Betwixt & Between is a stream pack by Zaia.
This pack was dedicated to the life of Betwixt & Between, real name 木村馨 (Kaoru Kimura), born 29 April 1983, passed away 17 September 2012.
A promotional trailer for this pack was made.
| Pack Director | Zaia |
| Stepartists | Zaia |
| BPM | 175-220 |
| Songcount | 26 |
| Blocks | 10-19 (13-18 target) |
| Type | Stream |
| Format | Singles |
| Release Date | Jan 24, 2017 |
¶ Structure
Betwixt & Between is identical in structure to Helblinde and Helblinde 2016. Each song has four charts and the lowers are in the “cut stream lower” style.
The chart description fields contain the stream breakdowns.
¶ Development
The origins of this pack go as far back as December 2012, when I showed an interest in doing a freeform hardcore pack (specifically artists Lv.4 and Betwixt & Between). Their songs had always sorta been on the fringe of the stamina metagame. There were Division 4 and -273.15 SX17s by Ninevolt (LEISHEN) in 9V Recharged (2010), and a more recent -273.15 by Mad Matt in Tachyon Gamma (2011), and a 12 Little Fragments of Silence by Aoreo (JNero) in SPEEEDCOOOORE 2 (2012), so the artists were slowly starting to gain a little traction by showing up in higher profile packs.
Betwixt & Between in particular was quite difficult to find information about on the internet, so that stymied efforts to get a project off the ground. It constantly got interrupted by other more immediate projects, but after Cirque du Lykan's success and how well Division 4 turned out, I thought it would be prudent to give this project a little more focus. Silphur8 was also keen to be involved with this project, and after his contributions to Lykan's comprehensive Companion Book, I thought it fair to let him collaborate in a more official sense.
Work on B&B began in earnest at some stage after Lykan and before Zeppelin, but was troubled by a lack of good quality music files. Everything I was finding would be through some third party ripper like mp3skull.
Motivation to work on the pack remained low, and the pack quickly languished in development hell, especially as I had been undertaking other interests at the time, and when I did make time to step, I was stepping for Tachyon All-Stars or other projects that weren't this one. It would remain this way through the developments of Cranked Pastry, Cirque du Zeppelin, Rebuild of Sharpnel v1, The Apocalypse Sampler, Dragonforce Kaioken (Dragonforce SSJ2), Cirque du Jackhummer, Helblinde PDTA, Scrapyard Kent and even through the concept stage of Cirque du Enzo. Stage 2 of the stepping process finally began in September 2016 (after returning from the US) when I gained access to the Bemaniso.ws tracker and was able to headhunt the high quality music files that had eluded me. Once the motivation came, it came quickly and I was able to smash everything out quickly in a couple of weeks.
Silphy ultimately made no contributions to the project and I proceeded with the pack solo.
¶ Artistic Influences and Chart Design
The writing style of this pack is primarily inspired by classical stamina packs - Dragonforce, Pendulum and Sharpnelstreamz v2 era Sharpnel (not Rebuild). The landscape of the stream chart metagame was steadily evolving away from what it had previously been, and the “classic style” that stamina had built its foundations on was becoming increasingly rarer in favor of new developments and new stepartists joining the scene. Against this historical context, and given the age of the project, I wanted this pack to have a slightly more retro styling as a throwback to those classical styles, but updated with modern design sensibilities. This meant more sections of mono, and more boxes than was expected. About half the pack was styled in this way, but others were modeled after more recent projects.
My most recent significant work before beginning the stage 2 development was Scrapyard Kent, which I'd been steadily chipping away at throughout 2016 and 2017, and it was definitely an influential factor in how the charts were written. This was during a period where I had been doing a lot of “motif x filler” patterning, where I would pattern parts of music with melodies and then use generic filler patterns to fill the chart until the next section with melodies to pattern came up. Dark psytrance and hi-tech music have a lot of this, so this style of writing went into Betwixt & Between as well.
¶ Graphics
In Q3 2014, I started a trend with my background graphics in that they would be inspired by things outside of dance games that I liked. Rebuild of Sharpnel (2018) would be the first pack with a graphic that was inspired by something not related to dance games, using the Evangelion motifs and visual style. On August 6, 2015, I made made a number of graphics for various projects, including Dragonforce Kaioken (2019) (at the time named Dragonforce SSJ2) and The Apocalypse Sampler (2015), and their graphical themes were based on Dragon Ball Z and 2001: A Space Odyssey, respectively. Contininuing the 2001 trend, I decided to use the film's visuals as a reference a second time for this project. This time, the incredible Stargate Sequence.
My concept was very simple: I took screenshots of various moments of the sequence and overlaid them atop one another in PhotoShop, with varying degrees of transparency. The final combination used is comprised of five images. A Brush Strokes filter called “Angled Strokes” is applied yet again to merge the individual layers into each other with a common filter effect.
Text was something simple and neutrally colored to balance out the complexity of the art. A simple composition, I felt, was plenty sufficient. The black frame is expanded here to have a faded edge towards the image center, to give the impression of being seen through a portal.
¶ Songlist
Betwixt & Between contains 26 songs. The Quick Readme.xls can be viewed here.
| Song | Artist | BPM | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12 Little Fragments of Silence | Betwixt & Between | 220 | |
| Awakening | Betwixt & Between | 185 | Sped up from 170bpm |
| Division 4 | Betwixt & Between | 180 | 2016 Rebuild |
| Dust to Dust | Betwixt & Between | 180 | |
| Fire and Brimstone | Betwixt & Between | 175 | |
| From the Abyss | Betwixt & Between | 180 | Sped up from 170bpm |
| Gravity's Rainbow | Betwixt & Between | 176 | |
| Hydra | Betwixt & Between | 190 | |
| I Think We Can Go to the Moon | Betwixt & Between | 175 | |
| Isolation | Betwixt & Between | 190 | Sped up from 170bpm |
| Kamsheen | Betwixt & Between | 175 | |
| Kokoro ni Todoku Uta | Betwixt & Between vs P*LIGHT Remix | 180 | |
| Kuru Kuru Ki Ki | Berserk+Haste | 220 | Sped up from 200bpm |
| Liberation | Betwixt & Between | 180 | Sped up from 172bpm |
| Lightning Fire | Betwixt & Between | 185 | |
| Like a Flame | Betwixt & Between | 190 | |
| Nemesis | Betwixt & Between | 180 | |
| Nothing Compares 2 U | Betwixt & Between & yukacco | 175 | Sped up from 170bpm |
| Point of No Return | Betwixt & Between | 176 | Sped up from 170bpm |
| So Sweet Bitter Days | Betwixt & Between | 180 | Sped up from 170bpm |
| Surging | Betwixt & Between | 180 | Sped up from 170bpm |
| Tankobu Heso Tarou's Wandering (Proteus Remix) | Betwixt & Between ft. DJ Proteus | 180 | Sped up from 157bpm |
| Think of You | Betwixt & Between ft. Hatsune Miku | 185 | Sped up from 170bpm |
| Tout Est Bien (Sein zum Tode) | Betwixt & Between | 180 | |
| Wide Awake | Betwixt & Between | 180 | Sped up from 170bpm |
| 妖 (You) -Ayakashi- | Teranoid vs Betwixt & Between | 200 | Sped up from 185bpm |
¶ Reception and Retrospect
This pack suffered from the notorious “day 1 patch”. Dust to Dust's lowers were off by a measure and this justified a full pack reupload (with other minor tweaks). This pack was only released on my Facebook wall, so it didn't have a wide distribution.
On April 17, 2017, mute found some other lowers with errors and I issued another reupload, this one titled “Betwixt & Between 170404 fixed lowers". I can't find a record of what changes were made, but this version remains the final version of the pack.
Critical and popular reception was relatively muted, compared to preceding releases. This pack didn't have the “wow” factor that Helblinde and the Cirques had, perhaps owing to its overall less engaging music, and it remains one of the lower profile pcks in my simfilography.
¶ Trivia
- Kokoro ni Todoku Uta: The note at M188.46 is quantized as a 192nd note
- I left an image in the song folder explaining my reasoning
- The note is actually one 192nd earlier, which would make it a 24th note
- Some songs have incorrectly-listed bpms in the Quick Readme.xls:
- Awakening is listed as 190 when it should be 185
- From The Abyss is listed as 181 when it should be 180
- Lightning Fire is misspelt as “Lighting Fire”
- Liberation: In the Readme.xls, a note refers to a "Secret easter egg in chart”. The easter egg is that M116-120 sounds like this part of Super Luminal. I wrote the steps in this segment in a very similar way to how they're written in that chart as a reference.