Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido - Commentary
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Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido (album commentary) Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube, YouTube (playlist), Spotify, Apple Music
Homestuck: (Bandcamp about blurb)
Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido, agents of Prospit and Derse. They once fought on the battlefield as their respective nemeses, only to be united by a common epiphany - the truth behind the Ultimate Riddle. Gazing upon the Skaian clouds, the secrets of the past, present, and future are now well guarded by these strange sentinels who spread enlightenment through their cryptic music and dance. Together, they hope their songs may be a beacon to all those who undertake the Riddle.
Andrew Hussie: (MSPA news post, excerpt)
Two Albums
Homestuck Volume 7: At the Price of Oblivion, and... a solo album by Michael Guy Bowman called Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido
On the solo album: M.G. Bowman has done a lot to shape the sound of Homestuck. Among his contributions were Explore and Sburban Jungle (end of acts 2 and 3 music). He is also a mastermind behind the ambitious Hare Force One project (people ship Con Air bunnies to each other all over the globe). For his album, he has created two characters whose names are featured in the title. They exist somewhere in the Homestuck universe, playing their own session, and each song captures something about their adventure. See his website for what he has to say about it personally. I think it's a really fun and creative album with a fantastic sound.
Tavia Morra and Richard Gung, both art team contributors, worked on the art for this album together. Tavia and Michael themselves actually dress up as the characters and pose in the album graphics. These are serious entertainers, folks.
Michael Guy Bowman: (excerpts from New Album Q&A)
Is there a linear story to this album, or is it some other form of story telling?
I've seen a good handful of questions like this and I'd be glad to clear this up. This album does have characters and a story behind it, but it is not a linear story or a rock opera. It's an eponymous album by its members Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido.
Back when Andrew proposed the music project in March of 2009, he made it clear that one of the things he wanted to do was create a lot of "fake bands" which would exist as actual musical entities within the Homestuck Universe in much the same light as the Gorillaz, the Monkees, or the Chipmunks (wow, those are all animal names). While we accomplished that somewhat with albums like "Squiddles Singalong", most of the concept albums have largely been musical homages to the actual characters. For example the Felt didn't "make" their album of the same name, the music team made it as program music.
Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido is meant to be literally an album that Mobius and Hadron would make together. Like the Kernelsprites, they spread their knowledge of Sburb and The Ultimate Riddle cryptically through overtly complex riddles rendered as rock music. They have a seemingly limitless knowledge of all things in the Homestuck universe, or do they? For all their answers they don't just give anything away, they tease you with their songs.
Hoohoohoo!
How much thought did you put into connecting the album with Homestuck? Or was it just supposed to be a silly thing with a loose connection?
From the very beginning I wanted to make this an album for Homestuck fans, but I also wanted this to be something which could be listened to from the outside-in. My goal was to create a solid set of songs that would revisit the basic themes of Homestuck, meaning that the fans would get a whole new dimension to the world of Homestuck and listeners unfamiliar with the comic could discover listen to it and, if so intrigued, discover the entire world of MSPA to create context for the album. Think of it as the relationship between House of Leaves and the band Poe - there is intertextuality between the literature and music and together they create a bigger picture. Plus, you can discover them in whatever order you like.
Personally, I believe the album is very faithful to the basic ideas of Homestuck. All the big themes are there: time, eternity, repetition, survival, the unknown, fractals, betrayal, dreams, romance, hypnosis, pumpkins, etc. While I certainly had ideas for songs already floating around before the fake band project fell in my lap, my rule of thumb was to incorporate Homestuck any time I hit a dead-end and didn't know what to do. Plus, the process of planning the art was something that Tavia and I were working on from almost the very beginning.
how much of the instrumentation was synthesized and how much of it was organic? i'm thinking specifically of the fiddly guitar bits in forever
I play every instrument on this record, and all the ones that aren't real instruments I either played through a synthesizer or sequenced myself. All the guitar is real guitar played by myself. I did all of the singing except for some backup vocals by Tavia. About half of the bass parts are me playing an old P-Bass and the other half are some spectacularly vintage-sounding synth basses that I sequenced. While I do play drums, I was unable to use my drum set in the making of this album and instead spent an intense amount of time laying down the drum parts as the first step in making each track. Most of the performance side of the album was really quick and just involved running through the song and playing a midi keyboard run through patches.
The "fiddly guitar bits" are played on a white Epiphone Les Paul named Glinda.
Are there any intentional song similarities or specific inspirations, musically? Chain of Prospit reminds me a LOT of She Blinded Me With Science by Thomas Dolby, in a very good way.
None of the songs are supposed to sound intentionally like any other song, but my style is informed by the groups I've listened to that I really enjoy. I can see the resemblance, but when I listen to my own music I always hear a demolition derby of every song I've ever liked. All the things I've seen posted about my music being a mix between groups like Daft Punk, David Bowie, or They Might Be Giants really satisfy me because those are most of the same things I listen to.
I think I listened to "She Blinded Me With Science" a lot about five years ago. Thomas Dolby is a cool guy. I really like his soundtrack to Gate to the Mind's Eye.
Also any fun stories you can share from taking the pictures for the graphics?
For the portrait of Hadron's face, I cobbled together my little lighting and shooting rig with the following: tripod, camera, music stand, orange extension cord, nightlight, and a chair. It was super guerrilla, if you consider shooting in the comfort of your own home guerrilla. Either way, it was actually a very pleasant photoshoot that didn't require an extensive amount of time to set up.
Oh, and I kept eating cookies during one of the photoshoots.
That's all I can remember at the moment. Bowman might remember more.
Michael Guy Bowman: (Michael Guy Bowman Talks About His Homestuck Music, adapted to text)
Mobius Trip & Hadron Kaleido, now there's something! When the fake band idea was being proposed, I think partly because of all the guitar and drum stuff I had been writing out on some of these, Andrew was really into the idea of, hey, you know, you should produce a rock album. And that's what he actually told me - it was just, produce a rock and roll album! That's what I'd always wanted to do, is produce original songs and do rock music.
(Continued in Lies With The Sea)
More broadly, what we ended up doing with that - I wanted to do, like, a prophetic work, where I wasn't tied to concrete storytelling episodes within Homestuck, because ultimately I didn't have authorship over the comic, Andrew did. And I wanted to create something that would be able to be interpreted freely, so that he could use it however he wanted to use it. So he never really... gave me characters, or anything, that he wanted there to be. I was just like, you know, let's come up with some loose characters, and we'll just see whether or not Andrew wants to use them. Because he never had a real, like, hard idea for that one. I think he was just too busy with other stuff.
The characters were a collaboration of myself and Tavia Morra, and we based their images on ourselves, and we came up with these citizens of Prospit and Derse who were generals, who were on opposite sides of a battle. And of course, knowing the comic, the battle is futile, and really the answer lies somewhere in the eternal, and they are prophets of peace who express that prophecy through cryptic art. (laughs) They are telling you something that's kind of, a psychedelic truth, which is that, you know, the universe is bigger than we know.
And I always respected that about Andrew's ideas with the cosmology of Homestuck, even with Problem Sleuth, with the Godhead Pickle Inspector and stuff, and staring into the lotus, and like, the microscopic becoming the macroscopic. He was always playing with the idea of, what's our eternal purpose? in a universe where time may be cyclical and where individual lives may not amount to much, in the face of cosmic destiny. I think thematically, that's what I wanted to play with.
(Continued in Dawn of Man and Chain Of Prospit)
I was really encouraged by Mobius Trip & Hadron Kaleido, even if it wasn't ever incorporated in the comic, I was more motivated to say - you know, I care about my own songwriting and want to continue with it. That meant that I ended up pivoting that year to making more solo music - those of you who follow this channel and know my personal work, it's probably not the biggest history lesson for you, but, that was the beginning of me doing a series of solo albums that I'm continuing to work on to this day. Of course, I didn't stop making music for the rest of the comic. We worked on more volumes and compilations.
"What were your main inspirations for Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido?" I talked about that a little bit, of course Bowie comes to mind again. At the time I was really listening to BT, Brian Transeau - I think that's how you pronounce his last name - and he is a trance music pioneer. I'd been listening to This Binary Universe, and that was a really great album of instrumental electronic music. And then it had a wonderful follow-up album, that was called These Hopeful Machines, and I loved both those albums a lot. I think they were really... I refrain from saying eye-opening... because they were ear-opening.
Homestuck: (Bandcamp credits blurb)
Album art by Tavia Morra and Richard Gung
Forever Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music
Michael Guy Bowman: (Bowmantown Discord, excerpt)
I tend to hold on to ideas and use them when they're ready. 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.
Dawn of Man Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music
Michael Guy Bowman: (Michael Guy Bowman Talks About His Homestuck Music, adapted to text)
(Continued from album commentary)
I did that on Dawn of Man, which was this piece that wove, you know, near-death experience, atrocity, and the survival instinct, and it's kind of like... 2001-style, oh, you know, pre-history and history and the future are all connected.
(Continued in Chain Of Prospit)
Tavia Morra: (track artist, Tumblr ask)
what is even the art for dawn of man
The art for Dawn of Man are photos of train of powerlines from my hometown. I cut them up into jaggy pieces and placed them back together.
Fly Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music
Lies With The Sea Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music
Michael Guy Bowman: (via early commentary collection)
"Lies With the Sea" is one of two songs based on sketches from dreams that I put on Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido - the other, aptly enough, is "Dawn of Man".
During the time I was initially formulating a concept for a fake band during the summer of 2010, I thought it would be interesting to do something with a nautical theme. One night as I was falling asleep, I very vividly imagined a melody and accompanying refrain "my heart so full of love", which I sketched and eventually transformed into "my heart lies with the sea" to fit the concept. Ultimately I ditched the nautical theme for the band after Squiddles! Sing-along came out and resolved to develop the concept that became Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido with Tavia. However, the song was already well-developed by that point and I opted to keep it around.
My first sketch for that piece was actually a lot heavier - I produced a version over that summer as a demo for Andrew that featured a slow, dirge-like drum beat and an incredibly loud guitar riff that somewhat resembled the song "Grease" from the way-overrated musical of the same name. Perhaps later I'll do some touch-ups to this "heavy" version of the song and share it, but until then I'd rather keep it to myself, being so primitively produced.
One thing it has in common with the quicker, more lightly-produced version of the track I put out in May was a fairly strong inspiration from modern electronic acts. I drew farily heavily from the sensibilities of Gorillaz in chosing synthesizer sounds on tracks like "Rhinestone Eyes" and "El Mañana" and also pretty closely studied the mix on Daft Punk's "Something About Us", a down tempo track I greatly admire.
The thing that most strongly made me feel comfortable using this track on Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido was its inspiration from dreams and the sense that it generally echoed the thought of being swept away in a wave as mentioned in "Dawn of Man" earlier on the album. Originally I even recorded an alternate lyric to the melody of "Sburban Jungle" to open the second verse which I ditched that went as follows:
"Down, down far below, somewhere safe/ Lost in the wave once again."
Michael Guy Bowman: (Michael Guy Bowman Talks About His Homestuck Music, adapted to text)
Originally, I think partly inspired by Plastic Beach, I was kind of interested in an underwater theme, characters like Eridan and Feferi and the sea kingdom thing... like, one of the first ideas I worked on that was Lies With The Sea.
Chain Of Prospit Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music
Michael Guy Bowman: (Bowmantown Discord, excerpt)
the outpouring of people who told me that song got them through a rough patch was incredible. it definitely makes me think twice about what the effect of my work on an audience will be, esp. compared to the stuff i was working on when i was way younger
Michael Guy Bowman: (Michael Guy Bowman Talks About His Homestuck Music, adapted to text)
(Continued from Dawn of Man)
And, taking that journey toward, you know, a culmination on Chain of Prospit, which says that our reasons for living are personal, and not refutable simply because the universe is giant and possibly indifferent. We have our own right to live for ourselves.
To some extent, that album was a turning point for me, because, you know, when you compare it to how stupid it was to do these... silly songs, you know, I think so much of the stuff I did for Homestuck ended up being funny, and it was like, I managed to get my way back into the comic again and again by being, you know, a comedian, that - pivoting so hard, to this, y'know, big serious thing that was more about "what does life mean?" (laughs) And doing that while decorating it with the elements of this comic, which are... sometimes just stupid and shocking.
I don't know, I think it hit right in the weirdest way, by reaching people that weren't expecting it. When people tell me that Chain of Prospit, for instance, really connected with them, and made them feel like they're not alone, or it made them feel like, that it... that it is personally true that they have a reason to live and that they shouldn't doubt their own struggle to keep going... I think it made me change, quite a bit. How cynical can I be about the world, when there's this other side of myself that... does honestly believe that, what you do with art, even if it's for some crazy thing like Homestuck, um, could actually touch somebody, in some real way?
(Continued back in album commentary)
Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido
Track list (1–9)