often than I'd like to think.

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