Touhou Music

Touhou music is not a single style but a fan-made remix culture around the Touhou Project — a Japanese bullet-hell shooting game series created by ZUN (Jun'ya Ota) starting in 1996. The original game music is composed by ZUN himself, typically in a recognizable mid-tempo Japanese game-music style with strong melodies and frequent modulation. The remix economy reworks those themes across genres: J-rock (foobies, Yonder Voice), trance (IOSYS), metal (Demetori, Crow's Claw), drum and bass (kors k arrangements), orchestral (TAMUSIC, A-One), vocaloid pop (Akatsuki Records) and many others. The genre's defining trait is the recognizability of ZUN's source melodies, which act as a shared songbook across thousands of arrangers.

ZUN released the first Touhou game in 1996 for the PC-9801 and continued the series through Windows releases from 2002 onward. The doujin remix culture exploded in the mid-2000s when Comiket and the M3 doujin music convention started featuring Touhou-arrangement circles in significant numbers. ZUN's exceptionally liberal fan-work licensing — he allows non-commercial and commercial arrangements with minimal restrictions — built one of the largest copyright-friendly fan music economies in the world. IOSYS, Sound Online, Akatsuki Records and TAMUSIC are among the longest-running circles.

Recognizing source themes is part of the format — themes like Bad Apple!! (Lotus Land Story stage 5), U.N. Owen Was Her? (Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, Flandre Scarlet's theme), and Septette for the Dead Princess (the same game's Remilia Scarlet theme) get arranged hundreds of times each. Listen for the way arrangers preserve the melodic contour and harmonic skeleton of ZUN's original even when they switch genre entirely.

Alstroemeria Records' Bad Apple!! feat. nomico (2008) is the most famous Touhou arrangement and the entry point most listeners take. IOSYS's Kero (9) Destiny (2007) was the early viral hit. Demetori's metal arrangements of stage themes show the heavier end.

The Bad Apple!! shadow-art music video uploaded to Niconico in 2009 — which renders the song as monochrome animated silhouettes — has been reproduced on calculators, oscilloscopes, Minecraft pistons and the Nintendo 3DS notification LED, making the song one of the most-ported pieces of music in computing.