michael guy bowmantary

1 files changed, 17 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/album/midnight-crew-drawing-dead.yaml b/album/midnight-crew-drawing-dead.yaml
index 879712d..fdcd73e 100644
--- a/album/midnight-crew-drawing-dead.yaml
+++ b/album/midnight-crew-drawing-dead.yaml
@@ -73,6 +73,14 @@ Commentary: |-
     <i>Michael Guy Bowman:</i>
 
     The Midnight Crew album was the first of our really high-concept releases with the fake bands, especially since we attempted to invent some kind of goth-jazz genre out of thin air, despite the team's minimal understanding of goth music or jazz.
+
+    <i>Michael Guy Bowman:</i> ([Michael Guy Bowman Talks About His Homestuck Music](https://youtu.be/85VXWZTg-vo?t=861), adapted to text, 7/20/2024)
+
+    This was, I think, right at the cusp of Bandcamp being a known platform, and for a minute when we started releasing these albums, they were, like, routinely the best sellers on there. At the same time that the Alabama Shakes were on there, like, breaking out as a band, it's like - "Wow! Look at this big indie band that's doing numbers using Bandcamp - this obscure platform!" We were routinely outselling (laugh) the Alabama Shakes. We were super stoked to just expand on that, with, uh, non-animation, non-interactive element contributions.
+
+    And, the first big thing that we did with that was the Midnight Crew album, where we took the Midnight Crew characters and said, well, they're actually a band, and this is their album, containing video-game-style jazz music on it. [...]
+
+    This was one of Andrew's initial ideas, which was like, there were going to be many many bands within the comic. He wanted to do something like, Gorillaz, but, different sets of characters. So, the Midnight Crew would be a band. And the Felt would be a band, and they made orchestral stuff for that - I wasn't a participant on that one, I was a little busy. And, I think we drifted away from the band concept... there were proposed bands that were never done, there was the two robot rappers who cameod but never really were expanded on, there was an interest in doing, sort of like, a robot hip-hop album, which would have been fun, had those characters gone anywhere... There was also the idea that, of course, each of the kids were going to have their signature instrument, you know, the piano, the violin, the beat maker, and the bass. The culmination of that would have been music that features those four instruments, as if it's like, well, here's the demo the band was making. This is what the four beta kids were doing in their spare time. I would have loved that one to see the light of day, I think that would have tied the comic together.
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 Track: Three in the Morning
 Artists:
@@ -253,6 +261,10 @@ Commentary: |-
     <i>Michael Guy Bowman:</i> (Bowmantown Discord, excerpt, 8/5/2017)
 
     I tend to hold on to ideas and use them when they're ready. [[track:forever|Forever]] was an idea I'd been holding on to for about five years. Lunar eclipse I think was 3 or 4 before I arranged it. Lots of my stuff bakes for months or years. Sometimes the first drafts suck but I find myself humming it later. That's how I know.
+
+    <i>Michael Guy Bowman:</i> ([Michael Guy Bowman Talks About His Homestuck Music](https://youtu.be/85VXWZTg-vo?t=919), adapted to text, 7/20/2024)
+
+    My contribution on the Midnight Crew album was an original called Lunar Eclipse, featuring sax by someone named Fenris, who we've never heard from again! We don't know what happened to them.
 ---
 Track: Hauntjam
 Artists:
@@ -272,7 +284,7 @@ Referenced Tracks:
 Commentary: |-
     <i>Andrew Huo:</i>
 
-    Hauntjam and Hauntjelly are interesting things. They were actually made based on a short fruity loop that The Big Man Andrew did, called haunt.wav or haunt.mp3 or something like that. A jam on his theme, logically, would therefore be called "hauntjam," with the opportunity for naming puns including "hauntjelly." His theme appears mostly unchanged as the bassline for the first part of the pieces. At this point in terms of instrumentation, we were still mostly striving for faithfulness to the canon Midnight Crew "band," as can be seen in [the Extras page](http://www.mspaintadventures.com/extras/ps000018.html) wherein the MC fill 'em with midnight (bottom), so Hauntjam employs trombone, string bass, piano, clarinet, and sax (I forget which because I've lost the file and am not a band person, but I think it was alto). From there on, it was fairly straightforward to write a haunting refrain and then solos for each instrument. I will admit I got a little writerblock'd for the second part, which was sort of a brief modulation to the dominant, so it sounds a little strange. But it still has its own little charm, with the almost annoying trill put in for a spooky ghost-like effect. In Hauntjam, Bowman did some good stuff with bringing out moving parts in the first refrain. In Hauntjelly, [[artist:ian-taylor|Xerxes]] emphasizes the spookiness by changing instruments for more electric organ.
+    Hauntjam and Hauntjelly are interesting things. They were actually made based on [[track:haunt-andrew-hussie|a short fruity loop]] that The Big Man Andrew did, called haunt.wav or haunt.mp3 or something like that. A jam on his theme, logically, would therefore be called "hauntjam," with the opportunity for naming puns including [[track:hauntjelly|"hauntjelly."]] His theme appears mostly unchanged as the bassline for the first part of the pieces. At this point in terms of instrumentation, we were still mostly striving for faithfulness to the canon Midnight Crew "band," as can be seen in [the Extras page](http://www.mspaintadventures.com/extras/ps000018.html) wherein the MC fill 'em with midnight (bottom), so Hauntjam employs trombone, string bass, piano, clarinet, and sax (I forget which because I've lost the file and am not a band person, but I think it was alto). From there on, it was fairly straightforward to write a haunting refrain and then solos for each instrument. I will admit I got a little writerblock'd for the second part, which was sort of a brief modulation to the dominant, so it sounds a little strange. But it still has its own little charm, with the almost annoying trill put in for a spooky ghost-like effect. In Hauntjam, Bowman did some good stuff with bringing out moving parts in the first refrain. In Hauntjelly, [[artist:ian-taylor|Xerxes]] emphasizes the spookiness by changing instruments for more electric organ.
 
     <i>Michael Guy Bowman:</i>
 
@@ -289,6 +301,10 @@ Commentary: |-
     I think drums, more than any other instrument, define the genre of the music. Even very minor choices can change the character of a whole song. At the very least there's been only two songs with no drums on them on the billboard number one slot in the last 50 years.
 
     I still do it by spreading of the parts across different instruments. Just in logic now. [[album:electric-daydreams|Electric daydreams]] is deliberately simple, and a couple of the songs just have a normal exs24 on there with all the drums going to the same channel. I wanted to imitate what I would be able to achieve if I were just a guy taping himself playing in a room.
+
+    <i>Michael Guy Bowman:</i> ([Michael Guy Bowman Talks About His Homestuck Music](https://youtu.be/85VXWZTg-vo?t=929), adapted to text, 7/20/2024)
+
+    And, the other thing was an arrangement of Hauntjam, which I just added drums on and synthesized out and did the bounces[?] for. The original on that one is by Andrew Huo, and supposedly it's based around a track that Andrew Hussie himself wrote, that was just called [[track:haunt-andrew-hussie|"haunt"]].
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 Track: Carbon Nadsat / Cuestick Genius
 Artists: