extremely long explanation of each photo and song under the cut, including some random behind the scenes info about making this thing and rambling thoughts about hifuu music
DOLLS IN PSUEDO PARADISE, 2002/12/30
(yes i know this is not strictly hifuu, but would you really rather me leave it out? 😏) They're dressed like Jacketko and Labelko with some modifications.
Legend of Hourai - Location: depths of the forest (real location: a shrine in the woods behind Suwa Taisha Harumiya)
i feel like this song is the definitive song of this album and its lasting impression. feels pretty relaxed. i hear a lot of dipp-style fan songs copy the style of this song, and strangely enough i've counted a few that have rain and thunder sound effects that i feel would be nice in this song too, so it feels like a light afternoon shower in the summer. by the way, the map renko has here isnt a star map like most of the others, but a vintage globe section.
The Strange Everyday Life of the Flying Shrine Maiden - Location: residence of the shrine maiden (real location: a shrine that was near where i lived in central tokyo)
this song is so mysterious but has a lot of energy and is a good closer for the album. i think visually, dipp has a sort of yellow-brown from the cover that seeps into everything about it when i think about it. more than a vintage sepia tone, it's also like the golden hour of evening and smells like smoke, and it blends western and eastern things like zun used to do back in that time. if you notice, the location has it in the western hemisphere even though it's a japanese shrine. this shrine in particular was one of the most interesting that i had visited and it was full of greenery in the middle of the city, and felt like a secret. i think dipp has that kind of mood and feels like a memory of a past time that might not have actually been real.
GHOSTLY FIELD CLUB, 2003/12/30
Passing Through the Dendera Fields at Night - Location: rendaino (real location: massive cemetery in kyoto behind yasaka shrine)
i like how this song takes a bit to get started and then really picks up after another beginning section with a satisfying definitive sound from the PCB-IN era. i have a few arranges that take up to a minute to get started too. it really adds to the spooky atmosphere and is a great start to hifuu as a whole. the cemetery that i stumbled upon was behind a shrine in kyoto that i had wandered around after getting up super early before anything was open, and i just kept walking and walking until i found it behind some more empty temples. it was around april, so everything was super dewy and light green. the cemetery was absolutely massive and went all the way up the side of the mountain, and i started getting really freaked out with how many people there were. everything is sectioned into numbered squares in a grid pattern and the tombstones are all tall and thin, so it felt like i was in a city of dead people overlooking a city of alive people down below. i wanted to know which one had more.
Ancient Temple of the Netherworld - Location: netherworld (real location: buddhist temple in south-central tokyo, i think)
this is actually one of my favorite touhou songs just in general, but definitely my favorite on this album. instead of intentionally choosing my favorite songs of the album, i chose songs mostly to fit with the pictures, which i was trying to loosely match with the story, but i felt like cemeteries were the defining scenery in this album so i was happy to be able to choose one of my favorite songs for it. i was listening to all of hifuu with a friend on a car ride recently and we both noticed that we always think ghostly field club is kind of mid, but then listen to the songs from it and realize that it's actually pretty amazing. this song feels like a cloudy afternoon in a field to me. i think this photo in the background is especially neat too.
CHANGEABILITY OF STRANGE DREAM, 2004/12/30
Retribution for the Eternal Night ~ Imperishable Night - Location: bamboo forest of the lost (real location: nikko toshogu)
i really love the youkai laugh in this song, but my favorite part of it is the ending that was added on for this album. it's really a great example of an enhanced arrange for a hifuu cd. back when i was gathering photos for this, i was going to have renko and maribel standing in the scenery itself as if they were a part of it, so i didn't have any good bamboo forest photos and had to opt for this one instead. getting the colors right was hard too.
Shanghai Teahouse ~ Chinese Tea - Location: misty lake (real location: wetlands preserve)
this is my favorite song on the album and i think is much better than the original. the piano part right after the intro is absolutely god-tier, and pofv-era music is one of my favorite music eras so i think the instrumentation and all the minute details of the arrange are so amazing...by the way, this is another location in the western hemisphere. i've been listening to hifuu music since i was in middle school, so i practically grew up with it, and gensokyo is as much a place in my home country as it is in japan. there's a gensokyo that i've built up in my mind from applying my understanding of touhou all these years to this environment, so i thought it was important to include photos i took outside of japan as well, because that is also "hifuu" to me. it's a little strange to go to the home country of touhou and all of the context of it collapses down into a single reality that only exists in that place, and it feels like even though i was in the real location of gensokyo, there was no way that that could be all there was.
RETROSPECTIVE 53 MINUTES, 2006/05/21
Blue Sea of 53 Minutes - Location: pacific ocean along the tokaido line (real location: sagami bay, close enough)
it's a little strange how there are so few ocean-themed things in touhou. i really love the sound of the waves in this song, and one of my favorite memories of this song was recently during the car ride with my friend mentioned above, when we were driving along the california coast (the other side of the wide sea that reaches japan!) and we turned a corner during the peak of the song and the ocean came into view. it's also really great to listen to this album if you get to ride the tokaido line. for the location on this one i quite literally dropped a pin along there on the other side of the tracks that pass by mt. fuji, but where i actually took the picture is close enough, i guess.
Retrospective Kyoto - Location: kyoto (real location: kyoto)
one of my favorite touhou songs of all time. i really love the pofv-stb era of music, and there's a ton of tracks spanning that stylistic period in both games and cds. i think this one in particular is one of the standout examples of how that era sounds, where it feels like being in-between stage and boss music, and has a constant energy of being on a moving train along a track. i like kyoto better than tokyo, also. my heart feels cleansed whenever i get far outside the reaches of the tokyo metropolis.
MAGICAL ASTRONOMY, 2006/08/13
Welcome to the Moon Tour - Location: renko and maribel's university campus (real location: tokyo big sight)
i think the location for this one is incredibly obvious if you've been there before, but big sight is the location of comiket and reitaisai, where a majority of these cds were released. i think this picture in particular was from the very first reitaisai i attended (fall '22?), which was an absolutely magical time. of all the reitaisais (and one comiket) i've been to, about half of them had rain, including this one. i think this renko is the jankiest out of all of them, but i selfishly wanted to get across the way her hat is covering her face on the album cover because it looks super cool. by the way, if renko or maribel don't have their hat directly on their head in the album art (even if they're holding it in their hand, or it's falling off their head!) i didn't draw it....because screw that honestly
G Free - (real location: suwa, nagano)
i didn't really have many photos that fit magical astronomy in particular (and a few other cds that you will see later), so i threw in a photo i took in suwa this past may, since that is around where gensokyo is. the antigravity theme of this song makes me wonder what it's like to be a touhou character who can fly and see the entire land from way up above, so i gave a lot of space to the sky in this photo. when i was a kid, i actually didn't really like this song at all and i felt like it was seriously overrated, but now it's fine to me. the map renko is holding here has one of those...i don't know what you call them...spacey orb-things.
UNKNOWN FLOWER, MESMERIZING JOURNEY, 2011/05/08
Bell of Avici ~ Infinite Nightmare - Location: higan (real location: spider lily garden in west tokyo)
i absolutely adore this mini-album (and wish i could purchase it physically one day for a price that isn't Literally 1000 Dollars) and i love this version of bell of avici that is pitched down. DS-TD era is one of my other big favorite eras of music and it also has a huge collection of songs to enjoy within it. this album was the first to come out after i had gotten into touhou, so it always feels new to me, and im also surprised that a lot of people don't know about it. by the way, seeing this many spider lilies in real life was absolutely amazing. i had always seen a handful blooming here and there along the sidewalk in places i lived and worked and always got super excited about spotting them, so literal fields of them as far as i could see was absolutely amazing. the location on this one being listed as boxes is some self-indulgent chuunibyou nonsense because i've been in my scp reading phase that comes once per year, so i thought it would be spooky if the location data was trying to show text from the otherworld that couldnt be rendered in any known language or writing system.
Tomorrow Will Be Special; Yesterday Was Not - Location: moriya shrine (real location: suwa taisha akimiya)
my second time visiting suwa taisha, though this time i only got to go to akimiya and harumiya, but that's ok because akimiya is the one considered to be the "moriya shrine" (i think?) and i was able to get super HQ photos with my ipad like some sort of tourist grandma. the picture was edited to look like autumn, but i've only ever gone in the spring and summer, so i'd really like to go in the actual autum to see the leaves. nagano is absolutely gorgeous and i'd live there if i could figure out a way to!! but taking the train there is an adventure in itself. also, isn't it funny that of the three songs on this album, i chose the two that were arranges and left the original out? not that i dislike the original or anything, it's actually my favorite of the three.
TROJAN GREEN ASTEROID, 2012/04/30
Trojan Asteroid Jungle - Location: satellite torifune (real location: nature trail in ome city)
this was the first photo i edited for this random project, so im apologizing to it for doing all sorts of weird experiments on it. it was also the first of the location data where i decided to just write out the actual place because i thought it would be ~spooky~ or something. apparently the L4 and L5 lagrange points are proposed areas for future satellites, but i dont know if anything is there now, so i thought it was fitting. ome city felt eerily similar to a middle-of-nowhere town we visit in upstate new york every summer. i feel like that's "hifuu" in some unexplainable way.
Ame-no-Torifune Shrine - Location: satellite torifune (real location: shrine in a park in central tokyo)
i feel like this overall image really encapsulates the mental vibe i get from the original album cover. did you notice that maribel has a moon shaped belt buckle for this one too? i thought that was really cute. renko's map this time also has moon phases because i thought that was fitting, but i didnt realize i had a map of the surface of the moon until after moving on to the next cd. i do this thing online for fun sometimes called touhou cognitive music test, where you get a second or two of a touhou song (just like this video! though my favorite difficulty is the hardest one at half a second) and you have to guess it. i can usually get a 50/50 no problem on the hifuu section, but if i ever get any wrong, chances are it's that i've mixed this song up with track 8 on the same album, because there are parts where they intentionally are the same. grr.
NEO-TRADITIONALISM OF JAPAN, 2012/08/11
Let's Live in a Lovely Cemetery - Location: zenko-ji (real location: shrine in ueno park)
this is another one where i just completely changed the location data to the fictional place, because i haven't visited the real zenko-ji to get pictures yet. this album is one of my favorite hifuu cds (though with so few of them, it's really hard to say something like that) and this track is definitely one of my favorites on the album. i think it was enhanced way beyond the original with its japanese instruments and cheery strolling energy. i also really love the album cover of this one because zun labels a grape, a peach, and a bamboo shoot for the viewer's easy understanding, lol. maribel's outfit is also really nice here. after drawing her and renko so many times in all their outfits, I started to notice that they've "settled" into a set design after the first few cds, so any large variation in their outfit like this is interesting to me.
Wind of Agartha - Location: hell (real location: lighthouse along the great lakes)
this overall image is one of my favorites; it's got that shade of red that i absolutely adore using and it's just needlessly edgy. maribel doesn't actually see visions of hell in the story (she just mistakes it for hell), but i feel like i wanted to have a scene of it for this part anyway because i really wanted to have some scary locations amongst the pleasant ones. the dead end sign is just a regular old road sign, but when it's in colors like this it looks so spooky, right? you'll notice that it's another location in the western hemisphere, almost like a "dear lord, maribel, where on earth ARE we?" this song is absolutely divine too, and i love the guitar part in the beginning, but the entire thing is just beautiful. it's really hard to choose a favorite track on this album, but in my opinion, the originals in particular are some of the best in hifuu overall.
DR. LATENCY'S FREAK REPORT, 2016/05/08
Natural History of the Childlike Duo - (real location: mountain behind fushimi inari shrine)
this is another cd where it was hard to find fitting pictures for it, since there isn't really any particular location and it's not like i've taken photos of atoms. but i think the pleasant sunny afternoon at a shrine encapsulates the upbeat and friendly feeling i get from this song. way back when this album was announced 10 years ago, i was a high schooler who had not seen a new hifuu album in (gasp!) four years! and literally sobbed tears of joy in front of my computer screen upon hearing the news. this album went on to be my favorite for a long while and was listened to many times while walking around my hometown and going to school and doing other boring things, and this opener was my favorite on the album back then. i cried more tears of joy when i was able to purchase the cd in real life at a big convention the next year, making it my very first piece of official touhou merch i ever owned, and began my long obsession with collecting touhou cds...
Eternal Transient Reign - (real location: chuo line in nagano prefecture)
double dealing character was the first game i saw released in real time (on here! tumblr dot com!) and seija instantly became a favorite, so i was over the moon the next year when she got a spin-off game with herself as the protagonist. this song was my favorite in that game and is still (probably) a top 10 touhou song for me, and my self-proclaimed "song of 2014". impossible spell card was also the game that taught me to get good at playing touhou games, and i have hazy but proud memories of beating spell cards in the latter days set to this song, especially doing one of yukari's with no items. i think it sounds even more dreamlike in the cd version (a difference which i used to my advantage against my friends back in the days of the multiplayer touhou music guessing game) and feels like a summer afternoon watching the scenery go by in the car or on the train. the picture here is of the train ride on the way to suwa, but i have enough memories of listening to this song on the multi hour ride down to washington dc through tons of random farmlands in virginia, and on a sunny afternoon, the two places across the world don't look too different. to go along with that feeling, renko's map is the entire earth this time. the location data is hexcode for "nagano, japan" or something like that, and it's completely chuunibyou of me to do so because there's no way location data would be formatted that way.
DATELESS BAR "OLD ADAM", 2016/08/13
Reverse Ideology - Location: mt. miwa, nara (real location: some giant ravine in upstate new york)
the location data for this one is fabricated to mt. miwa, which appears in the story, though it's mentioned in the text for omiwa legend and not this song, but that's why it's one of the few that is completely unobscured in case one of you sick freaks were crazy enough to pause the video and type in the exact geocoordinates of every frame. i really like how the colors of this background turned out with the aqua-green sky and blood red river, though this is from a time before the blood pools of hell appeared in touhou.
Hangover of Bedfellows Dreaming Differently - (real location: uchiura, shizuoka)
yes, ok, i went to uchiura for love live tourism ok leave me alone
i really like the desaturated + red color scheme of this overall image. while the others have a feel of being in the middle of exploration for club activities, this one really feels like two people who are just trying to comedically find their way home and are getting increasingly lost and irritated. and what is up with renko's giant forehead! i thought her ribbon headband was super cute on the album cover, and the both of them have some interesting variations in their outfits that we never see again, but when it scrolls through all of them, she looks a little weird without bangs. anyway, this is a fantastic album closer for the "literal worst hifuu album of all time" (so sayeth Everyone Ever). i remember this cd being the moment where i realized that touhou music was "getting really weird" and that the experimental, electronic style that zun was rapidly shifting into during lolk (and by extension, TD) was here to stay for a good while. fortunately he grew into his weird period and made some genuinely neat stuff.
RAINBOW COLORED SE-se-s....sep...septen...please omg how the hell do you spell this, 2021/12/31
The Wolves of Nanatsuishi Dash to Seize the Clouds - Location: tabayama village (real location: tabayama village, yamanashi prefecture)
one of my proudest photos, an actual real-life trip to tabayama village!! if you didn't know, zun composed this song for their regional tourism board and they play it on the 45 minute bus ride from okutama station to tabayama village, which i got to listen to when i visited one april day in 2023 (they only play about a minute of it, but man, it was so awesome, they announce it on the bus as a special song by mister zun-san...) okutama is already the very last station of the chuo main line and is all the way at the western end of tokyo (prefecture, not just city) in the mountains on the border of yamanashi prefecture, so it was a super long ride there, and once i finally made it to the village, there was nothing to actually...do, i guess...? it was even a weekend (thank god, because on weekdays there is only one bus there and one back per day, so if i had missed it i would have gotten hella stranded) but it really just is a village with people that live there. i guess the idea is to then hike up to nanatsuishi shrine way in the mountains, but that was like, serious hiking for people with gear and would possibly involve a multi-day overnight stay, so i doubt i'd be able to make it up there without someone experienced. i ate some absolutely banger food made of completely local produce at a traditional restaurant and then just kind of bummed around city hall until the next bus came, but it worked! zun, you did it, you got me to visit tabayama village! what cracked me up was that there was an election van driving around blasting its megaphone to the maybe 50 people living there telling them to vote. as for the song itself, i absolutely adore it and it brings back strong memories of the mysterious scenery and riding the bus through winding paths of the mountain forests (oh god please dont fall off the cliff), not to mention the eerie calls of ghostly wolves throughout the song being super memorable. i love these low-key songs with deep notes that he does every once in a while, and the instrumentation is fantastic.
Illusionary White Traveller - (real location: inokashira line, tokyo)
i like how this version of the song, which is already one of the best songs of the game it's from, sounds almost blanketed in snow with ice crystals falling through the sky. if you remember that reisen i drew at the beginning of this year with the caption "it snowed today!", this photo is from that day. i woke up to giant chunks of snow falling from the sky and covering everything, which was a rare sight in tokyo, so i grabbed my ipad and my heated vest and my snow boots, which were collecting dust, and headed outside to take a ton of pictures. i made it all the way to inokashira park, where a ton of other people had the same idea, but it was absolutely heavenly and every tiny surface was caked in a thick layer of snow, which made the tree branches especially look really lovely. this picture in particular was taken while standing in the middle of the train tracks (oops! lol!) and i really like how the dark, saturated colors of maribel and renko offset the sheer white. it really is hard to get minuscule color variations of white to look good, but i quite like this one. the snow started to melt around noon, so i'm glad i got to experience it while it lasted.
TABOO JAPAN DISENTANGLEMENT, 2024/05/03
Dawn Breaks on Tanabatazaka - Location: tanabata hill, hitachi, ibaraki (real location: walking trail in my neighborhood lol)
an album i was at reitaisai for, but was unable to purchase because it was my first time tabling and i was so busy, which was a good thing i guess. a new full hifuu album after so long! maribel gets a strikingly different outfit for this one too. this album is absolutely fantastic and zun brings out everything he's got and a little extra, and this is a wonderful opener that definitely feels like wandering around outside in the early morning. i used to listen to touhou music all the time while walking on this trail, so it feels like a bit of gensokyo to me.
Ghosts Exist Even When It's Not Night - Location: land of the back doors (real location: a nameless island off the coast of maine)
and a really great closer to a great album. this song has a lot of power and attitude in it, but it gets super dramatic at the end and is absolutely amazing to listen to. dr. latency's freak report was my favorite up until this one came out, and now i'm just not sure. i think the overall image of this one is super striking and i was really hoping to be able to do a red maribel and renko for this one. renko's hat is falling off her head in the album art, so i didnt include it because i wanted an excuse not to, but i can't just leave out the yukari bow on maribel's hat, so i left it on her. you can see too that renko is holding a piece of paper with a bunch of handwriting on it this time (but in negative! because spooky!), to match with the story in this cd. also, this random unnamed island had tons and tons of dead crabs all over the woods.
ARTIFICIAL UTOPIA IN RUINS, 2026/08/16
Location: unknown, possibly nara
(real location: a zoomed-in photo of the atlantic ocean on the coast of maine)
i'm interested to hear this one since it's been done several times already, mostly in the wily beast credits, but it also shows up a bit in yuuma's theme as well. it's also just a really great and powerful song, so i wonder how the story will match it. in any case, i thought it was a good fit for this scary looking background image. in the preview that zun showed, they're both cut off above the waist, so i just used their previous outfits from TJD since it seems to be the unique shirt that maribel was wearing with gold trim and lace on the collar, but what if it's different? what if she's wearing.....shorts??
To a Humanity That Reveres Failure, The Next 2000 Years
what a title. it's a closer too, so i wonder what kind of dismal note the story might end on this time...
what? why are these here? you didn't hear these two songs in the video? you didn't see the secret text?
