Creator's note: Paranoma

Apparently I should archive this here as well. Mediawiki handles line breaks much better than CJK oriented services too.

Thoughts

So I've just decided that this time I'm going to write this in English. No specific reasons, I just kind of feel like doing so.

And just by the way, a language (be it native or foreign), you don't use it for a while and you surely get rusty. Like you still remember most of the basics but the words just don't flow out anymore.

Speaking and writing are different. Within the realm of writing there's formal writing, academic writing, lyrical writing, shitposting, and each of these is unique. Each of these requires specialised practising.

To build that momentum to write, the only easy way is the hard way. To keep writing that is. So if there ever should be a reason for me to write my thoughts in English this time, here it is.

'Paranoma' is the go-to answer when I get asked 'what's your favourite manga'. It's not something grande, not something with twisty plots or epic battles, no. It's just absurdly comforting.

The author kashmir is probably more known for his wackiness and wild imaginations illustrated in earlier... hits? Well Yurian Naoko-san surely got an OVA so that's got to be certified as a hit.

'Paranoma' is all about the nothingness within everything. I guess for the first episode or two he didn't really knew what Paranoma was going to be either, and there was just a tiny portion of weirdness, presumably inherited from his other railway work, 'Termina'. But from then on it's just peaceful nothingness.

And I like peaceful nothingness. I like the pursuit of meaning when there really isn't any.

Ethics seeks the answer to the question of what 'good' is. And subsequently what is bad could be known as well. An action getting branded to be good or bad will indicate some consequences upon an individual, and that makes the action meaningful. There is meaning in it.

But there's this grey zone that is neither good nor bad in between. And that's what paranoma is about.

Of course we see Mako (not necessarily her name but it's convenient) setting up goals she would like to complete for her trips. But they're usually nothing more than a goal for the sake of a goal.

I don't like doing things just for the sake of it, then there's a delicate difference that my skill of language might fail to capture.

Having a goal for the sake of having a goal is a bit different. It might be more about materialising a more abstract inner impulse, rather than inventing meaning out of thin air.

Also it's quite important to have fun. This is ultra subjective.

And there's no shame to be ultra subjective, just like there's no shame to have fun.

I find the most enjoyable part of travelling in the actual movement, or moving. Surely more than just moving but moving is important for me personally.

So this song in the very beginning was focussed on roads that enable moving. And that eventually became chapter 2 ([0]).

But having too much about roads themselves will probably end up being like Telegraph Road, if it's me writing. So I steered myself away from that direction.

After all, this is a love song to Paranoma, however cliche that might sound. I plan to keep it that way otherwise I'll feel guilty for borrowing (stealing) the name.

Regarding the name, of course, it's not really a word. It's probably one of the most misspelt forms of 'panorama' though. Basically all the search results for 'paranoma' are typos.

I don't think there is a word in any language that is from the beginning 'paranoma', but with the presence of its canonical brother with a huge search engine and semantic presence, I wonder if we'll ever know what 'paranoma' actually, was.

A friend asked after I declared that I'll write this thing what I thought paranoma was. He meant like what paranoma as the title of this specific comic series was.

My answer to this question is engraved in chapter 1, so we'll talk about it later.

Now I'd talk about the musical aspects as a whole for a minute. This is something music after all, you know.

Talk about scales first. I sometimes suspect that I'm not a proper Jazz musician because I can't really work with the full chromatic scale, not to mention the mad Turkish scale(s?).

I've always used a very reduced scale which I don't really know the academic name for. Probably something minor.

Then we have a common problem for a long song. The balance between repetition and consistency.

It's simple in theory. Repeat the same thing for too many times and the song is boring; introduce a myriad of alternations and the song would sound like too many a song.

My solution this time, not a good one mind you, is to break down the whole thing into 3 parts at an early stage, with them sharing a 'core' melody progression.

I've done it multiple times in the past but not necessarily consciously. It's just becoming more systematic now.

So at the heart of each chapter or part or whatever you may call it, there's a same tune. And I'll freely admit that everything rooted from the very first phrase of the song (the one on guitar, not on pads).

Chapter 1 was mostly complete as if itself was a standalone song. Then I copypasted the theme and modified it to fit the motives of Chapter 2 and 3 respectively. And voila we have 3 parts.

There's a lot of kairo in this song. I won't deny it. And if I'm successful this should sound like kairo a lot, well not that lot but still a lot, because that's what I intended.

The easiest way to sound like kairo is to steal their melodies, riffs and chord progressions. And I stealed them. Not like ke is going to file a complaint any soon so I think that's totally fine.

Then it's not exactly kairo. Of course it's not, it's your bloody NCMR. An entity that is heavily inspired by kairo, but never will be, shouldn't be, and don't plan on becoming kairo.

Acknowledgments and general introduction should end with a very big thank you to shiroshi. Well I know it's skeb and usually artists accept comms if the price gets paid. But still a very big thank you.

Shiroshi is one of the more atmospherically proper names to link with this song in my opinion and (un)fortunately the first in my list that accepts commissions.

Paranoma[1]

As I might have noted before, this is the 'oroginal' part of the song, as in I did this section first and almost finished it before even starting to work on the other 2.

The tagline for Paranoma[1] is 'The ghost rover in everybody else's lives'. This is a recurring theme also seen in rover over virtually eternal roundabouts.

In fact with the new album (part 2 of PaXprotej) themed around travelling and roving, it's not very surprising that some of the songs would overlap. A former me would have ruled this out due to my disdain for repetition, but now I've overcome that me a little bit.

The concept of a traveller slipping into an unfamiliar environment is one of the charms of travelling. I'm very sure this has been talked about quite much. This is not strictly academic so I'll skip the citations.

In ぱらのま (I think using the original text would be beneficial for distinguishing the original and this song here), there were at least 2 occurrences of such experience. Once in the 'Go west by yourself' episode and the other probably the second time going west. Or the other way round.

I was going to include a line or a verse (or a stanza) that is loyal to the original plot, about watching movies in a midnight theatre with few people around. That is surely a very strong materialisation of ghosting around in foreign territory. But I had to leave that verse out because I cannot find anything else that is as good to complement.

The closing verse is rather my own conclusions and an extension to rover over's thinking. And I like it very much as soon as I discovered it.

It's about how the best thing about travelling, in foreign territory, is a result of foreign territory being foreign.

Apparently the excitement and enjoyment of getting away from the tiring daily routines wouldn't be there, if you stay too long for the once-was-excitement to become tiring and boring daily routines.

Here comes my first attempt at interpreting the word 'paranoma' too. I know kashmir is a man of... Japanese culture, in his usage of rather antique Made-in-Japan mimic loan words. There's a more proper name in 和製英語 but what I'm talking about here don't limit themselves to mimicking English. So bear with it, sorry.

Let's get back to the interpretation. It's simple, though. Remember how I was babbling about 'tiring daily routines'?

To connect that with kashmir's preference for Japanese as-if-loan-words, our readers here might have known that to translate 'quota' into Japanese you could use 'ノルマ', which was borrowed from Soviet Russian 'norma' (I won't go Cyrillic because I can't type). And if we shorten 'paralysing' (or simply 'paralyse' because 和製外国語 are always grammatically bad), what do we have here?

'Para'-'noma'. That's as dumb as Joey Barton's pressers but here we are. I think there could be, just could be, a possibility that 'paranoma' means 'tiring daily routines'.

That would be a secondary meaning at most, but I see it as totally fine. And as a result I wrote:

痺れる日常からの僅か数千分の逃避行

And the other attempt is bland and boring. It's just the classic spelling-error-turned-style theory. And I deliberately asked Yukari to pronounce what I wrote as 'パノラマ' as 'ぱらのま'. Sorry.

Musically I wanted to deploy a whole bunch of synthy sounds just for the sake of it. Any long-time fan would realise that there is little if not none of synthesiser sounds in NCMR's arsenal.

That is mostly because I'm not good at using synths. And I tried to fix that problem. So here we are.

In my honest opinion synthesisers are so powerful that they're very difficult to manage. A synth can make thick, centre-of-the-stage sounds as well as ghostly atmospheric textures that simply submerges into the background. The latter is actually more difficult as very often I make them stand out too much.

I don't really like one instrument standing out a lot, it's like showboating to me. I want to give the listeners a headache if they were to award the 'sound of the song'.

So I got three synths for this one. Two of them are essentially one texture in the back while the other is just a weird piano if you could see it that way. I think I somehow managed to submerge the shouldn't-sound-too-important texture deep down with some filtering magic, but I can't decide for anyone else.

Tell me what you think. If you haven't realised they've been there (before reading this) I'd be very happy.

But I won't fool myself to expect that kind of answer because the big beeping synth sounds are clearly audible right from the beginning and one would require a hearing dysfunction to overhear that.

I mean atmospherically. Atmospherically the beepers should just lay low. Let the real melodic instruments do the melody.

And the beeps are gone after chapter 1. This is actually because I can't get the automated sequence right with the non-4/4 signatures. But too much of it would be too much anyways.

Almost forgotten is the fact that I initiated this song with the very random thought of banning (heavily rhythmic) drums and basses. That turned out to be impractical. So there are still a lot of drums and basses around, but no drum 'n' bass. Sorry.

Paranoma[0]

So here's the 2nd part of this song, or medley if you would.

The [0] is your now overused computer jargon that suggests 'the beginning'. Yes roads and connections are the foundation of travels. What else would be?

The intro bass lines were a twist to my own Shimizusawa.

Quite a straightforward one this. The two songs are (will be) in the same album, both sung (spoken) by Adachi Rei, and have a similar theme.

In a wilder sense a power plant would count as the abstraction of connections as well. You see, a lot of locomotion vehicles run on electricity to begin with. I somehow forgot to put power plant into the polyphony soliloquy but I have to amend that here.

Apart from the bass melody, there actually isn't much more linking with Shimizusawa. So I suggest you don't overthink it no more.

I tried to achieve an alienness, a non-human character with the robotic and almost rattling grammars for Rei's lines.

I won't call it 'inorganic' (無機質な) simply due to the massive amount of chemically organic, i.e. carbon high-poly, components that exists within all the objects that's been talked about here. Think about the PCBs everywhere, you wouldn't call that inorganic, would you.

During beta testing I got asked why the styling for 'それが美しいことであろうか、私たちはわからないけど。'(We don't know if that is something beautiful or not) is different from the other similar lines. My answer should not only answer this question but also serve as a rather firm belief in my lyric composition.

However emotionless the character that speaks the lines is, the author that writes the lines is different. He has his own emotions. Same for the subtitle maker, the vocal manipulator, et cetera. Well in this case they're all me but you get the idea.

Eventually the song is a vessel to convey whatever emotions or messages the author want to convey. Lines and in-song characters are a formality. They're facetted agents of the author, and the author sometimes just squeezes out of the facet.

At the end of the chapter I tried to deliver my thoughts more directly via a more human aspect, voiced by Yukari.

I don't know if the delicacy is well preserved in the multilingual switching process. And I kind of regret introducing a third object in 'memories' here. It just complicated things.

But the sentiment is true. I believe that whatever memories and emotions we human generated would pass on to different generations by residing on roads or other inanimate objects while the humans that originally generated them are no longer there.

There'll also be loss like any other propagation. But there are new insertions, too. It's like a spiral of optical fibre transmission. You don't have to clearly grasp what that is.

Regarding ぱらのま, this is an actual episode in the original comics, or maybe two.

The memory part is one of my favourites. It's from volume 1 where Mako met with the other girl in Ogoori and said 'millions of people have taken the express Fuji and the travels will be remembered even if the train is gone'.

The other source would be Line 16 from volume 4. This is also the direct reason for me to include the vending machine in the parallelism. Read for yourselves.

Believe it or not, the 'I am... we are..' part by Adachi Rei was actually inspired by Chumbawamba's Top of the World.

That was a song wrote for the 1998 world cup but apparently they didn't cease to be themselves by stuffing it with a lot of, say, unusual choice of occupations.

Paranoma[2]

Finally we're here at the final chapter. The tagline is an outrageous rip from kairo's famous album alone, but never alone.

There's been debates whether it is more proper to say 'alone, but never lonely'. But this time I think repeating 'alone' is good enough. And that's more kairo, what a bonus!

Now, the theme is something I want to write as a finisher, so let's talk about the music first.

I've been longing for something like a cello for a long time. I used to make do with a fiddle, an accordion (bayan), or synthesisers, but finally it had to be a cello.

So I tried out the cello with the last cover song Tote End Boys and that went well. And there's intensive cello utilisation (ICU) in chapter 3 as well.

Bowed string instruments have a unique texture with a lot of versatility. And the cello being in the mid-low territory makes it capable of freely switching between the roles of lurking background texture and under-the-spotlight front row melody maker.

What's more there's also the option to pluck (pizzicato). That would probably render the electric basses out of job. (Not really)

Also, I switched to a 3/4 or 6/8 signature. Mostly just for a change of pace.

The theme here is just self-explanatory. And there's less connection with the original ぱらのま (compared to the previous 2 chapters). More of my personal thoughts.

I drive (and ride) on my own a lot. I get to see some really good views on the road. And I can't shoot them with a camera because I would be driving; nor can I paint them down because I don't paint too well.

I just kind of passively have faith in that someone else would get the same view and make the same exclamation that 'bloody hell, this is awesome'.

In sharing the views in an asynchronous manner, we are loosely connected with each other. This type of connection frees us from the awkward physical adjacency while maintaining the feeling of having company. I like it very much.

Or maybe I'm just weird.

Closing

I'm quite sure there's a lot I forgot to write down. But this is already getting way too long so let's cut it here.

Enjoy the paranomic travels and listen to this if you will.