What do we have here? It is a song by a producer called gomigomi and it's called 'True Love'. I was checking out a compilation by lolicore/breakcore affiliated label called The Worst Label; if you don't know it and you happen to enjoy glitchy heart-attack breaks distorted noise-verging sounds mixed with occasional swathes of beautiful melody and topped with anime/manga (to be very broad) aesthetics – including a fair few samples thereof – then you should check it out. Clicking some sort of link or googling it will get you there but why am I saying this.
The compilation, called #N0T TRU3 LUV, was curated by gomigomi and features other artists in the same sort of vein of music (Riajuu, Rotten Blood, Napkin Terrorizer, p.stmdrn, Vixenvy). Why gomigomi, though? Why not any of the other artists on the compilation?
Basically, this track 'True Love' stuck with me. Sure, it's like a minute (01:16) long, but within this modest unit of time there's a galaxy of sound. It's like a masterpiece in miniature, and perhaps the great thing about making tracks with such breakneck BPMs is, in theory, you can fit more in, but that's a very basic way of looking at things.
The rolling drums in the beginning section of the track arrive with a kind of triumphal march feel after a spot of Japanese language lesson in the sample – "hajimemashite, nice to meet you"; delicate music filled with flutes and harps gets chopped and sandwiched between the beats, or "breaks" if you're feeling specific, laden with glitch sensibilities, as they become more raucous and FX-beset, the beats are crushed, sped-up, slowed-down, brought back to the more organic feel of the initial drums, all in all juddering like a mad machine but with a sense of breezy cuteness, broken pastorality.
Speaking of which, a later track on the compilation seems to be the spiritual sequel to this particular track. That's in terms of the broken-pastoral quality, anyway. It's called 'Hitbox Samurai' (a "hitbox" is the area that's assigned to an object in a videogame, the boundaries of which define when that object is "hit" or struck in-game) and it's served up with similar slices of diced-up incidental music, giving it a breezy atmosphere whilst the beat here is even more glitched-out than before, with stuttering vocal samples peppering their truncated cuteness throughout.
An interesting note: These tracks and the others on the compilation are all tagged "shoujocore" – shoujo, if you don't know, is a Japanese word that basically refers to any underage girl (i.e. younger than 20). This could be taken a few ways: an attempt to dissociate from the lolicore label for whatever reason; or it could be a conscious attempt to mature the lolicore scene by gently nudging it to the next natural age level; I think gomigomi used to go under the moniker matoakai, so it might reference this progression; or lastly, and quite probably, the label of shoujocore is a preferential whim. I've not seen it before, but it could already be a thing, in which case I'm guessing it just refers to a different type of (less loli-oriented) aesthetic.
- So, yes, you can grab these two tracks and more from the #N0T TRU3 LUV compilation courtesy of The Worst Label's bandcamp page. Pay anything you like~
- The art is really nice I think. It's by Yunjung. You should go have a scroll through her art.
