All in all, this is going to be pretty short post, given that the song itself is an instrumental and the artist herself doesn’t much biographical information available online.
First things first, Longma is Chinese for “Dragon Horse”, referring to a creature in Chinese mythology that’s basically exactly what it sounds like. Notably, Sanzang’s horse during his travels in Journey to the West is referred in the narrative as the White Dragon Horse.
Incidentally, I don’t know if you remember/were paying attention to the whole big thing about Canada’s 150th anniversary, but one of the things that happened in Ottawa was a weird elaborate, like, performance art thing involving giant animal robots, one of which was explicitly named “Longma.”
Nini is a Taiwanese folk musician specialising in traditional Chinese instruments with a repertoire combining original Folk Metal songs with Chinese Folk versions of various well-known popular songs and classical music.
LongMa is a song from her 2022 EP Legends. Unsurprisingly, the songs on the EP are all based on Chinese mythology. We’ve gone over what a Longma is. Wukong is, as you may remember from previous posts, the most famous character (though not technically the main character) from Journey to the West. Guan Yu is one of the great heroes from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, to the point that the historical Guan Yu is now deified and worshipped as a god of war and protection. Mazu is a sea goddess.
Again, it’s an instrumental, so there’s not a lot to unpack in terms of lyrics, though I do like the horse noises…
It’s also a pretty short song, but I think there are a lot of interesting elements of Chinese folk music packed into the song that make the most out of its short playtime — even to the point that I’d probably point to it as an example of why I like the sound of Chinese folk music to begin with.
And, honestly, it wouldn’t sound out of place in a Dynasty Warriors level…
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