earthly flowers in full bloom
Artist: dwarf
Genre: CRUSHED WAVE
7KEYS:
- NORMAL 3
- HYPER 8
- ANOTHER 11

When I watched LUXURY stream himself playing Nakaiankow's entry from the 2HDBMS event and I heard how low the bitrate was, the thought immediately came to mind that "oh, the ideal genre for this event is definitely the intentionally lo-bit ambient trap stuff that's been trendy underground lately", and I quickly started working on a track to see if I could slip in a second entry in time.
I was really happy with the song! I made it in 48 hours! But having a background track just took up too much space, so I decided to shelve it and release it another time at full quality without having to worry about size limitations for keysounds or BGA. (Additionally, a bass growl and arp riff were later in the second half to make the song just a bit less repetitive.)

HexD AKA Surge AKA Crushed Trap has been going around recently in the underground English-speaking internet music scenes on sites like soundcloud and rateyourmusic, as an aesthetic of heavy bitcrushed and distorted ambient electronic music, usually similar to cloud rap or trap. (I'm not a part of these scenes at all but it's fun to follow the resulting music as an observer, just being somebody who finds learning about styles of music interesting.) The majority of HexD tracks are just way too strongly influenced by cloud rap for my personal taste (I generally don't like cloud rap at all), but the sound of bitcrushed ambient music over fat 808s is something I find super cool, so I wanted to make a track focusing on that aspect of it, which fits in nicely with my usual BGM-making musical style anyway.

The song's for BMS, so I can't just make an ambient trap beat and put distortion and a bitcrusher on master. My approach was to selectively bitcrush individual elements and have parts that I knew would only be in the BG keysounds routed to a single track with the distortion / crusher effects. Additionally, some keysounded sounds are very subtly also routed to the distorted background track as if it were a send track (I'm hoping this doesn't sound too messy when in-game).
I had been in the mood for Touhou music recently at the time of composing, so I tried to make a feeling similar to Undefined Fantastic Object and Ten Desires' misty yet colorfully lit atmosphere which always had a strong impact on me, although the songwriting itself isn't really much like ZUN's music. As such this is themed as a "danmaku song" or something. 

Also, despite being really into chiptune-infused music around the time I started getting into DTM, recently I've been avoiding chiptune in non-chiptune songs because I think it's become somewhat of a trendy cliché and instantly makes a song sound completely inorganic, which contradicts the aesthetics I'm usually aiming to acheive. That said, this time I was self-indulgent and put in a PWM solo that I really like and I'm happy I did. After all I still like chiptune elements in other people's music (in BMS, safe_state and The deepest place cannot be above the sky are particularly good ones, and both probably subconscious influences here).

I thought the patterns were going to be level 9-10 on ANOTHER but I managed to churn out an 11 with some stupidly dense sections. BGA was made using the usual tricks and is about accurate to what visuals I had in mind when I was making the song, although it's not particularly intricate. Even though the song is Touhou-influenced I didn't bother drawing a cute girl stage boss... Glen from nymph/XXXY_c (and some other of my BMS) cameos in the miss BGA, but they're technically not a girl or a flower, so what are they doing here?