In the time since I wrote this blog post, Patricia Taxxon has expressed regret at labelling her music as "IDM", it's a genre name that stands for "Intelligent Dance Music" and the name itself is rude because it implies that other genres are lesser, and because the name "IDM" is often only used for people from non-marginalized cultures. I did not know these things about the label IDM when I first wrote this blog post. I will no longer use the term IDM to describe any music. As of writing this, Patricia Taxxon is looking for an alternative genre name that is accurate to her style of music.
I have changed the title of this post. The rest of the post below is unaltered.
I love the aesthetics of Kirby: Canvas Curse. One might think that a game about travelling into a world of paintings would have an art style matching the Renaissance or Impressionism, and have orchestral music; but Canvas Curse embodies the true spirit of art: experimentation. The user interface is geometric abstraction, sprites of characters appear to be pre-rendered 3d, and the art style of the level background changes constantly from level to level.
The music is electronic; but while most electronic music may have a focus on bass and sawtooths, Canvas Curse focuses on high pitch, tinny, slightly wet sounds (reminiscent of water splashing and bubbling).
I haven't heard much music like it (though I don't often go out of my way to listen to new music). However, there's one song I've heard that strongly reminds me of Canvas Curse's music: TECHDOG by Patricia Taxxon from the album TECHDOG 1. TECHDOG is very different from Canvas Curse music, it's much more atonal for example, but the instruments have that tinniness and wetness. Patricia Taxxon is very good at making intricate and lovely soundscapes.
TECHDOG 1 is tagged as "IDM" and "Glitch" on Bandcamp. Maybe the Canvas Curse soundtrack can also be described as IDM? Most of Canvas Curse's music doesn't fall into the Glitch genre, except for Drawcia Soul.
Whenever I notice a vague similarity between two songs, I add them to a list of mashup ideas. I was looking back at old entries in my list, and I saw "Beginning of Tera Raid Battle X Beginning of Untamed Heart". I wrote this entry before hearing the Area Zero theme, and upon reading it again I realized that Area Zero and Untamed Heart might go quite well together. I made a little musical sketch in Signal of how a mashup of these two songs might sound; I'll probably never finish it, but I hope you enjoy it. If you want to, feel free to take this idea and finish it (credit to me would be appreciated). Download midi. The soundfont I used is A320U.sf2, the default soundfont in Signal midi editor.
I've heard that some companies host their videos on Vimeo rather than YouTube because they feel that YouTube's interface isn't a good fit with their branding. Unfortunately, Vimeo has a tendency to disconnect and be unstable.
Sendvid is a simple, free video host that I've heard of. I haven't used it yet, but I have used their other service Imgbox (an image hosting website) which I've found reliable and useful.
You may have heard of active styluses, which have lots of features and are battery operated; but did you know that styluses for capacitive touchscreens can be simple and inexpensive? Passive styluses do nothing except conduct the electricity from your finger to the tip of the stylus, so they work with almost any touchscreen and don't need to be charged.
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