This is the last in a series of four bits of writing about music that affected me last year in some way. There’s a few changes between this and the final version (which will hopefully be published in a few days), but the main thing I want to highlight is that there was a line about my not understanding Japanese which allowed me to hear the song differently. I removed it from the draft and the final as it felt like a really arrogant and ignorant thing to say. It also felt disrespectful. Removing it improved the parts around it quite a bit, too.

Of note, the main vocalist of the song is MO’SOME TONEBENDER’s Momo Kazuhiro (百々和宏), and it’s through this song that I got into that band.

The final version of this essay will be published on From Somewhere out the Back. If you’ve been following my stuff here long enough, then you’ll recognise the name as the title for when I write about music releases in my music collection. I’d been intending to dedicate a space for those pieces for a while, and of course rather than hold to that, the space expanded to more than just music.

The draft below is just to give an idea of progress.

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I hope you enjoy.

At some point in the second half of 2025 I discovered the song “Across the Katamari”, a song used in Touch my Katamari and included in its soundtrack album, Katamari Damacy Novita Original Soundtrack: Katamori Damacy. The album’s cover features a mandrill enjoying what I think is a bowl of ramen. It’s calm. The Katamari series is seldom calm, but it can have a calming effect, strangely enough. Among all the bizarreness and rather brazen, destructive action, there’s a whimsy that comes in its process of creation, of its continued work and building and working and working some more… you get the idea. “Across the Katamari” is calm, but it’s also not.

What an opening paragraph.

“Across the Katamari” starts with light percussion twinkling in a vast silence. Vocals soon join, singing short phrases. Elongating where required, and always remaining concise. More percussion comes in, firm, yet still gentle. Brass starts enunciating the melody, building on it whilst adding its own detail. More instrumentation joins and adds its own flair, widening the. There’s a bit going on, but everything is kept light and simple and gentle. Inviting in a way. Perhaps comforting and relational.

There’s a pause and additional vocals appear, harmonising, keeping things flowing and creating this very soft, small moment. The main vocal re-enters, then everything then comes back and creates this moment of grandness. The melody pushes out further, harder. Those background voices harmonise with the surrounding instrumentation, and it’s just a big and beautiful, yet humble moment. It doesn’t feel like it’s trying to be anything more than it needs to be, and it feels thankful. There’s gratitude in there.

The song becomes gentle once more, and sounds sort of drifts in a controlled way, becomes big once more, then returns to a verse. There’s more energy here, but there’s also more space. It doesn’t last long and once more things get big, and perhaps feel like a release in a way. The main vocals keep singing short phrases, and remain both gentle and firm and fronting, and a little smooth and a little rough, and eventually they disappear and once more let the song do its thing. The instruments stay in control as they drift and seemingly explore a beauty, a wonderment of the grandness of everything until they reach one more percussive curl, then let a guitar close everything off with the quiet smallness of everything.

Excellent stuff.

Before editing, I said that “Across the Katamari” is a perfectly-composed song. I don’t know if that’s fair as it doesn’t say anything about the song at all. Plenty of music out there is perfectly composed. It doesn’t mean it makes for good music. Instead, I want to say that “Across the Katamari” is an affective song. It makes great use of cycles and layering whilst preserving a sense of space. Vocals harmonising with the other instruments, and everything moves through a sectioned build that feels organic. It’s small and massive at the same time, and it’s fragile and strong, and efficient. It’s so many things, and it’s just a song. What I think makes it good, however, is none of this.

Where the song shines is in allowing itself to straddle many different emotions in one go. There is, what I feel, a genuine sense of wonderment, joy, jubilation, happiness, celebration… but there’s a certain openness in it, in the way the sounds flow, the way the push forward and pull back, and become massive at times without coming off as smothering. The lightness in them, and their ability to become expansive without becoming sparse. As such, it can be about something different from one listen to the next because it’s universal.

The great thing about music is how, even if understood, its meaning can change context based on different situations. A lot of music comes from the heart, and it often takes a lot of work to create something that feels throwaway like filler. “Across the Katamari” feels like it had a lot of heart and soul thrown into it. It feels like a song that Taku Inoue (here credited as NBGI) poured a lot into, and it feels like a lot of things, but it also feels optimistic and hopeful. It’s a song filled with wonderment, even when it feels sad.

That this song is used in a game considered (as far as I’m aware) controversial is a downright shame, because this is a great song. Until recently “Across the Katamari” was the last bit of credits music heard in a Katamari game. Maybe that adds a bit of unintended poignancy to it. I imagine it wasn’t composed as being final in mind, but it does feel final. To be fair, plenty of great music requires digging, but this is one really should be more readily accessible. Sure, the album it’s on is out there. You don’t have to play through a game to hear it, but how many people are going to come across it of their own accord? I only came across it by chance, but that’s the way it goes, really.

I feel lucky for having come across “Across the Katamari”. It makes me think about how small I am in the grand scheme of things, and how, whilst moments of joy will pass, I still carry those experiences with me. I think about the mandrill eating ramen on the album cover, and I think about my own intensity. This is a Mandrill embracing a moment of calm. A moment I’m an intense person and aging hasn’t changed that, though I’m a bit more controlled, at least.

To be clear, I’m not trying to relate myself to mandrills here. They are intense and sometimes violent creatures, as are so many animals we love, but on the cover of Katamari Damacy Novita Original Soundtrack: Katamori Damacy, we have one just enjoying a moment in time. It’s a picture that I feel works well with “Across the Katamari”, because the image can get across so many things, much like the song. There’s energy in the song; there’s energy in a mandrill. But sometimes, just sometimes, you gotta take time to relax and enjoy moments in life, and that’s something that we can all take something from.

I don’t know how the longtime fans of the series feel about the song, but “Across the Katamari” made me believe in music again. I’m finding myself thinking about last year and the trip it was. I think about the music that spoke to me. Mastodon’s “Gigantium” made me think of my friends. Lianne La Havas’ “Weird Fishes” spoke to me in a way that no other song could. Fever made me want to write about music again.

Music has been good, and writing has been there, but there’s been a detachment, as though I haven’t been taking part. I’m not really there. I played my first gig in six years and that was great fun, and  there’s potential for more sooner rather than later, but I wasn’t fully in it. There’s stuff that I’d heard that was affecting, but it wouldn’t take hold of me in the way music usually did. But “Across the Katamari”, and its being about anything whilst also reflecting on the journey to that point, and in its grand smallness; I came across it at the right time, and it made me believe in music again.