Ganymede

Song Information

Artist: 玄武 (Genbu)
BPM: 72-82
Genre: Esoteric Slowcore
VJ: HES
First Appeared On: AC DistorteD
Length: 2:06

Lyrics

None.

Song Connections/Remixes

One of the 4 Cardinal Gate songs.

A long version of this song appeared on the CARDINAL GATE conclusion CD (on CS DistorteD's Special edition) along with CONTRACT, waxing and wanding, 華蝶風雪, and 嘆きの樹.

Trivia

In William Shakespeare's play As You Like It, the character Rosalind disguises herself as a deceitful boy named Ganymede. The song's odd speed (plus its changes) and its deceitful note chart may be an homage to the play.
This is the slowest of the Cardinal Gate songs.
This song features a green colored skin.
Genbu is believed to be Wac's alias. Perhaps the most apparent evidence for this is Wac's very distinctive energetic, longwinded writing style being used in the song notes on Konami's web site, as well as the song name, which follows Wac's pattern of naming songs after astronomical bodies. CARDINAL GATE conclusion (the CD that comes with the special edition of IIDX DistorteD CS) confirmed this by crediting him as composer.
Ganymede is also the name of one of Jupiter's Galileo moons, and the song may refer to its lonely and desolate nature.
The video features a green Armored Core-style robot-like character as the embodiment of Genbu.
In Greek mythology Ganymede was the most beautiful man who ever lived. Zeus kidnaps him with very large birds and he lives out his life in Olympus.
Genbu is a Chinese god that is a turtle.

Music Production Info

Hello. I'm Kametarou Kameda, who is playing the role of Genbu this time around.
You can't beat me. There's no openings for you at all. After the match I'll stand in the ring and sing "FANTASY" or something. (Today's meme)
"You are a turtle. A slow, clumsy turtle" was the orders I was given, so I became a turtle in body and soul. Sorry, this body was no good.

I worried about lots of things, like if this is fitting for one of the four heavenly kings, so I tried to express a turtle-like strength.

After all, it's a turtle.
It's slow. It's veeery slow. So, you see, it's slow.

After all, it's a turtle.
It's hard. It's got very high defense. It will reflect all the players' attacks.

After all, it's a turtle.
It lives in the water. It sways to and fro. The patterns represent the flow of water.

After all, it's a turtle.
The second half isn't quite a victory. The rabbit is catching up. This must be what you call "deretsun". (Today's meme)

In other words.
It doesn't matter whether it's a long song or not. Just make a turtle-like song.
It doesn't matter if the note chart is fun or not. Just make it an obstacle between the player and the OMES.
That was the theme, so I'm satisfied with my own sense of achievement.
I did it Kametarou did it he really did it I'm so sorry.

I thought about things like BPM or density or come on give me a break already but nowadays there's mods like SUDDEN+ and HS5 that go easy on all the "I love fast songs! I hate slow songs!" kids so I figured I'd make something to rage against that sort of world.
If you have any confidence in your skills, please play this song with no mods.
It's nice to play HS0, no mods every once in a while.
I don't know if it's a good idea to do that with this song though.

The song title came from
Turtle → green turtle → elephant turtle → sea turtle → soup → scary → ghost → something's mixed up in this → water turtle → water jug → Ganymede and the lonely magical banana.
It's the so-called solitary wit.
I hope to see you again next time.

Video Production Info

For this song, the composer of Ganymede gave me a few keywords to focus on when designing the movie images.
So I decided to design the turtle as a mechanical being.

A Holy Beast once protected the land...
Archaeological digs suggested that the being was composed of technology that was not possible for that time.
The scene where the mecha was submerged in water was my visualization of the keywords, a scene representing the infinite universe.