About a week ago, I went to bed and decided, on a whim, to listen to the vvvvvv ost. I played the game many years ago as a kid, back then the song that stuck to me the most was (unsurprisingly) positive force, then, a few years ago, I listened to some of it again, and this time, came to appreciate Pushing Onwards a bit more too (partly because of the way it teases, and resolves to positive force in a very satisfying way).

So that night, I was just drifting along the ost, until one track particularly stuck out to me. God damn, I’ve seriously been sleeping on Potential for Anything!

I was about to send a few paragraphs to a friend in DMs about how much I’ve been listening to the song recently, and about what makes me like it so much, but then figured out “a few paragraphs” migh be just long enough for a tiny blogpost(?) so here we go.

By the way, I have fairly little vocabulary when it comes to music, so I’ll probably be explaining things using inaccurate terminology, sorry in advance.

The start of the song is already worth commenting on, it has this really agressive synth, with strong portamento, that you don’t quite know what to make of.

Here are a few comparisons:

  • With Positive Force, you can tell fairly quickly what vibe the song is going for (even though it too has a few surprises);
  • Same with Predestined Fate, the desolate vibe appears quickly and remains there for the rest of the song.

Potential for Anything, on the other hand, doesn’t really give any hint as to how it’s going to evolve musically, there’s another synth looping around, doing its thing. You have this thing at 1s that looks like it might be the bass, but is not the actual bass synth once the bassline starts at 8s.

Then, 15s in, the initial melody is replaced by something else, you get this very resonant synth stepping up through maybe one or two octaves. It’s hard to spot a semblance of melody there, but suddenly, the bass is starting something (hey wait, so that first thing WAS the bass synth after all!) and it only takes about 3 measures for it to completely shift the vibe of the song, which originally felt very “alien” with the first synth.

It doesn’t take long for more and more instruments to pile up, here comes the chord progression, here comes… another bass(!?) and finally, the drums. From the first 15 seconds of this video alone, I would never be able to guess what I’d be listening to 30 seconds later.

I really like shifts like that where the start of a song is almost misleading in order to pull a big tonal shift right after (most often from some ominous to a more uplifting mood), some examples I can call out to are this track from gakkou gurashi (never watched the anime, only read the manga and listened to the ost a whole lot); Suspicious Phone Call is kiiiiinda similar tho I wouldn’t exactly say it “misleads” you the same way.

I’m also a big fan of the progressive nature of the song, the way things slowly add up, retreat, and then come back. I found 2:03 pretty surprising with how it throws a brand new pattern, it made me think “will it then go back to the previous one?”, and it did, but the previous pattern came back even stronger, with the chords doing some very groovy stuff complementing the very first melody.

I like how that initial inscrutable melody slowly got recontextualized as the environment around it changed. I like this kind of stuff too, when a you get a glimpse of a melody, and then it comes back later much stronger and it makes you think “ooh so that’s how it is at full power!”. Star-mine does this, you have this thing at the start, but when it comes back at the very end 3 mins later, it’s an octave higher to align with the chorus that just ended, and the whole instrumental around it lifts it to new heights. By the way, Star-mine also does the other thing I talked about, after 30 seconds the key completely changes in a way that the begining didn’t prepare me for.

I think Trance is a big reason why I started liking progressive music a lot more, artists like Taishi are among my favorites and I love the progression and storytelling in his songs.

I’ll quote something I’ve said last year about BlueFieldCreator.

It takes you on a 16 minutes long journey with great moments of tension and release. You first hear some very subdued, almost muffled “leitmotif” at 0:30, it can barely reach your hear, and it feels like it’s being suppressed by the heavy atmosphere. The “interruption” at 2:29 creates an uneasy and oppressive feeling that is emphasised in the next section (2:58). So when the same “interruption” comes back at 8:03, you’re bracing yourself for another moment of tension, but the song takes you by surprise with the following piano section. The oppressive choir suddenly turns a lot more melodious. At 9:03, the leitmotif from the beginning comes back, much more audible, it still has a bit of noise and distortion but it’s much closer now. You get a small moment of calm and silence preparing you for what’s to come, and then at 9:51, the leitmotif can finally be heard in full. This is what I like the most about Trance music (and particularly about Taishi’s works), the melodic climax makes all of the build up worth it.

So these are probably the reason why I’ve been listening to Potential for Anything so much recently, because over time my tastes have aligned with a lot of things the song does thanks to genres like trance and specific artists like r-906, Taishi, Kikuo (who does some very masterful things with progressive music and storytelling <- Sight, Noise, Life and the Earth is REALLY worth a listen if you have 40 mins to just close your eyes and take it all in).

That’s about it I guess. With the way this song start, you just don’t know how it’s going to unfold, you could even say that it has… Potential for Anything.