VOCALOG 02

Preramble

as promised, it’s taken me two months to get back to VOCALOG, and my yap fever hasn’t broken. returning to the format with fresher eyes, I am reflecting again on whether this really was always fashioned to be a newsletter. right now these posts are being sent into the common global feed for this site, and even if filtering is pretty trivial, they’re likely to begin smothering everything else. newsletters aren’t exactly flexible with presentation, and wrangling subscription lists is hardly something that I want to bother with. ghost could be a happy medium, but I’m not keen to jump back to another central platform or balloon the complexity myself by self-hosting. maybe it would be preferable to detach VOCALOG strictly to its dedicated page and provide a feed there. do I dare bifurcate my loyal audience, of which I have no metrics to prove exists at all?

my initial hierarchy for VOCALOG was always imagined in three parts: spotlight (editorial focus), pickups (presenting new releases and producers), and clippings (curiosities and tidbits sourced elsewhere). spotlight and pickups I think survive this round of review, but I’ve decided to give clippings the ax for now. decent beat reporting is arguably one of the biggest holes in vocal synth coverage these days, now that referral links don’t seem to pay out the way they used to for cottage fan sites, but VOCALOG doesn’t necessarily seem like a great place for it unless I accelerate the cadence. per my soft mission statement, these posts really should be taken as a supplement to other explorations rather than as a total of the vocal synth scene, and that is probably something that I will constantly need recentering and reminding on to keep scope in check. clippings, if it does return, feels like it should be reserved for the sort of oddities that would earn rightful placement on a fridge, like kenshi yonezu running a phone scam on poor grannies in kagoshima. real notables, like satsuki’s detour into boy bands, could just as easily slip mention into the pickups section if I decide to be less rigid there. there is a balance to be found in highlighting producers instead of specific works, commentary instead of gratuitous link dumping, that I’m not sure I’ve settled on yet.

one truth that is already emerging is that this is likely always going to remain a very PV-forward deal. while I would love to applaud freshly recorded vegetables, no doubt extending my veggie mix, we live in a food desert when the only meaningful way most of us interact with doujin events is through a flood of crossfades for albums we can’t listen to. being able to anchor to what’s available on streaming is not only naturally convenient, but it also provides a point of interaction for readers that doesn’t dead end in disappointment. crossfade roundups, too, are the sort of monotony that I actively want to avoid.

if monotony is where I land, then I hope it is with adachi rei’s love and support. right now, I’m energized enough to keep the plates spinning.

Spotlight

while they have never exactly shied away from doing so, crypton made a rare nudge this past week to remind everyone that the piapro character license (PCL) covers derivative uses and restrictions that apply to their characters. more accurately, they’ve made this plea specifically to japanese fans, as it wasn’t translated or posted about in any other languages. with it so cagey on specifics, this is really the only useful signal that we can parse to determine what group it may have actually been directed towards. for all the curious bystanders, and all the roaches scattering to the next flame war, it has become another creative springboard to levy accusations and point fingers. the digital diva has never really been divorced from scandal, no matter what my city paper’s culture reporter has said.

it doesn’t take much to construct explanations for why we’re seeing this notice now, and not three or six months ago. this year has been turbulent for crypton, between brazilian miku’s explosive popularity, channel being hunted by a new wave of puritanism, overseas fans misunderstanding display technologies, and a flood of generative AI that no longer means facominn is the only game in town depicting miku with huge breasts. isolated these have each mostly faded into a background hum, but together they are a relentless series of events to spar with in a PR capacity. most explanations at this stage seem keen to point the finger at akihiko kondo, the more press affable miku wifeguy, for most directly violating the license by recently carting her to the wedding of numazu city council member ryu ozawa and promoting her as a representative fictosexual. the timing certainly aligns here, but akihiko has been on the press circuit for going on five years and has schmoozed with politicians like taro yamada before, so it does seem a tad unjust for him to now carry the full weight of a public scold. the notice certainly suggests a wider spray, and a more accurate assessment would probably conclude that he was unluckily the final straw that frustrated things enough this time to inspire a press release. the ambiguity in the statement itself, echoes of payment processors, is already enough to inspire a chilling effect.

although the PCL is generally lenient, and effectively codifies understandings and assumptions that are inherent to derivative works under any other japanese franchise, it has always had a broad carve-out restricting commercial use. the text has always been clearly written under that doujin governance, and the scenarios presented in its summary speak more pointedly about consignment sales that truly only apply to events that happen in japan. miku has otherwise been dual-licensed globally under a creative commons equivalent (CC BY-NC) since 2012, just on the periphery of miku’s first english release, and crypton has given wide leverage for creators to pick and choose whichever license allows for more permissive use in their personal case. with this consideration, the PCL should be viewed as the guiding legal document, as it is both more permissive than the CC equivalent and is the only document written with crypton’s express intent. even as they do not generally diverge, more principally, both are lockstep in not waiving moral rights, and while the US and many other regions have only a milquetoast patchwork of equivalents, japan has retained them with an overriding supremacy available for creators to exercise against all derivatives. all doujin activities will always hang in this fragile balance, and even trusting that crypton is too sober to ever go fully nuclear with restrictions, any of their proud boasts of free culture exist only under the thumb of their current attitudes about enforcement.

there is plenty of historical precedence for these chides when one shops around for them. concurrent to the JASRAC registration upheaval, crypton requested the cancellation of dakimakura covers that were planned for distribution at C73, leading to revisions in the PCL better covering consignment sales. ZUN, who has spent ample time discussing how he would prefer that touhou continue to be retold by others in new ways, still prefers to exercise control through team shangai alice and has had very public scuffles over unauthorized royalties. white canvas, the shop center to that dispute, did eventually make amends with ZUN, but wasted little time moving on to bootleg love live merch, inspiring similar restrictions there on doujin goods. commercial sales are really the only scenario where we do see the mettle of restrictions being tested; when the requests are more general and have no specific parties in mind, as they are when cygames pleads to keep seiun sky out of ero, fans seem to relax restrictions on their own over time until they are essentially void. even when the nudges have pretty obvious subjects in mind¹, the requests to follow usage guidelines can feel more like toothless formalities as they go ignored without consequence.

these examples are both too residual as memories and too academic about policy for them to earn much mention in a discussion with a convenient individual villain like akihiko. if we are to learn anything from crypton’s statement, though, it should be that these flare-ups have already happened with regularity and are going to occur more frequently as increased participation ignores guidelines that have always existed on an uncertain foundation. controlling political expressions and commercial activity has so far been a narrowly tailored approach to keep most of the heat off, and it is normally desirable to prevent miku from becoming a nazi mouthpiece, but it bears stressing that a growing cohort of fans now advocate for more stringent brand control in even mild expressions. the way long-term IPs react to these pressures, either with stricter enforcement or accepting leniency, is how I expect we may see their fortunes reflected in overall cultural longevity. what players like crypton may not recognize, however, is that the era where advisory guidelines can survive with enough prodding reminders has likely already expired.

Pickups

there’s not much positive to say about nico as a platform these days, except that it continues to be a large platform that understands the power of metadata to change outcomes. despite that vocacolle did not run this summer, with the site opting instead to run a more informal dumping ground for uploads in vocaeri, producers have largely picked up right where they left off with informal user submission festivals before the site’s hiatus. these have continued to be the remaining lifeblood of the site, exhibiting users in conversation through communal tags. with a tag on nico, it’s feasible enough to view every upload linearly for a release event, or even applying your own filtering, without having to rely on algorithmic discovery that chooses winners. you only need to compare this to youtube, which launched linkable hashtags only a few years ago with an idleness where they should have probably not bothered, to see how easily a themed cocktail can turn into more of a content slurry. the major threat for nico, then, isn’t that their competition is necessarily more capable than them, but that these events have almost all moved into off-site organization through twipla and discord where those benefits are easily substituted for or less relevant. making the video player suck less wouldn’t hurt either.

despite the label, the irregular time signature song festival doesn’t skip any beats. almost 200 submissions were made to the tag over the two days of the event period, and it is an amazing fount of mixed meter and polyrhythms that feels uniquely expressive the way maybe only a bemani or BOF roster typically does. even accounting that sasakure and soflan-chan have been beating this drum for years, there is a bespoke craft to the presentation here that you won’t see explored by those avenues, and more novel visualizations of time signature that I could only expect to see equaled in a game jam of the same concentration. it’s also possible I don’t go to enough math rock festivals to say this with any authority.

the time signature festival is especially an opportunity to flex, and it is difficult to come up with a representative sample that does it full justice. haimen feels like they’ve taken the chaos learnings of furokuro and umicha to a new logical step, arriving at every twist of visualization that doesn’t involve committing itself to standard sheet music. yohaku seems to have worked harder to disorient more than anything else, sprinkling single measures of 11/8 and 17/6 into a standard 4/4, as if they are continually feathering the brakes on a roller coaster and daring you to not hit your face on the crossbar. shimu’s lean on the fibonacci sequence, though, is potentially most fascinating for how pure it is. the expectation is established and immediately understood by the title, and yet it doesn’t feel like it has compromised at all on easy listening by adhering so strictly that rule. it is the best love letter to spirals this year, and if nagahama was able to release his own uncompromising standards sooner, he could have tapped something like this as an uzumaki ED featurette to also correct wrongs central to the core work. now that he is free to work on anything else, perhaps we will finally see him return to easy wins by leaning back into love letters to lat miku. around the loop goes, circling back in on itself.

one of the comforts of oster is not only that she has remained astoundingly active, but that she has not rested on her moe laurels. while zundamon is not out of place as a featured vocalist, she has been mostly steered as a jokester with producers like namigroove and nununu, and mostly relegated to talkloid status for youtube shorts one degree removed from AI slop and explainers about bir tawil. tsumugi is still the real deal: she’s the gyaru vtuber embarrassed about how she’s never had proper vocal training. she has now been under steward of the VX-β engine for over a year, with hopes of potentially getting the V6 release treatment sooner rather than later, and oster has been pretty much the only name orienting her sound by contorting her with humming. she is one of the few names you can expect to navigate those restrictions and wispy intonations with enough poise to land on a chill duet. the flipside to this is that the zuntsumu pure love yuri festival, unmatched in lure only to someone spinning a sign for FREE FOOD HERE, seems to have gone by with this being only one of two songs submitted. love hasn’t fully bloomed yet, but I am lying in wait with binoculars.

tetris and teto are too convenient a coupling of accumulated regrets for someone not to have taken a pun this far. against a backdrop of a paul brother and a weapons manufacturer becoming intertwined with the brand through another cash grab, this is likely to be the best thing that’ll happen to tetris this year, even if you believe TGM4 might potentially escape vaporware. you just can’t take mihara at his word, unless you also believe you’ll need a superheater and migs and megs of memories to play it. unsavory personalities and potential trump czars aside, korobeiniki being this catchy shouldn’t hugely surprise anyone, and is probably the core wisdom pushing the youtube monkeys to let it put down seven million views in under a month. not saying I’d make a great pop music consultant, or one cosplaying as a tastemaker, but you could have seen this one coming a decade ago if you had access to my IME autocompletes.

we’re already a year past a shrimpku frying some rice, and as that has simmered into the preferred fan citation for good english tuning, jamie paige feels like she’s still walking a path to western stardom matched only by names like crusher and circus before. perhaps it comes with the territory, but the ambition for these producers is clearly being driven by a love for vocal synths themselves, and a respect for GUMI that traces back to V3. to describe it one way, the variety being featured on this album, without snark, feels most like a sample platter of lyrical weaves that arose from testing out new voice banks. to put a pin it, though? teto says fuck. it’s as shrimple as that.

I don’t have the social graces or the athleticism to prove that I played youth baseball, but it continues to resonates deeply for me as a piece of celebrated americana. the lucky break for a modern hermit like me is that japan now loves baseball more than the states, notwithstanding ohtani and all the great sports manga, and I don’t have any trouble finding myself getting swept up in the same frenzy. little league will probably always lack the same emotional punch that comes from losing teams scooping up dirt at koshien, and while I have grown warmer to the NPB owning a ham fighers jersey and following atsuki yapping incessantly about the yomiuri giants, professional athletes and corporate sponsors hardly clear in the same way. only in a school setting can I recall my pops tallying up the slugging percentages for everyone on my AAA team, only to reveal that I wasn’t clearing .300. things could have been different if my girlfriend was cheergirl teto and I was able to have this as my walk-up song.

the indie spirit is alive in adachi rei. I’ll spare another launch into the wonder of aspect ratios, but the soft CRT effects, text supers, and mixed media here from taiyo offer enough veracity to convince me this very well could have been processed through a video toaster before it was digitized off of a dusty tape, a remainder from departed days of public access. the airhorns will jolt you out of that dream, if you do fall too deep into the trance.

the vtuber bubble may finally be starting to pop, based on a string of shuttered agencies and high-profile departures, but the flood of voice bank releases that also rode a larger surge of otaku media alongside it doesn’t seem to be slowing at all. do the economies of scale still make sense when moca seems to have already hit her peak after people like haraguchi sasuke were assigned part of the budget? not my problem. right now I’m doting on the ever-cute una, until the next little lamb makes me feel like wanting to adopt another daughter. cowshi is doing their damndest to keep her afloat with this demo track, which does deserve recognition for how well it accommodates the whole multiple selves trope in a cuter light. all of the fans that told me una was their second favorite eight years ago now just need to show up.

nascent online video, the social web, or whatever other arbitrary era split you prefer to delineate the mid aughts with, now is with enough distance to have reemerged as fuzzy nostalgic memories. unlike frutiger aero and other inventions that are completely self-absorbed with themselves, TONE’s work is authentically retro to an unbelievable degree, especially as it dawns that they were was not old enough to be contemporary to lucky star episodes in three parts and PVs mirrored from nico. combing this channel reveals a producer almost cozily trapped in digital amber from my memories at 18, and sitting awash in all the digital synths, static art, and folky lyrics feels more like participating in my own anthropological dig. SF-A2 miki may actually be the closest thing we have to a time machine, youtube be damned.

the only appropriate way to describe ikomai is other-dimensional, the cousin once removed from sun ra. with a jazzy dissonance that feels like it’s constantly slipping between your hands as you try to cling to it, the winding groove and instrumentation switches to vibraphones and stylophones are hypnotizing. as if this weren’t totally apparent, liking the video on nico reveals that the harmonies were deliberately pitched out of tune². it’s to be expected with vocals from kazehiki, stuck in the limbo of an eternal cold with a sore throat.

the animation and demoscene-like loops come courtesy of osawa, who looks like they may be primarily working in game dev, though their socials are just as personally inscrutable. their personal site is obtuse in ways only matched by ARGs, and what we do see seems characteristic of someone that digitally scribbles: virtual travelogues, trace jobs from scouting google street view, and studies in touchdesigner and pixel composer. if we ever meaningfully detect vocal synth music in a transmission from deep space, it’s probably going to look and sound something like this, coded with aberrant signals. evidence suggests their people may also be carbon-based.

clocks. twins. gothic architecture and the art nouveau. girls kissing other girls. show this to ikuni and you just might get him to slip back into his cosplay wardrobe.

even knowing rei and teto are my personal chocolate and peanut butter, the taste being sampled here is bitter, and the growing evolutionary distance between rei and teto as scrappy utaus, one a lie and the other a fake, is now at its most ripe for dramatics. rei standing upright for the first time is certainly a triumph of character and creator, and that would still be worth exploring in its own youtube essay timeline of events, but nothing else is going to offer this degree of flashy, theatrical meta commentary with showa trimmings. the other personal triumph in yasai31 being tapped to perform tuning for an original song, as the foremost superfan for both teto synthV and utau covers, is a more seducing siren.

even as the classification of something as “webgen” is perhaps more nebulous than it even originally was, now that it is the path of least resistance for animation, it remains rewarding to trace those influences through to emerging creatives. clicking on to exsy’s channel immediately hits you with a wall of stick figure brawls animated with flipnote dating back almost a decade, and while the flash and pivot animations from newgrounds continue to trudge along in some fashion, flipnote holds on to a more precarious niche with custom servers and fan-run portals. exsy is just one person steering this ship, and they’re currently soliciting submissions for a stickman battle event that shows where they’re really concentrated. in between the page flips, they’ve somehow found the energy to pursue vocal synths, and even though the coupling will probably remain a jourzin trademark, PVs like this are a reminder of how free, open platforms like flipnote are a vital element to fostering young talents where they don’t have to compete with incumbents that enjoy access to expensive tooling. hatena may be continuing to keep some sliver of this dream alive running splatnet, but as long as a wide moderation surface area remains a liability, it is disheartening to realize that these sorts of unique social services are rarely being pursued at scale anymore.

it’s stuck in my head, and I’m not going to deny you the chance to fall in love too. while he hasn’t disappeared himself, mellowcle has tapped into the classic twang of emon danceability that has made some of those tracks so enduringly great. the slow simmer of utaite and vtuber covers, which I am already bracing for, are likely to make this one unavoidable past a certain point.

Noteworthy

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