broken piano noises

Sometimes when you flip over a rock you find amazing things. Lets' start with the meme I saw. Let's also briefly revisit the definition of meme. Per Merriam Webster:

 /mēm/
an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media

A meme acts as a conveyance to transfer cultural ideas, symbols, or practices from one person to another. The definition is already blurring, as AI is already being used to auto-generate memes which lack creator intent but they match the format of "real" memes. A LOLCAT is an easily understood meme. Anyway thank you Richard Dawkins. 

What grabbed me was the music more than anything. I like noisy music. There was no artist profile connected. The attribution was simply given as "old doll (out of tune piano)emptiness, love.nicotine." I found a video on YouTube posted by bluerra-sai with the right key words but it was clearly labeled "!! THIS IS A COVER; THE ORIGINAL COMPOSITION IS BY MUSIC ATELIER AMACHA !!" It's similar but definitely a cover of the one I first heard. I might even like this one better.

 

Eventually I found the version I first heard. The song appears on Amazon, Spotify, YouTube and other streaming services. "℗ 2024 emptiness & love.nicotine, under exclusive license to Kurate Music Ltd." They have a whole YouTube channel named Emptiness. The original piece I heard is here.

Attribution varies across sites. Sometimes it's Emptiness, Sometimes Love.Nicotine othertimes both like Simon & Garfunkel. There the instrumental is attributed to Atelier Amacha. The take away here is that this is not the original. It is a cover. The version by bluerra-sai is just a different cover.

So who is Atelier Amacha? Thankfully bluerra-saigave a link because I couldn't find anything useful on Google. (an increasingly frequent outcome) amachamusic.chagasi.com The website is in Japanese, but Google translate does a decent job. It turns out to be a source for royalty-free music. I'll quote "At Amacha's Music Studio, we distribute music created by the site manager Amacha as a hobby as free material..." Apparently this tune made it into some manga RPG called Mad Father released in 2012. That version has lyrics. That's the kind of rabbit hole I'm afraid to click on. More here and here.

But here I at least heard the original: a synthy somewhat spare arrangement. The "broken piano" arrangement only exists in the cover tune. But there are dozens of versions, even piano tutorials, sheet music. It lacks the noisyness of the version that first caught my attention but I can hear that same tin-pan alley quality that made it so captivating in the first place. 

 But there was one more rock to flip over. I pulled up the ASCAP - ACE Repertory site. The title is unique enough that I found it immediately. The writer is registered as Brock Mike, the publisher as Flomper Music LLC. Bluerra-sai appears as the performer, so that's the cover version I found. The phone number listed under Flomper belongs to a New York restaurant, Inside Park. The email is a hotmail address. I am mostly left with questions Is Brock Mike also Atelier Amacha?  It's doubtful. Who are emptiness & love.nicotine? I think all I learned is that a meme is everything that Dawkins thought it was.