東方 Touhou Boogie (The Traditional Old Man and the Stylish Girl) [E5,

Title: ハイカラブギ (High-Collar Boogie)
Circle: Azure & Sands
Album: CASINO聖輦船/CASINO Seirensen (ASCD-0009)
Original: 時代親父とハイカラ少女 (The Traditional Old Man and the Stylish Girl)
Image artist: Based64, with some LORAs (31472, 332461, 109763 on civitai)
Image link: AI-generated + manual touchup
Upload #24
Azure & Sands, headed by Tainokobone, hasn't put anything out lately (though Tainokobone seems to have been contributing to ShibayanRecords' Bossa Nova albums), but from what I remember, they used to be that one hit-or-miss novelty circle that either put out something interesting or something very skippable.
Anyways, this album, which was apparently a collab between multiple circles (even oiko/N-tone from two videos ago participated), is no exception - most of the tracks in it have decent instrumentation, but very subpar vocals that would probably be better suited for drunken karaoke night.
That, or I'm being too harsh on the vocalists from sekken-ya/IOSYS. I get those circles were important for the community at some point, but I never really got used to their vocals (or their arranges, for that matter)
....bleh. Anyways, I'd say this arrange's one of the more interesting ones from Azure & Sands' discography that's representative of the novelty they're (sometimes) known for. No vocals, interesting genre choice/theming, and good instrumentation. Very solid track overall; would recommend listeners take this to their next Vegas outing (or the next time they install/open up Robinhood).
Regarding the title, there's a small inaccuracy in the VGMDB translation, which says that the translation is "High-Class Boogie". The literal translation's "High-Collar Boogie" though, where high collar evidently means "stylish" - see en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%83....
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Finally built a new computer! My old laptop got a really nasty crack in the side from heat damage - looking closely at the laptop, there's a huge bulge in the center for no particular reason - and I ended up rush-buying PC parts. It's a shame that I never really got to use the 1070 in my old laptop for anything worthwhile (aside from maybe a handful of games in 2018ish), but it's nice finally having a machine that doesn't reach egg-frying temperatures (the innards literally get to 90C+) when doing anything other than browsing the internet.
Anyways, I guess the lesson of the day is to not buy off-brand gaming laptops, no matter how good the graphics card inside is. Doesn't matter how good the hardware is if everything gets heat throttled.
~
One of the things I wanted to do with a new machine was to use AI image gen for some of the music uploads I had planned that didn't have good images to use, with this track being one of them. The only images I could find that would fit on this video were, funnily enough, the cover arts of several other TH jazz albums, so I figured this was the more kosher approach.
The unfortunate part of AI image gen for videos is that since there's much more variety in what art can be obtained, image standards go up, but quality simultaneously goes down because it's AI.
I actually wanted Ichirin to have a trumpet/saxophone, but you'd be surprised at how hard it is to get Stable Diffusion to spit out an image of a character holding a brass instrument with the correct number of loops, with two hands, in a way that doesn't feel like they're holding an assault rifle.
I ended up switching the instrument to a piano and got this one in a few hundred image gens, which would usually take a whole day on my 1070 but it went surprisingly quickly on my new 4070 Ti Super. The image only barely fits the metrics I set (suit, slacks, tie, from above, and actually playing the piano), so it's not exactly a remarkable image at first glance...
...but she had 5 (plausible) fingers on each hand! Probably used up all of my luck for the whole day to get the image, so I figured that was a good stopping point.
The keyboard was obviously mangled, the right hand was also slightly mangled upon further inspection, and the hood was miscolored, so I figured it'd be done after fixing all of those.
Then I realized that the floor was concrete and had to replace it with wood.
Then I realized that the left and right sides of the piano didn't line up, so I had to paste in another piano half.
Then I realized that the shading under the seat was wrong (except I just made it worse)
Then I realized that ... (etc.)
...then I realized that the image doesn't really work with the music? Was the image lucky or unlucky?
I guess that's the other danger with AI image gen; it looks good because you didn't spend the effort to nitpick at it, but when you stop to examine the details, everything kinda just falls apart.
At least this isn't an art channel. Normally I'd pick a different image, but I'm already behind my upload-within-two-weeks schedule anyways, so "good enough", I'd say.

[@LoveFor298Yen]

You’re one of the best Touhou uploaders on UA-cam. Where do you find your selections?

[@paranoidneet3211]

Thanks for the compliment. Wasn't sure how accurate the first part of that comment was, since there are a lot of other youtube channels that have good stuff on them - kkcwkoh, ChaosAngel, inferuy0 to name a few - but after closer inspection, they're all inactive. The only other channel that I can think of with curated good stuff that uploads from time to time that comes to mind is SkuddeOuo, though he's been uploading less frequently lately.
Regarding content that comes from this channel, a lot of the upload ideas were taken and filtered from channels that no longer exist - sometimes it's the circle name sometimes the actual track uploaded.
Among them are the channels infernape1, Naturalistick2, some guy named Ray (forgot his actual username), SpiritofTouhou/SpiritOfKensei, KakashiMr, and Angel Mutsumi, in rough order of hardest to easiest to find.
Some of these channels were downed over 10 years ago, closer to 15, so my memory's a bit hazy at best on what they uploaded. I do remember things from time to time though, and try to jump on those opportunities when I can.
As for the source files, nearly all of it come from the >700 GB lossy TH music torrent on nyaa.si, though there are a handful that I've had to dig up myself on the internet.
I've also made it a goal to rummage around through the contents of the torrent from time to time just in case I can find something good, but it's a real chore. There are multiple circles that only have one or two good tracks per hundred, and there probably over 100k files in there at this point, so I try to give each track maybe a few seconds of listening, possibly more if one sounds decent.