Title: Rhododendron
Circle: Iosys (read description!)
Artist: ARM
Album: Bloom
Original: Reach for the Moon, Immortal Smoke

I've been a fan of the touhou franchise for 7-8 years when UFO got released, I've been wanting to upload touhou for some time now. I use to have a touhou channel a few years ago but deleted it. The pressure of having a 200k viewed vid got to me.

It's a strange feeling being a fan of it and being 23, there are many things about it I want to keep behind closed doors from others, when someones looking through my phones music I'd get comments like "that's a lot of anime crap" I laugh and agree defending that it's just video game arrangers who know that (cutie sells). I have a little bit of merch from the franchise, 2 t-shirts, 2 plushies and some cd's but I hide them literally in the closet. I'm not entirely positive that it has to do with growing up but lack of people around me who share the interest. In real life I've only known 1 person who knew touhou not due to me and 2 who I introduced it to, all those relationships have ended. I hang out now with mostly roleplayers for games like D&D and Dark Heresy, I feel almost a shame in sharing it, I just think that they're going to think its like a mediocre generic moe anime or something (I only watch obscure old anime).

This album Bloom is definitely a masterpiece by ARM for me. I use to listen to a lot of Iosys material and this one just blew the others away. Electronic music isn't my forte but I love his ability of fusing sounds together.

I've wanted to upload this particular song for a few days now, I was looking at touhou related pictures and after finding this I just knew the perfect song to go with it. I know it's traditional to have a picture of the character the original song is associated with but this is a fair exception. The original "Reach For The Moon" to this arrangement has always been my least favorite (popular) touhou original. When artists put emotion into the melody it just doesn't sound right for me, it could be why I love this version. It defies the rulebooks for touhou music by making it sound as Western as possible with English audio clips yet having an artificial Eastern parody of the melody.

A fun fact for you, the ending song Rainbow on this album is very similar to the intro of Edge Of Thorns by Savatage, the album cover is quite similar also.