The Felt - Commentary
2.1k words across 12 entries.
The Felt Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube, YouTube (playlist)
Andrew Hussie: (MSPA news post, excerpt)
In the same vein as the Midnight Crew fake band album, but where MC was a dark jazz band, the Felt is an orchestral group. The idea I proposed earlier in the year was an orchestral sound with "temporal effects." Notes, melodies, rhythms played backwards, forwards, rewinding and such, as if the music itself was subject to their powers of time distortion. The sound also took on some electronic, sort of ambient qualities as it developed. You could refer to the genre as "temporelechestral." If you wanted to say a mouthful.
Nice job to Clark Powell for mastering this whole thing, as well as including a few of her own great songs in the list too. The whole thing strikes me as a very tight bit of production.
Sick cover art by hypertalented and prolific HS fan artist, SkepticArcher.
Cindy Dominguez: (whatpumpkin.com news post)
Another one that's been a long time coming. This album has been in the works since about the time Midnight Crew: Drawing Dead was released. Clearly there are time-related shenanigans afoot!
As it happens, if you are a fan of time-related shenanigans, surely you will be a fan of this album. It's an orchestral score, done up Felt-style--The Felt imbues this music with effects borne of their time-distortion proclivities. It's ambient, it's intriguing, it's a little dark, and it's a even little funny. It's a gold mine.
Big thanks to Clark "Plazmataz" Powell for polishing up this gem with her mastering skills.
Also, have you SEEN that cover art? Wicked classy. That's all SkepticArcher right there.
Homestuck: (whatpumpkin.com side blurb)
The Felt classes up the joint a bit with their chrono-tastic orchestral self-titled album. You won't know whether you're coming or going when you're done with it. In a time-travelly kinda way, of course.
Homestuck: (whatpumpkin.com "about the albums" blurb)
Self-titled debut album of the criminal, and now musical, archrivals of the Midnight Crew. The Felt's ever-present temporal machinations are here in full force, resulting in an orchestral creation quite unlike anything else you've heard.
Homestuck: (Bandcamp credits blurb)
Music by:
Thomas "EidolonOrpheus" Ferkol
Toby "Radiation" Fox
Mark Hadley
David Ko
Jeremy "Solatrus" Iamurri
Robert J! Lake
Clark "Plazmataz" Powell
Alexander Rosetti
Erik "Jit" ScheeleCover art by SkepticArcher
Swing of the Clock Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube
(original commentary)
Ah, yes, Swing of the Clock. One of my better songs. Also the first song I wrote after joining the team!
If you didn't know, Swing of the Clock was heavily inspired off of both Clark Powell's Three in the Morning and various Philip Glass musical compositions. It was my first attempt at doing something with a lot of orchestral instruments, though definitely far from my best orchestral composition.
In retrospect, it's a bit of a boring song with its chord progression, but I'd be damned if I didn't say something about the shift from Philip Glass style clarinets to swung synth rock. I was very proud of that contrast.
Also a lesser known fact: It was actually considered for a flash animation, in a similar vein to Alex Rosetti's Squiddles song. But, due to the difficulties in organizing a full song animation, especially one that was twice as long as Squiddles, it was just impossible to do realistically.
Ah, this song. The memories. Not really any pre-song history so I'll just get right into how it was created and why I took this song in this direction.
Swing of the Clock, henceforth shortened to SotC (not to be confused with Shadow of the Colossus! It's just a hilarious coincidence) was the first song I started writing after joining the team. Multiple fake band albums were in progress (The Felt and Squiddles), but at the time I had no idea how to even approach Squiddles (see last week's post for details).
So, I decided I'd try to do something orchestral. I went with a few ideas, but for some reason I kept wanting to write a song with a swing feel in it, though that's more Midnight Crew than Felt, yet at the same time I wanted to do something that was clearly Philip Glass influenced. The small scraps I started before finally settling on a starting point (none of them were saved, sorry!) all shared two major common pieces: a ticking clock, and an arpeggio piano inspired off of Clark Powell's Three in the Morning.
Both are still in the song, though amusingly many people didn't notice the piano. It's there. In reverse. :D
While I was messing around with the early ideas for SotC, I managed to create a nice sounding bass synth, but I ended up replacing the sound with a couple of clarinets to keep the focus on orchestral instruments instead.
I knew early on I wanted to write a song with a very slow progression, very gradual and subtle shifts between sections. However, I wasn't entirely sure how to approach it until Beatfox made a suggestion on the forums about mastering and production as a whole. Before this song I tended to have a bad habit of improperly using compressors and limiters, though I definitely knew better than to use FL Studio's stock setting for the Fruity Limiter. (Not saying the Limiter is bad, it's just really horrible in what the default project template gives you.)
While SotC isn't the first song I put a significant amount of effort into controlling the mix, it was the first I really managed to succeed in understanding what I was doing in that area of production.
I ended up automating everything in the song, and I realized how much easier it was to fulfill my original idea plus improve on my overall production. Sadly, the song was still very much on the loud side compared to the rest of the album, so there were some problems with how it was mastered in the end.
Going back on track with the swing feel I originally intended... As you can tell, the song is in a 6/8 time signature. It's one of my favorites. It's not a true swing, but it was close enough to get where I wanted.
A true swing is lazy 6/8. Sort of.
Anyway, so while the first third of the song is pretty strictly 6/8, the drum beat comes in that's definitely swing influenced. And during that section, there's the tuba part. Well! That originally was actually a stand up bass part, but there's really no way to mimic a stand up bass with sample libraries, so I experimented with a bunch of sounds until I settled on the tuba.
It was passable, but only after I shifted it to actually play slightly early. The attack was so slow. It was a little frustrating.
After that, as you know, it goes into the heavier synth rock section. Oh, hey, remember that bassline I said I scrapped in favor of the clarinets? There it is. Back in its glory.
The fun big moment, and then the song fades away.
Still one of my best songs in the Homestuck canon. I felt like I had set a new standard far higher than I'd ever be able to reach, but being on the team has pushed me further than I ever expected.
Now For Some Trivia!
Swing of the Clock was the second to last of a very long stretch of original songs I did in the key of F minor. It's my favorite key to write music in, but I've barely touched it since Chartreuse Rewind. (Which is next week..! Er.. I guess this week, since I was late on this. Oops.) Why? Well, too much of a good thing is a bad thing.
Secondly, Lexxy really dug this song and it made me flip the fuck out when I found out she liked it, because she's an amazing person!
Clockwork Reversal Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube
Thomas Ferkol: (Tumblr, excerpt)
Clockwork Reversal was my second contribution to the Felt. I love the melody of Endless Climb. I loved the music box-esque remixes on Volume 5 even more. Before I got on the team, I had written Clockwork Apocalypse, an orchestrated version of Clockwork Melody. After realizing Audacity could reverse music, I started experimenting. Since the Endless Climb melody was so memorable and it had served as good sort of interlude tracks on Volume 5, I decided to try to make something in a similar vein. Oddly enough, I think the reversed version of the Clockwork Reversal sounds even better than both Clockwork Reversal and Clockwork Apocalypse.
Chartreuse Rewind Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube
(original commentary)
I was honest to God surprised that Chartreuse Rewind made the cut for the Felt. It's not nearly as strong of a song as Swing of the Clock, but it still has its interesting moments.
Originally it was a song called Ascension that I was writing outside of Homestuck. Amusingly, it was inspired off of the work from the Felt, but it was a little too electronic to really fit the album's overall atmosphere.
Long story short, I remixed Ascension into Charteuse Rewind and, out of hilarity, Ascension itself was scrapped. So, the remix of one of my songs survived and the original did not.
(commentary redux)
To start off, I did not expect this song to make it on to The Felt.
Why? Well, it's not nearly as good as Swing of the Clock. I didn't think I deserved two songs on the album (versus other pieces that didn't make it), but nonetheless, that's what happened.
So, where did this song start? Well, it started as inspiration off of The Felt but also from my interest in drum and bass music. Yeah. This song sounded very different at one point. As in, in my head, as a concept.
I never actually did make the version I originally set out to create, instead I made something that kind of sounded like the final version, except a bit more focused on the electronic stuff (e.g. the second half of the official release).
This song's name came out of a subtitle I was using, because this was the remix, not the original. The original was called Ascension, but it ended up getting scrapped. The other peeps on the team started to reference this song as Chartreuse Rewind alone instead of Ascension (Chartreuse Rewind), and the name stuck.
What else... oh, I really love bass clarinet. Before I met Marcy Nabors [she] told me she really liked to play the bass clarinet part. And she actually has played the part for me. Not like it's difficult.
All of my work repeated itself way too friggin' much back then.
There are pieces here and there that are in reverse, yet forward in the chord progression (the xylo, for example, though it ends up flipping turnways in wibbly wobbly time near the end).
Is it a bad song? Oh, no. I've made worse. Far worse. But it isn't particularly an amazing song, to me, anyway. I guess a lot of you liked it, though, and that's all that matters. :D
Trails Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube
At its heart, Trails is basically a fugue, with a melodic line being repeated and played over the previous one. Trace and Fin follow past and future trails, so I made the first melody in the first half hollow and somewhat indistinct, since it is a "future trail" for the second melody that will come in a few bars later. In the second half I reverse this and have the indistinct melody come afterwards, a "past trail" of the melody that just played.
Omelette Sandwich Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube
I imagined this song being played by Eggs and Biscuits. Shortly after the melody plays, it stops and rewinds back to the beginning, adding more instruments and speeding up the song slightly. This repeats until it is barely the same song anymore, fast and furious instead of the simple cello and viola duet that it starts with. After all the parts are in place, the parts start dropping out one by one until it goes back to the simple start. I went with the abrupt sound of a tape recorder instead of something more subtle, because Eggs and Biscuits aren't know for their subtlety.
Time Paradox Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube
Thomas Ferkol: (Tumblr, excerpt)
Alrighty, first off is Time Paradox. This was the first piece I submitted for an album once I got on the team. Basically what happened was: I am visiting somewhere in Chicago with only my phone’s connection to the internet, check the MSPA forums and find a message notification waiting for me. Radiation congratulates me on getting on the team. After some moments of sputtering disbelief, I read on. He says if I want to get started on something, the Squiddles was being finished up and the Felt was on the table. So, for the next couple hours I was invigorated, consumed wholly during the car ride and time in the hotel before I finally fell asleep with working on a track for the Felt. Time Paradox was made. Originally, I made it imagining the recruitment of the Felt, picturing Doc Scratch warping across time and space, assembling the green goons from who knows where, and then witnessing the construction of the Felt manor. It’s a fun track, more energetic than a lot of things I had worked on and definitely influenced by Radiation’s style. The last two sections are still some of my favorite phrases that I’ve written.
The Felt
Track list (1–17)