Constant Conquest
By Michael Guy Bowman
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Cover art by Elly Beck
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Released 3/14/2013.
Duration: 4:46.
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Artist commentary:
Michael Guy Bowman: (composer)
I floated the idea for a UU + uu album last year in about June as a concept record divided in half with equal and analogous parts Calliope and Caliborn. While we really wanted to jump in and get to making more Homestuck music following Volume 9, we decided to wait and discover more of the two characters until December when Radiation re-organized the effort. He proposed the Jekyll / Hyde alternating pace of the album culminating in "Eternity Served Cold" and had the group split into pairs, each musician working with a partner on a track with the same themes and motifs.
I worked with Erik, who sent me the at-the-time unfinished Calliope composition "Constant Confinement" for me to base my Caliborn track around. Erik's track was so meditative, it was actually difficult to recognize the slow-paced woodwind melody over the course of the piece, which pulses onward without any strict meter. This melody had to be expanded upon a lot to match the pace of "Constant Conquest" - it actually flies by at breakneck pace in the first measure of the piece before settling into its groove.
Conquest in many ways resembles "Ruins Rising", another electronic track based around one of Erik's piano compositions. Like in my approach to "Ruins" I arranged the melody sparsely and created a very dense environment of drums and percussion sounds to convert Erik's pulse into a groove. Same input, same solution, although this time I went much, much heavier than ever before. I had a handful of different drum kits going all at once, each with unique effects chains, to create more of an ensemble sound than a clean dance beat.
What really sealed in the atmosphere of this track was the huge slather of pads that adorned the track, most of which were created using analog equipment. I fed the signal from an old Radio Shack keyboard with basic midi patches through a pawn shop guitar pedal to create the many layers of sound that fill the background. Some of the most excellent sounds on the track (especially that snarling synth at 2:57) were created by hammering the mod knobs and wah-wah pedal while playing atonal pitches. The result is distorted synth excellence.
Michael Guy Bowman: (composer, Michael Guy Bowman Talks About His Homestuck Music, adapted to text)
And then in the later years of the comic... 2013 was my final actual production that was a contribution to it. I did Constant Conquest, another piece of work with Erik. I took the Caliborn side of it and Erik took the Calliope side of it. Erik wrote the Calliope theme first, Constant Confinement, and I took the theme from that and decided to just go... real crazy industrial with it.
You know, it's so hard when so many villains have already been introduced! You know, you've got Jack Noir, and Lord English, and all these other characters that are already in the mix - and they're already all dangerous, and now you're four years in, and you have a new villain, and you have to like, heighten that much further than the previous ones. You know, a bit of a Dragon Ball Z style problem.
This was the only piece I actually used Logic Pro to write. I had switched over to Logic Pro at the time. I used a whole new palette of sounds, and played with all kinds of new effects chains, I found it way easier to edit the piece... I had pedals that I had used for my live performances. That was fresh off the year where I had made my live debut (laughs) - I had gone to South by Southwest and I'd had a little band involve Marcy Nabors, Erik Scheele, Clark Powell, and Riki Tsuji, and we had done a backyard show, and a show at the Velveeta Room, where we performed stuff from Mobius Trip, other Homestuck music that we could figure out how to get arranged, and stuff from my second solo album, Ithaca. So I had all this leftover equipment from that crazy adventure, and played with, you know, running the keyboards and guitars and stuff through wahs and distortions and just created this great little crunchy mess.
I even brought in Buzinkai's Doctor for two seconds because, you know, at this point, Doctor was in so many remixes and references and revisitations, that it was fine for me to take it for the first - and only! - time, and do it in this, ah, totally out of tune, random vignette. Just to say, there, there's my Doctor remix. Y'a happy?