Camellia: History Of Rhythm Game Artists

“The God Of Rhythm Games”. “The Unavoidable Japanese EDM Composer”. and “The Arbitrator Of Memery”. These are just a few of the names Camellia has managed to earn himself over the years, known today as one of the most notorious composers in the electronic genre, let alone rhythm games. Aside from his strong melodies, production and absolute sound design magic, perhaps the biggest thing Camellia is reputable for is his ability to genre-bend; you could give Camellia a genre that he had NEVER heard

before, and he would be able to come up with something that’s on par with even the greatest artists among said genre. Because of this and his background in rhythm games, “unavoidable” could not be more true; even if you don’t like a certain track or style of his, he has such an abundance of others that you’re guaranteed to find something of your taste, and rhythm game wise the variety of his discography makes him the perfect candidate for those that are looking for a song to make a chart out of

; whether you want to make an easier song for beginners, or you want to make a gauntlet testing even the best players in the world… Camellia is the man for the job. But you ever wondered what Camellia first sounded like and how he went from a completely unknown doujin artist to collaborating with the likes of toby fox? If you have, you’ve come to the right place. Let’s go back… to the beginning. Born on September 28th, 1992, Camellia was born as a kid stuck in an era that was transitioning to a

world that would be taken over by a digital renaissance, and because of that, when he was younger he spent a lot of time on the internet. Particularly, he was addicted to playing online flash games on his mother’s PC when he got the chance, and because of that he ended up making a lot of online friends. Music wasn’t really something that was in the mind of young Cametek… until one day, when he was around 10 years of age. That day, one of his online friends had decided to make a rather absurd req

uest towards Camellia; they had asked him to compose a theme song for them. And although Camellia had no prior knowledge in producing music, he still took the leap and simply replied with: I will do what I can. The only equipment he used to create this now lost theme song was his mom’s PC, which he used the Microsoft GS Midi Synth on to create the melody. From then on, Camellia had become hooked onto the idea of creating music, and from elementary to middle all the way up to high school, his tra

cks would mainly be experiments in DTMs as he figured out the ins and outs of music production. It didn’t just end there however; Camellia also begun to play instruments by this time, and while overtime he would show a staggering proficiency in multiple instruments, one of the most significant instruments when he was younger was the drums. See, in 2006, when he was about 14 years old, he had joined an online brass band called the VIP brass band, or it’s alternative name, the VIP Wind Orchestra.

This was a group of individuals that summoned people from around the internet nearby to learn a parts of a piece, usually a popular game song or classical piece, and eventually end up joining in an actual in-person ensemble. Obviously… there are a lot of dangers that can be involved in this, especially at the time where doing this was a pretty new concept, but nonetheless Camellia was allowed and he became a regular of the VIP Orchestra. It got to the point where Camellia was put in charge of or

ganising the band’s recordings and uploading them onto NicoNicoDouga. These are in fact some of the first videos from Camellia’s Nico that are still intact today. In the description for multiple performances, Camellia is sometimes seen talking about the drums, for example saying that the playing was tight or the bass drum was too loud. So it’s safe to assume he was behind most of this, and clearly, he was already holding himself to a pretty high standard. Shortly after beginning to upload these

performances, in October of 2008, he would also begin posting on his own personal blog, on camtek.seesaa.net, where he would occasionally mention his experiences with said brass band and also post some of the experiments that I mentioned earlier. Again, most of these are unavailable, but the posts themselves contain a lot of information on what to expect from these. For example, in November 2008, we had a post simply titled “I think the bass is important”.. the bass guitar is actually one of the

multiple instruments that Camellia also learnt to play when he was younger, and it was one he was said to play quite a lot. In another post he released 2 tracks, one titled hh.mp3, and another titled min.mp3, which by the sounds of it is a minimal track. In this he expresses some disinterest with minimal, saying “he isn’t sure about it, but he guesses he should repeat it”. And this turns out to be true all the way til now, as he states in a recent interview with the Comic Fiesta Community. Rega

rdless, it was clear that over time, he was building up his experiences with many different genres, and this early exposure would explain the nature of his style later on. Hell… at some point during this time, Camellia did a full acapella of the legendary Lucky Star opening. Indeed, you heard me right; Camellia had already been developing his vocals this early, in case you don’t believe me when I say he tried everything! As you can probably guess, his development in vocals will be important to

him later, and it goes to show that even when he was in highschool, Camellia remained a man of culture. Additionally, during this time period, one of the biggest things Camellia had interest in was the infamous Yume Nikki, a game depiciting the story of a young girl navigating her deeply disturbing dreams.. well…. I guess calling them dreams only goes so far. In fact, it was safe to say that Camellia was a massive fan of the series, and his love for the game went so far that he decided to remix

some of the soundtracks in the game. This was very similar to how Nanahira started with her singing, with the “I tried to sing” challenge, except this time Camellia would try to do a “I tried to make Yume Nikki a certain genre” He did quite a few of these over the years, but his earliest one is the “I made a Yume Nikki medley with MIDI”, where he made a MIDI piano arrangement that spanned various tracks from the original game, on the 25th July, 2008. This is extremely impressive for one of Camel

lia’s earlier tracks; after all, this was an arrangement that was just over 9 minutes that transcribed a lot of the soundtrack and made them transition between each other in a smooth manner. A lot of which was likely done by ear. He would end up doing several more of these kinds of remixes in succession of each other, with some very… interesting genre turnouts for a soundtrack as minimilastic as Yume Nikki. For instance, there’s one where he tried to make trance/techno out of the melody that pla

ys when you approach Mars-san in-game. The choice in melody is the biggest deal here; trance is a genre that focuses a lot on atmosphere and a strong but distant melody, and while there is a lack of atmosphere in this, the melody’s fleeting feel more than makes up for that. There were some interesting additions as well that to me feels like foreshadowing for what would be later to come for Camellia’s style… the biggest thing being some of the use of splicing around here. And to top it off, Camel

lia would end up adding onto the melody in the final chorus to create an impactful ending to the song, which is something that he’s notorious for. Carrying on from these, it wasn’t long until Camellia had then started actually contributing to fangames with his own personal soundtracks. In particular, he was a contributor to Yume 2kki, one of the largest fanmade variants of the game that is considered by most to be the sequel that was never made official. This now-massive game started off small o

n it’s initial release on May 26th, 2007, and a few years after, in June of 2010, Camellia would release his first contribution to that game; the patch for version 0.090i contained a new area called “Monochrome Feudal Japan”, accessible from the Art Gallery, and with this came several new background tracks, including a set of them called “camellia_japanish” and “camellia_japanish2.ogg”. Both of these are variations of each other; one plays in the new area added, a very large and strangely peacef

ul landscape… to the point where it’s almost unsettling. This place is actually pretty infamous because of how big and featureless it is, and the music doesn’t help with keeping your sanity as you traverse this zone. The constant repeating melody is enough to make any player descend into madness after enough time. The other tracks plays in one of the creepiest rooms in the entire game; in order to access this you must be in the “Broken Faces Area”, which sounds disturbing enough already, and whi

lst there you may find the mouth of a white face that has bleeding eyes and white hands beside it… y’know… the usual. The mouth kinda resembles a gate as you can see… enter it, and the scene changes to Danger Panic Zone, where this track will play for as long as you’re scrambling in there. Clearly, this is a more frantic version of the Monochrome Feudal Japan theme, capturing the atmosphere of what’s happening on screen pretty well. If I didn’t know any better, I would definitely guess that this

is the type of theme that plays when you’re nearing death. Of course, these tracks are relatively simple; but so are most of the tracks in the game, and Yume Nikki does have a specialty in using bare minimum tracks to create a skin crawling experience, which Camellia took and did very well to prove his early versatility. So, throughout the course of 2009 and 2010, Camellia would continue doing various remixes, covers, and soundtrack contributions to Yume 2kki, as well as another Yume Nikki fang

ame called “If”. This stuff had yet to show what Camellia was truly capable of though… and it turns out that concurrently, Camellia would begin taking his music much more seriously and begin improving at an alarming rate. Theoretically speaking this would mean he’d have to double down on one specific genre and try to master it, and while he doesn’t follow this rule completely as you will soon see, the one he would eventually end up going for is something that most of his fans today don’t even kn

ow he used to produce; vocaloid. It all began with the release of Manman Mite Chinchin Okki Okki. The song description details “I tried to make a song about the mystery of life with Miku. Sing along”. As you can see, it starts off pretty tame. It has a pretty nice tribal feel to it, and the vocals are basic but enough to establish a decent flow. A Jews harp is also played throughout the song, which is said to have been done by Satsuki ga Tenkomori, a vocaloid producer who may sound familiar, and

at the time was already pretty well established. In fact, Camellia had referred to Tenkomori a few times in some of his blog posts so they were clearly already pretty good friends and well.. this wouldn’t be the end of their collaborations. Anyways, this all seems well and good until. The song suddenly transitions into some raw vocaloid metal, which is something we hadn’t previously heard before, but is something that makes sense considering what we’ve already seen from him. It surprises me jus

t how well he nailed the guitar and metal sounding drums, especially when he said in a previous post that out of learning piano, guitar, and bass, guitar is the most difficult! This is also when he begun to delve into listening to Vocaloid, creating a list to keep track of some of the things he discovered. Coincidentally, the very first song he added on here was a song using Haruka Nana…. who might be someone you recognise if you know anything about Nanahira, but… we’ll come back to that later.

Through this, Camellia gained inspiration to create more vocaloid which was great to see, and it wasn’t just any vocaloid either; there’s a surprising amount of variation between the instrumentals of some of the stuff here. For example, with Miku as a virus, it has a breakbeat, neurofunky kind of style, whereas “A coupon that makes the main unit 4000 yen cheaper”… (guess the long titles has always been in Camellia’s blood)… uses elements of chiptune and has much more of a math rock vibe to it. A

gain it was evident that Camellia was not only experimenting a lot between genres, but he was also beginning to combine them, and not only this but you can see his biggest strength begin to shine early on; his strong melodies. His ability to create strong melodies that stick to a listener long after the song has finished is something that Camellia is known for, and not only this but he also seems to be capable of bridging multiple melodies together in some of the most creative ways I’ve ever see

n. It’s also funny because the gap between “A coupon” and his first vocaloid song is about 6 months, yet the difference in quality feels astronomical. Not even just talking instrumental-wise, but also vocaloid-wise; Miku was tuned this time to sound so much cleaner and this is something that you’ll see Camellia shine at later. Sometime in between this, in July of 2010, Camellia had signed up for his first ever competitive music contest on a now defunct website called “Creofuga”. This was a free

online music contest community that generally works to increase the activity of small creators and discover talent. A certain contest had been going for the release of a vocal album, which was a collaboration between the Tokyo Digital Arts School and Creofruga,, where 6 tracks were released. The goal of the contest was to get the players to remix 2 selected songs from this album; Wonderland and time for departure. You were provided with all the vocal acapella needed to create a completely differ

ent song, and well… from there you could do what you want. May the bests song win…. the best 5 to be exact. Camellia chose to remix “time for departure” for this contest, talking about how the song was very rocky and he wanted to tap into the song’s strong will to “depart”. He cited that there was a lot of use of pop and club techniques, in particular the use of a “stutter” effect, which as explained by the man himself is a technique that simply cuts the sound to create a groove. This use of stu

tter was part of why the judge looked highly on Camellia’s song; in fact the judge was actually surprised by the use of stutter and the detail that went into the remix, and with that Camellia’s song was able to earn 5th place overall and get a judge special award. This was a pretty big deal at the time since Creofruga was a decently sized community when it was still around, so this put a bit more eyes on him, and it was something Camellia could use for bragging rights. He did express a little di

sappointment in his placement; he said he was a little dissastisfied and really wanted to win the Grand Prix prize if possible, but he’s happy he won anything at all. After all, there was always next time. All of this built up to Camellia being able to hit his peak in terms of production when he released his first ever album, Honey Ginger Ale, on the 3rd October, 2010. This album did all feature Hatsune Miku, but several songs have their own distinct feel to them, and.. man the raw talent this m

an posseses really does shine throughout the entirety of the CD. The first song alone, called “A lonely dream”, should be enough to tell you what you’re in for; between the amazing drumlines and breakbeats which dip into some uncharted time signature territory around here… the catchy and strong melody, and the AMAZINGLY tuned vocaloid…. I could mention much more and talk about this song all day, but the point is; this was only his first album and already he’s showing he was in his own league. Ge

nerally the album follows the same pattern as the first song, heavily centered around chill rock and breakbeat vibes and using very strong and sombre sounding melodies, which matches well with the album title; when combined, honey and ginger is a good solution to relieving yourself of pain and relaxing the muscles, and honestly this album has the same effect. Well.. for the most part; the one that comes closest to breaking that rule is the “debugged” version of Miku As The Virus, a version exten

ded and made to sound slightly more intense. This is definitely the one that screams “EDM” even though it isn’t. Regardless, all the songs are crafted in such a way that they have this level of beauty about them; you can really feel the emotion put into each track, and for me that was at it’s strongest in the final song of the CD, “minigness world”. Again considering that Camellia begun Vocaloid production in January and has managed to come to this level in October OF THAT SAME YEAR… is genuinel

y absurd and to top it off this REALLY went under the radar. And I really mean that; I wouldn’t be surprised if less than 5% of the people that eventually come to watch this video even knew Camellia did vocaloid, let alone knowing that this album existed. But it was a project completed by Camellia nonetheless, and even if he wasn’t turning a load of heads yet, he DEFINITELY had the potential if he kept going. It wasn’t long after this until Camellia returned again to Creofuga for another contest

. We saw what he said last time; he’s aiming for the gold medal and he won’t be satisfied with any lower. The question is: will he follow through on that? Well.. that would depend on what the contest actually is. It seems that this time around, Creofuga was collaborating with a label called “LGR Label”, a company that sampled CDs and DVDs of drum sounds. And for this contest, contestants were given kits of drum sounds from LGR label and you simply had to create a song from that. The best judged

song wins. Now this is something that I’d really like to hear since the concept sounds interesting, but as far as I’m aware this is lost to time, so we’ll never see what Camellia did with this; though we can be sure it was something super exciting at the time. So far Camellia has demonstrated an insane intuition when it comes to creating good drum rhythms, and there’s no doubt he did the same here. This caused the creation of the song “where you’re in the world”, and not only did this end up win

ning the gold medal, it was basically deemed nothing short of exceptional. A judge for the song pretty much wrote a mini essay analysing the song, and a lot of what they wrote was of the highest praise considering it was from a judge, with the best sentence to sum it up being: “producing such a song requires advanced programming skills and a unique sensibility, and I thought he was a wonderful author who has both”. Camellia responded back with a comment of his own where he goes into a bit more d

etail about the production process, and shortly after he won the Rhythm Works Complete Edition II as a prize, an over 20 GB CD that contains 35969 sounds of various drum and percussion samples. Safe to say that he had enough sounds for a lifetime. If all of this doesn’t show the insane improvement rate of Camellia in just a few years, I have no idea what will. And the best part was that it certainly wouldn’t end here. In fact.. the best years in Camellia’s career lay ahead, and that streak begun

in 2012, arguably one of the most eventful years for Camellia. The year begun with the release of “I will witness your end” in February of 2012. Another vocaloid song, yes, but…. first of all, listen to the beginning. Do those synths sound a bit… familiar? Cause this is probably the first time we hear them from him. Actually, this song’s instrumental has a lot of elements of EDM sprinkled in with the drum breakbeat and it sounded pretty unique for its time, to the point where even Camellia gave

it a new genre name; Miku’n’Bass. And well, on top of the song just being a general banger, this gave the song what it needed to make a bit of a wave when it released; as one of Camellia’s most viewed earlier songs, this sits at just over 100k, and it was the first time he truly begun to make a big break as a vocaloid producer. Meanwhile, the world was enjoying the first edition of the now popular Sound Voltex; Sound Voltex Booth, released by BEMANI. And well… Camellia has had his fair share of

rhythm gameplay when he was younger; in fact, one of the first rhythm games he played was DanceDanceRevolution when he was REALLY young, so it’s only natural that he would soon hear about this. And… it just so happened that Sound Voltex would run a music contest a few months down the line, just before its release; the 1st Speed Up Contest, which is also the first EVER remix contest held for Sound Voltex. Here, artists were given a list of memorable BEMANI songs, and beyond actually remixing, th

ey had one simple task; speed up the song as much as you can. There were some super good choices here, but one of these was the obvious pick for Camellia; see, there’s one artist that Camellia has always idolised and been inspired by when it comes to music… and that person is Nekomata Master, someone who’s widely considered one of the best rhythm game composers period. The song included from him was “Sayonara Heaven”, and Camellia created his own “NEKOMATAelectroRMX” which became one of the winn

ers of the contest. That’s right…. this was Camellia’s debut to the world of rhythm games, and on August 3rd 2012, it was finally added to the booth. For something called the Speed Up Contest, I definitely expected something much faster, being only clocked at 150BPM, but that doesn’t take away from how good this song sounds and how much of an evolution it is from some of the other stuff we heard. This is the moment where Camellia adopts his distinctive electric style; reusing a lot of the sounds

that we heard previously from “I will witness your end” and combining it really well with Nekomata’s song, which had some heavy influence of celtic music, as you can hear from the accordion and flute. Sayonara Heaven is an incredibly beautiful song, and Camellia took that beauty for himself to create something that sounded good and was suitable for a game such as Sound Voltex. The intuition that he already had about rhythm games allowed him to be able to create something that’s sufficiently cha

llenging and constantly changing, and that’s something you’ll come to notice about Camellia’s songs as he begins to transition more into rhythm games; the songs never stay the same, and they are unrelenting in that fact. This also marked the point in Camella’s career where he would be in a position to also gain international exposure thanks to Sound Voltex getting international exposure, but the point where that’s noticeable wouldn’t happen until much later. By true nature of the relationship be

tween these two genres, Camellia would then end up dipping his toes into the Touhou doujin scene almost immediately after this. The thing is Camellia had already become friends with a man called Masayoshi Minoshima, who just so happened to be the lead of Alstroemeria Records. Yeah, THAT Alstroemeria Records; one of the most reputable doujin circles responsible for the imperishable Touhou remix, “Bad Apple”, among countless others. Camellia would first feature in Alstroemeria Records under the al

bum “THE WORLD DESTINATION” in August of 2012, with that debut being in Comiket 82. And in this album, Camellia contributed only one song; IN THE FLICKERING, a complextro remix of Kana’s Theme from Touhou 3. This was actually something that said a lot about the direction Camellia was heading; before he used to do a lot of drum’n’bass, breakbeat based things, but now he was producing a lot more complextro. In fact, this is a common pattern across all of the things we’ve seen from Camellia so far;

there would be a period of time where he focuses a lot on a certain genre, then he would take that genre and combine it with elements of the other genres he’s done. It’s an effective way to build intuition on many different types of music to be able to make music that hadn’t been heard before. But I digress… the track impressed Masayoshi Minoshima, and from here the relationship between these 2 deepened to the point where Camellia would begin to feature on more albums on Alsotroemeria. And, eve

ntually, Masayoshi Minoshima wanted to launch an entirely new label called “DOWNFORCE”. It was unclear what the motivation behind this was, but my best guess is that he wanted to move away from doing Touhou remixes to producing original songs. The debut EP, Airfoil, was gonna be an album based mainly around that concept, and for that album not only did he himself produce 2 songs, but he invited Camellia to also produce 2 songs of his own, and these would end up being “Null-view” and “unsure”. Th

ese would end up releasing on December of 2012, and some time later there would even be an official Youtube Channel for the label, though this channel is very inactive and only has 2 of the 4 songs uploaded. Both of the songs Camellia produced were complextro galors; and just like with vocaloid, when it came to the direction of the composition of his electronic songs, he was improving at an alarming rate, and proving to us again that he has what it takes to become a massive artist. That being sa

id, it was also around this time Camellia released one of his biggest vocaloid songs to date; Systematic Love, a song that actually COMBINES vocaloid and complextro to create what’s one of my personal favourites from Camellia’s vocaloid era. This ended up blowing up to 300 thousand views, by far one of his best performances of this era, and it got so popular that some years later in 2015, Reol would end up making her own cover of this song on her Youtube channel, which sits today at over 4 milli

on views. At this point his blow up in Japan would be inevitable, and in 2013, he would take that one step further… thanks to a certain individual. Remember how I said Camellia had a Haruka Nana song in one his playlists back in 2010? For those that don’t now, Haruka Nana is an UTAU, something similar to vocaloid, who’s voicebank is from none other… than Nanahira. Now I go into more a lot more depth about the relationship between Camellia and Nanahira in my video about her, but to cut a long sto

ry short, Camellia began working with Nanahira when they expressed mutual interest in each other’s works. They began to work on an increasing number of albums and collaborations, and eventually there came a time where Camellia needed Nanahira to sing for one of his tracks for a BEMANI competition. This track ended up being Bassdrop Freaks, and it’s said today to be both of their “breakout songs” because of how unexpectedly popular the song became under the release of beatmania PENDUAL. But… if w

e’re looking at Camellia on his lonesome, then Bassdrop Freaks was only part of his breakout. There are 2 sides to every story, and apart from Bassdrop Freaks, there was one song that he could not have anticipated going this far. Fast forward to August of 2013. Camellia has just released his 6th vocaloid album, Stance On Wave, which contains some of Camellia’s past work from vocaloid like Systematic Love as well as some new compositions. Actually, here’s a fun fact; this is technically Camellia’

s 6th album, but on most records the album that came before this was Camellia’s 4th album; CTCD-004, Michno – Sequence. What happened to CTCD-005? This is something I’ve only seen mentioned on the Camellia Discord Server but; CTCD-005 is actually a pretty obscured album called “flow arrow”, consisting only of 3 songs; presound, flow arrow, and the instrumental to flow arrow. Not entirely sure what happened here, though apparently the serial number was accidently called CTCD-004 instead of 005 on

release. And to be honest it just seemed like a pretty scuffed CD in general. The titular song is incredibly good though, and it can actually be found in Stance On Wave under the same name. Speaking of, compared to something like Honey Ginger Ale, this deviated A LOT from the classic chill breakbeat atmosphere of that; now the songs were generally much more aggressive and electronic with their sounds, and we were now at a point you could safely say that Camellia has found his own unique “sound”

. It’s hard to explain, but if you’ve listened to a lot of Camellia, and you then listen to a song from his album such as this… you’ll be able to recognise pretty quickly that this is Camellia even though it was made over 8 years ago. But.. this wasn’t the only reason this album is significant. This is actually also Camellia’s final vocaloid album to date, and from this point onwards there would be a noticeable decrease in his activity as a vocaloid producer… until there’s none at all. Why is th

is, you may be asking? Well… there was simply other things that he wanted to work on, that wouldn’t give him enough time for it. Most of this was a LOT of doujin works; as you can see here Camellia went crazy with the contributions to many different doujin circles, far too much to sift through in this video. But one thing that was beginning to take priority…. was rhythm game music. And there was one really good opportunity that was just around the corner for Camellia; the Konami Arcade Champions

hips. The Konami Arcade Championships, or KAC for short is one of the biggest annual game competitions held for the best national players in specific arcade games from KONAMI, and these games can range from card games to rhythm games from the BEMANI series. For the KAC of 2013, the concept was simple; if you’d like to participate, you must first play the qualifying round where you have to select a group of songs and try and get the best cumulative score you can on them. Depending on the song gro

up you picked, you’re then placed in group A, B, C, D, or E and out of the 100s of potential people in that group, only the *top 3* will advance. These 15 people, along with 1 other asian representative, then advance to the final round, where the 16 final competitors compete in varying ways according to each game to determine the winner. At this time, SOUND VOLTEX II: infinite infection was out and about, so you could probably guess that this game had it’s own championship contest, and for the f

inal round, the 16 players would participated in a classic single-bracket elimination style tournament. Generally, each round would have the players play 2 songs concurrently, and whoever has the highest cumulative score across them wins. That is…. until the finals. To honour the best players of the world, instead of playing 2, 4 of some of the most difficult songs are played in succession to determine the SOUND VOLTEX champion. It’s a pretty big deal, and in order to really set the scene, they

need to make sure the songs they pick are appropriate for the setting. This is where the KAC2013 Original Song Contest comes in. This is a song contest that’s held in celebration of the KAC, which is really nice, but the biggest detail is that now, these songs would be judged to get a “best songs” category. The 2 best songs from this contest would immediately be taken and adopted for play in the SOUND VOLTEX II KAC Championships Finals. This… was a huge opportunity for Camellia, but the competit

ion would prove to be incredibly fierce; there were a lot of other well-known artists participating in this, and this contest was responsible for some big songs like Black or WHITE? by BlackY and siromaru, Verse IV by Yu_Asahina and Yamajet, and For UltraPlayers by cosMo, who would end up winning the best song overall at 1st place. So the big question is; if cosMo was 1st … who would be 2nd? Well…. *chuckle*…… he did it. Clocked at a blistering high BPM of 234, this song is dubbed as a “boss son

g” because of just how difficult it is; in fact at the time this released, this and For UltraPlayers were considered the 2 most difficult songs in game for a while. And upon hearing the song, it’s pretty easy to understand why. This is probably the first time we’ve heard Camellia dabble in speedcore so far; he understood that he had to create high speed rhythms if he wanted to really challenge the finalists, and not only did he do that but he also did it with a LOT of style; every second that go

es on the song is developing or changing in some way, and he transitions between each of them effectively, featuring good use of some electric guitar, unrelenting voice samples and a pretty catchy melody to end with which, according to Camellia, is very reminiscent of “Max Burning!!” by BlackY. Again Camellia shows off his ability to create some very strong melodies, and it all comes together to create the perfect song for a final showdown. Now… obviously featuring in the final 2 songs of the Kn

oami Arcade Championships is a MASSIVE deal, and it was this, alongside Bassdrop Freaks, that allowed to him break through not only in Japan, but internationally, especially once Bangin’ Burst released in the game in December of 2013. The song stands today as one of the most recognisable from the SOUND VOLTEX series, and to top it off it got one of the coolest song jackets to date. But oh boy… 2013 didn’t end there. I think it’s pretty clear by now that Camellia was beginning to transition into

pure electronic music, and the release of his next album on New Year’s Eve of 2013 proved that. This was paroxysm, which on it’s own means “an explosion of intense emotion”, and it was Camellia’s first fully instrumental album, featuring 8 songs. The title could not be more right; the album is a very intense rollercoaster of emotions and genres, ranging from some chill glitch hop to only the dirtiest of dubstep you can find. The song that stands out the most in this album though definitely has t

o be Fastest Crash. I would say this is the best song to really show the result of Camellia’s slow musical buildup over the past several years. Because man, what a journey this song is. How Camellia managed to make each section transition so smoothly when they sound completely different is honestly beyond explanation as this point. This song is most definitely one of Camellia’s best works to date, and I highly recommend the album as a whole as a definitive introduction to what Camellia sounds li

ke. After this, Camellia would become much more active in producing electronic music. In 2014, he would focus a lot more of his efforts on album work, releasing another 3 instrumental albums, [diffraction], Sudden Shower, and dreamless wanderer, each one being better than the next, and he would continue with contributing to BEMANI and helping Nanahira with her music. Wait…. speaking of contributing to BEMANI… there was a certain group that Camellia would end up becoming associated with. As you k

now, the BEMANI series uses a lot of music from a ton of artists, and they all make super good music. However, there are some artists that not only make good music, but CONSISTENLY make good music that ends up being adopted to BEMANI works. All the way back in 2006, a handful of these artists got together to form an entirely new label that would eventually become an official, dedicated in-house recording label for BEMANI. It started off with 4 members; dj TAKA, DJ Yoshitaka, L.E.D and Tatsh, und

er the name beatnation Records. The history of this label is quite a turbulent one; not even a year after joining, Tatsh left beatnation Records and pretty much abruptly stopped all activity regarding rhythm games due to health problems. He would end up returning later, but not to the label. Then, in February of 2007, 3 new artists joined; Sota Fujimori, kors k, and Ryu*. This was the official group, and they would continue contributing to BEMANI until the release of beatmania 18: Resort Anthem

in 2010, where the entire label would cease activity and be put on hold. The reasons behind this are unknown, but it would occasionally get a mention here and there on some BEMANI streams, until one day in early 2012. A note, part of which is still on the official beatnation Records website to this day was put on here, and it spoke about recruiting new members for the label. Then, later in 2014, the group was fully revived at the JAEPO 2014 event, in which a new member was introduced; the one an

d only Nekomata Master. And there was plenty more where that came from. There were to be 7 additional new members after this, each one chosen by an old generation beatnation Records member as their “successor”, and revealed as the months went by. The first to be announced was DJ TOTTO, chosen by DJ Yoshitaka. Then Hommarju, chosen by kors k. And so on until the BEMANI Stream that happened on the 10th April, 2014. Here, it was revealed that….. Chosen by Sota Fujimori as a successor, Camellia beca

me an official member of beatnation Records, which would later be changed to a new name; beatnation RHYZE, in July of 2014. Not only did this mean Camellia was now a certified top pick if BEMANI were looking for someone for music, it also meant that he could contribute indefinitely to all the BEMANI series If he really wanted to, along with some other perks like being able to release albums under the label, all of which are huge opportunities for him to continue to grow. This label sounded reall

y promising and they were certainly going to deliver; with most of these artists dominating SDVX contests and continuing to contribute to beatmania titles. Hell, in August of 2014 there was even a collaboration album with HARDCORE TANO*C, literally called beatnation RHYZE vs. HARDCORE TANO*C, in which Camellia did a “KABOOM” remix of Mothership by Sota Fujimori. As he continued releasing music, naturally his fanbase continued to grow, though again… overseas, no one really knew his name. That is

until August 16th 2015, with the release of what’s widely considered to be a legendary album; PLANET//SHAPER. As Camellia’s now 5th instrumental album, the sound of his electronic production had evolved to a point that was almost too good to be true at the time, and the sound gets so brutal here that it’s enough to disshape a planet, according to Camellia. Pretty much all the songs here are incredible, and a lot of them have a very similar structure; the song starts with a simple melody, transit

ions into the “main section”, and then the most melodic part of the song drops, which today is known as a “Camellia drop”. This is extremely important because these melodic sections are a huge reason why these songs would end up becoming so loved; they all have a super catchy and energetic melody that sticks to you so that you want to come back for a replay and share it to your friends. There’s a pretty good video by Telestro you can check out that goes into more depth about this and his song’s

compositional structure, but to sum it up, this album is the peak of Camellia’s melodic strength, and he does an good job using his sound design skills to create… INCREDIBLE songs that range from dubstep, to electro, to gabba, to speedcore. Hell… here’s what’s personally one of my favourites from the album: Why do you hate me? which I don’t even know what genre it’d fall under. But out of all of these, there were 3 songs that caught the attention of everyone; flying in the flow of deep-sea, delt

a for the DELTA, and…. Camellia’s INTERNATIONAL breakthrough thanks to a certain rhythm game.... the legendary “Exit This Earth’s Atmosphere” . Like I said; the melody in this one is what makes it so flashy and memorable, and the entire song seems to feel like a build up to this part even though the parts before this could be a song on their own. It started off pretty slowly for the first year after the album was released, but after a while, this song BLEW up on Youtube…. why was that? Well, thi

s is where osu! comes in; on the 6th October 2016, legend player rrytui mapped a 7.56* difficulty version of Exit This Earth’s Atmosphere, and this became ranked about a month later on the 9th November. As one of the hardest songs at the time, this song naturally ended up becoming really popular, and as time went on more and more people discovered Camellia through this and other songs that would begin to get mapped or were already mapped. He begun to feature more and more in tournaments, being u

sed for countless tiebreaker songs.. until it was official; Camellia had become one of the largest composers in rhythm game history, and he was still growing. It was at this point Camellia begun to ramp up the work rate in regards to his electronic music; he’s released many more albums that are all excellent in their own right, done some of the best collaborations we’ve seen, done soundtracks to rhythm games, done soundtracks to ACTUAL games (check out the Dweller’s Empty Path by the way), featu

red as a guest in a furry conference… (yeah). The list goes on for what Camellia has managed to accomplish in his years of composition, and the most impressive thing about it all is just how fast he’s able to pump out music that sounds this good; as a matter of fact, in a recent interview he said that a lot of his songs can take anywhere from a week to just a few days to create, which… is an absurd workrate. Now, obviously there’s a lot of things as of recent I’m not talking about in detail here

, but that’s because I wanted to focus far more on Camellia’s earlier years since that’s what tends to be the things people know least about. I’m not sure about you but it’s pretty unbelievable to see the route that Camellia took to get this far, and as someone who’s been following and enjoying his music for years, seeing him now be this popular puts a massive smile on my face. Who knew that someone who started off making a theme song for one of his friends would become one of the fastest growin

g electronic music composers of today? Not only do I hope this was interesting for you, but for anyone out there who’s composing music or pursuing any long term, dedicated goal; I hope you see that it’s all about patience and being dedicated to whatever it is you do. Sure, there’s people that are talented and will grow faster than you, but at the end of the day… hard work will outlast any of that. (Well unless you’re doing something physical in which case you better pray to God you have some goo

d genetics) so even if things don’t go your way… don’t let it mislead you from your vision. Oh, and I get the feeling Camellia will see this someday, so if you ever do; it’s a simple message really…. we ALL love you man. Never stop doing what you’re doing and be sure to take care of yourself. That being said do be sure to support Camellia’s music; links to his platforms are in the description. And as always if you enjoyed leave a like, subscribe, I would say dislike but Youtube’s bitch ass remov

ed them anyways… and follow me on Twitter. Oh, and if you wanna interact with me and other likeminded people with similar tastes, then feel free to join my Discord server. Thanks for watching and… I’ll catch you in a bit.