(disclaimer: AIM judge review here! these are just my opinions and thoughts, you can take from them whatever you like! music is subjective and all that. <3)

above all, my main suggestion is that individually all your parts should be turned way down in volume because they are pushing up against your limiter/compressor and sometimes also clipping (distorting). you can tell by how immediately quiet the opening guitar riff gets when the drums start hitting that there is simply not enough room for all the sounds to coexist. turning down all their volumes will give everything room to breathe.

the other thing i think might help you a bit is adding some variation to the velocities of the notes in your guitar lines for instance - like lowering the ones that aren't on the strong beats and generally not using the same values 100% of the time for a little bit of a humanistic touch.

i def get that you chose your instrumentation to try and fit with 'japan' but beyond that i'm not picking up a lot of relevance to your chosen art inspiration; in particular the artwork depicts a major natural disaster event so i maybe expected something emotional, heavy, dark, or... fractured, maybe. there's also a ton of details in the artwork you could hone in and focus on, if trying to tackle the whole thing is too overwhelming, like the busted cars or shattered buildings.

with all that said, there's good potential here for something that really goes hard. there could be a little more development and variation, especially with the drums, and i could definitely see some distorted rock/metal guitar chugging going on, but the basis of an idea is definitely here, so expand the prototype!

AIM 2023 Judge Review

For a track described as being "rock", I was surprised at how buried the electric guitar was in this. The composition does somewhat fit the art in that it has a bit of sadness and a touch of intensity from the minor key progression, and the layers that are introduced I can hear working with a different execution. I do like the way the second section's continuum starts under the first section's and despite the hard cut to the new section, these two ideas melodically flow together.

Unfortunately, the mixing and production feel so off that it's hard to justify wanting to listen to this even if the composition is decent. The drums are too loud but they're also very spread out and sound like they're heavily reverbed, which does not work at all. Layers that enter or re-enter either sound too loud or too soft and the entire mix is generally just too loud. I had to relisten to this many times before even realizing that there were other parts besides the drums and the one continuum. I wish I knew more production-related terms, but sadly I'm not that knowledgeable in that regard, but I will say that generally with production, you don't want instruments to be competing against each other so that the whole thing doesn't sound muddy.

There are ideas in the layers that do work and I think the downward contour of the arps does at least come off as a bit tragic, reflecting the art. I just wish I could hear more of what you've done with your composition. When your audio waves are almost constantly touching the top and bottom, it's a good indication that the track might be too difficult to listen to mix-wise.