Cirque du Zeppelin is a stream pack by Zaia.
It is named after the Zeppelin, which is a type of airship.
| Pack Director | Zaia |
| Stepartists | Zaia, Zeph |
| BPM | 148-175 |
| Songcount | 40 |
| Blocks | 9-15 (11-14 target) |
| Type | Stream |
| Format | Singles |
| Release Date | Sep 30, 2014 |
¶ Structure
Cirque du Zeppelin is structured identically to Cirque du Lykan but covers a slower bpm range. Its target difficulties are the 12-14 block.
The chart description field contains the stream breakdown only. The stepartist name is omitted as I began to use a cdtitle with this pack, but popular ITG themes of the time could not display it.
¶ Development
Zeppelin marks the first instance of what would become a recurring theme in my stepartist career - the sidequest pack.
Sidequest packs are those that interrupted the production of a pack that was already in the process of being made, but will be finished and released before the pack that it interrupted. In this case, Cirque du Zeppelin interrupted the production of Betwixt & Between, which had already started production before Cirque du Lykan released. This occurred because I was having difficulty securing high quality Betwixt & Between music files and wanted to wait to get something better.
At the exact moment I was conceiving this new pack in my brain womb, I was already presently working on something else as well. Cranked Pastry was nearing the end of its production phase and I had joined the team a couple weeks prior, and in fact submitted my first finished chart to the pack, Bloody Hell Mate, on the same day the new Cirque was born.
Judging from Facebook posts, Cirque du Zeppelin was written in 2 weeks, which I suppose shouldn't be too surprising, given my track record. I don't remember the experience all that vividly, but there was one incident that occurred on July 12-13th that would have a paradigm-shifting effect on my stepartist career. Will discuss in the next section
I held an open call on Facebook for names for “Cirque du 150-170”. I'll list as many as i can below:
| Hovercraft | Truck | F-16 | Corolla | Zagato | Rally Car |
| The Homer | Tank | Punto | Huracan | Delorean | DeSoto Firedome |
| Vanquish | Drill | 2148 | Plethore | CheryQQ | Republic XF-91 Thunderceptor |
| Mirabeau | Zenvo | F(240) | Tesla | Pantera | Horse and Buggy |
| Limousine | One:1 | Pontiac Grand Am |
I ultimately didn't pick from the suggestions made in the Facebook post and was most inspired with one suggested by UPSFanBoy420: Cirque du Dirigible Balloon. I didn't think using it verbatim was as thematically on-brand for Cirque, but I really liked one type of dirigible - the Zeppelin, and that word absolutely ticked the Cirque “exotic word” requirements, so it was almost a no-brainer to go with. When I thought of Zeppelins, I also thought of the LZ 129 Hindenburg, so I imagined a hypothetical banner reading: CIRQUE DU ZEPPELIN: IT'S A DISASTER OF A PACK!
I was on a bit of a deadline to clear Zeppelin out, because just a week and a bit later was my USA trip for Bearpocalypse 4, and I was quite busy getting everything in order so I wouldn't have to worry about anything in Australia for 6 weeks.
And I was glad I did, because barely two days later, on the 23rd of July, a certain album would (finally) drop that would lead to the second sidequest pack to push Betwixt & Between down the queue.
The Stream Breakdown Notation System underwent a significant simplification after evaluation of the cumbersome Lykan formatting. This is when the current form of the system was first drafted: the / symbol was implemented for all “long” breaks between streams (anything over 4 measures), and - was implemented for breaks up to and including 4 measures. These were the only two symbols in use at this time.
¶ Artistic Influences and Chart Design
Zeppelin followed the same design principles Lykan did, just - like Lykan was to Zonda - slower. That said, I did find myself a little more creatively challenged beause this pack had significantly more musical variety than Lykan and room to justify more creative range.
On the night of July 12th and into July 13th, I stepped Silver Screen and Destination Talos for Cranked Pastry, back to back. At the time, it was the most mentally and physically challenging day of my simfile career. I was about halfway through Zeppelin's simfiles when I took a break to do this, and something profound occurred when I went back to working on Zeppelin again. Stepping dark psytrance is extraordinarily challenging. It's a unique challenge that requires high amounts of creativity and a ton of ear stamina. I do mean that quite literally, because I'd never stepped songs this long and lacking in melodies and proper breaks. At the time, 300+ measure charts with no real breaks were extremely rare, and their lack of conventional music structure means that these charts will have virtually no copypasting. 300 measures of original steps for a single song was unheard of in the ITG community at this time, and after stepping two back-to-back, I was mentally and physically exhausted by the end. I vividly recall my ears hurting and having a headache and went to bed after sending the charts over to @@.
The effect that this had had would not be apparent until I went back to stepping Zeppelin again.
All of a sudden, the Zeppelin songs were now twice as easy to step as they had been two days prior. It was as if my eyes had been upgraded overnight, and I could see patterns and hear sounds that I couldn't before. What had happened was that I'd increased my mental bandwidth from stepping dark psytrance- it was like putting training weights on and keeping them on whilst stepping those, and then taking them off when coming back to step “easy” songs. I'd learned how to create patterns out of thin air, and coming back to normal songs now, there was one less variable to have to deal with, and significantly more mental energy to devote to maintaining clarity and control over the music.
Subsequently, with increased brain power, I was able to see things from a broader macrocosmic perspective. I had more headspace to experiment with more complex pattern structures. From this point onwards, the charts I was writing began to employ mechanics like axis-swapping in a more thorough, methodical way; though I had not yet developed16th shifting, so L-R swaps could only occur where streams had been broken. After Silver Screen and Destination Talos was also the moment I started to realize that relativistic pattern scaling was a potential new way to add a new dimension of technical and artistic complexity to stream charts, but this wouldn't be explored in detail until the development of Helblinde (2014).
Armed with this new knowledge, the latter half of Zeppelin's songs were quickly stepped with no loss in quality. I don't have a formal list of the stepping order, but I remember that Amazing, Endless Flyer and Snowman were three of the most notable simfiles that were able to capitalize on the gains.
¶ Graphics
Due to the social nature of the pack's naming, I elected to return to the shitpost graphic style, but keeping the composition improvements made for Lykan. Since the pack's name was Zeppelin, I decided to use a photo of one, and the most famous one was the Hindenburg. I went with a colorized version of the photo. The black letterboxing is caused by the dimensions of the photo and was not intentionally added.
As promised, the face photo was integrated into the final art, and as had been tradition with Veyron (and Zonda, sort of), there were distorted images of notes exploding outwards.
The stylization of the text was something I wanted to be a little more creative with. I went with a vaguely Art Deco typeface with some experimental composition to complement the background image. Unfortunately, the unusual placement of each word meant that literal readings of the pack name were not possible.
This was also the first pack since S21 Works (2009) in which I re-adopted the use of a cdtitle, at @@'s encouraging. It is based on the Cirque du Soleil: Zaia logo.
¶ Songlist
Cirque du Zeppelin contains 40 songs. “Original release” refers to my release version on September 30, 2014. “Resync” refers to the mute/Ash resynced version
| Song | Artist | BPM | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 Minutes (Play & Win Radio Edit) | Inna | 162.5 | Original release had “- Nightcore” in the subtitle Stepped with Zeph |
| A Brighter Day | NAOKI feat. Aleisha G | 155 | Stepped with Zeph |
| Aggressive 201 -Original Mix- | sun3 | 165 | |
| Ala Rosso | Kryptos | 168 | |
| Amazing | Inna feat. Hixxy, Sy & Unknown | 170 | |
| Amore (Radio Mix) | Camilot | 158 | Original release had “- Nightcore” in the subtitle |
| Beamsabre Beat Zero v2 | DarkeSword | 163 | |
| Black Lair | Sakuzyo | 154 | |
| Center Stage | Kita Khyber | 168 | |
| Cross Time | Brandy | 160 | |
| Decisive Battle, Cyber Beasts! | Yoshino Aoki | 171 | Original release was titled “Cyber Beasts!” and artist was “Megaman Battle Network 6” |
| Destiny -Eclipse Mix- | e^2 | 167 | Restepped from S21 Works version |
| Empire State Glory | Dirty Androids | 173 | |
| End of the Moonlight | Forte Escape | 155 | |
| Endless Flyer | TJ_MS-DOM | 160 | |
| Engage (Radio Edit) | Kozato Yuzuki | 165 | |
| Euphorium | DM Ashura | 158 | |
| Event Horizon | wa. | 169 | |
| Fancy Footwork | Cardboard Box | 156 | |
| Go Go Sing | Outsider feat. Whale | 166 | |
| Hamatte Sabotte Oh My God! | Aya Hirano & Emiri Katou & Kaori Fukuharai & Ayu Endou | 158 | |
| L | Ice | 155 | |
| L2 Ver. B ~Liberation~ | Ice | 152 | |
| Le Grand Bleu | Kien | 164 | |
| Melody of Happiness - The Solitary Melody - | Xenothium feat. gmtn | 162 | |
| MEPHISTO | LeaF | 172 | |
| moon_child | Shonen Radio | 148 | |
| Omega (Ω) | Max Dragon | 175 | |
| Operation Evolution | Dimrain47 | 165 | |
| Our Xenopittan | Xenosaga Freaks | 170 | |
| Parousia | xi | 158 | |
| S | 0mega | 166 | |
| Sakura (桜) | RevenG | 150-160 | Has a high bpm speedup at the end. CMOD required |
| Shining Rouge | Xenothium | 150 | |
| Snowman | Brookes Brothers | 174 | Fraxtil's You're Streaming Again cut used |
| Still Blastin' | Nemesis Theory | 170 | |
| The Final Hour | Dimrain47 | 165 | Resync caused the charts to start a beat late |
| Typhoon Impulse | Nexus | 165 | |
| Vortex Infinitum | Shin Hae Chul & N.EX.T. | 172 | Restepped from Dropbear Awareness Pack version |
| You Are (Scott Brown & DJ Evil Remix) | LIA | 165 | Original release had no subtitle |
¶ Reception and Retrospect
Cirque du Zeppelin was a smash hit across the community. It had extraordinary penetration and could be found on machines everywhere. I saw a machine once that only had a single Cirque pack, and it was this one. This pack was the first large-scale stream pack that specifically targeted casual and novice to journeyman level players at slower speeds (the slower a pack is, the exponentially larger target audience it can have). Critical opinion was also high; not quite as high as Lykan's, which was across the board better.
A large amount of attention was focused on one particular simfile from the pack: Amazing. Particularly in South-American communities, the reception to Amazing specifically was disproportionately high. Amazing has since gone on to become one of my most recognizable simfiles and a very high profile ITG custom in its own right, transcending the pack it called home.
The other simfile that managed to break out was Endless Flyer, primarily because of its cheeseblock style chart and divisive Expert rating.
My personal assessment of this pack is that I think its the worst Cirque. The entire pack is carried by two songs (Amazing and Endless Flyer) and the other 38 feel invisible. I think it was too much of a mixed bag of music genres and suboptimal chart structures. Some simfiles like Sakura didn't work out at all, and many others feel like filler content. I feel that the fact that the feedback was so good on a pack like this illustrates how little content there was with lower to mid-range players in mind, and that they would happily take whatever they could get if it meant having new things at accessible levels to play.
The pack received a resync from mute and Ash Astral (Fraxtil).
¶ Trivia
- Amazing is actually a restep of a B1uEM4oM4o chart from December 2012. He stepped a cut version of the song and I used to play it as a warmup very often in early 2013
- Beamsabre Beat Zero v2 is from OCRemix
- Destiny -Eclipse Mix-: e^2 is short for “Electronic Elation”
- One of the more experimental charts in the pack, Fancy Footwork, is inspired by the sideswitch chart Central Utopia by SpootyBiscuit.
- Hamatte Sabotte Oh My God! is the OP for the Lucky Star: Ryōō Gakuen Ōtōsai visual novel
- Omega (Ω) samples DDR MAX-EXTREME 10 footer songs. The voiceover at the start of the song reads out various DDR boss song names
- I have a restep of it in an as-yet unannounced pack
- Typhoon Impulse is a remix of 蒼い衝動 (Aoi Shoudou)～for EXTREME～
- The prototype for the modern visual style I use to format my pack release spreadsheets was first used in this pack's readme image. The beginnings of some kind of organized way of indicating unusual chart elements is introduced in this readme. This format evolved into the multi-tab format that I maintained until Dragonforce Kaioken.
