A few new songs just got added last week to the Taiko Music Pass subscription service of the latest Taiko game, Taiko no Tatsujin: Rhythm Festival, which means that not only do I again get to make my first post of the year about VGM from the new year, but also I finally get to infodump about one of my all-time favorite rhythm game composers!
“MASEIJIN – zeta asterism -”
Composed & arranged by Hisui
Violin by hiyama
This is a sequel song to “Mahoujin -Summon Delta-” from an earlier Taiko game with similar instrumentation and composition. Mahoujin in that title is the Japanese word for magic square, which is a square of numbers where all the rows, columns, and diagonals add up to the same number; maseijin here is a magic star, which is a line drawing of a star with a number at each vertex where all the lines add up to the same number. Math!
Both pieces were written by Hisui, a composer represented by Production GIW (this is the same GIW behind Shikou Shidan: GIEEVAL EPISODE2) who’s been doing the freelance thing through his label TSUKUYOMI Records for more than two decades at this point. In addition to original music, he’s had a lot of other random projects over the years: he started off doing composition for small games, animations, and drama CDs, then he had an arc where he mostly did music for stage shows, and now in the past couple of years he’s been doing a lot of songwriting for virtual singers produced by the group WINDVOICE. Since 2013 he’s also been occasionally contributing tracks to the Taiko no Tatsujin series, and after a gap of a few years, he’s returned with this new piece.
Hisui’s an interesting composer who’s a pretty big fan of both prog rock and Japanese folk music, so you’ll find a lot of elements of those in his various projects, mixed in with his pop songwriting or orchestral music or whatever else is going on. His music is good generally but his Taiko tracks specifically I find to be by far his best work; it seems like with these pieces he gets to really just cut loose and throw everything he likes together into a consistently sick series of vibrant prog bangers, sometimes real synthy and sometimes more acoustic. And always with the odd time signatures, so much more than he uses anywhere else. The main Japanese fan wiki for the Taiko series even calls him out on his odd time usage, which is funny.
“MASEIJIN” is very much in the synthprog side of things that you’ll find in its predecessor and his “SORA” tracks: no Japanese traditional instruments or vocals here, just a lot of different keyboards, bass, drums, and thirty seconds of moderate violinin’ near the end by hiyama. It doesn’t have quite the insane and instantly iconic intro that “Mahoujin” has with the dark transposing piano chords, but there are a couple of nice syncopated stabs in there, and the section right after has some nice, trickily syncopated phrasing (it’s still just in 5/4!). At 0:49 it settles into 7/4 for most of the rest of the track (though I’d say it starts off with more of a 7/8 feel musically) and I really like the contrast in the first section between the airiness of the synth solo and the angularity of the rhythm section under it. There’s also a little bit of random cartooniness in this that I don’t remember really encountering in Hisui’s music before, a whole tone descent at 0:05 and then some chromatic movement at 2:03; I’m honestly not really sure how I feel about these bursts of goofy energy in comparison to the rest of the piece, but they’re there! And I like the final resounding piano/synth chord, it’s one of those surprise final notes in the chart that tries to catch you off guard because you think the song’s over.
Fun piece!
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