Gust of Heir
By James Dever
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Released 10/25/2011.
Duration: 4:17.
Listen on Bandcamp or YouTube.
Read artist commentary.
General contributors:
- Clark Powell clarkpowell Bandcamp plazmataz SoundCloud barkbarkclark Twitter → Drift into the Sun Next general contribution by this artist (additional sequencing)
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Artist commentary:
Michael Guy Bowman: (co-composer)
Two of the tracks I put on Volume 8 were collaborations with other Homestuck musicians, something I've been meaning to do more of because two heads are usually better than one. The first of the two was "Gust of Heir", a track that James Dever wrote and for which I did the production.
James and I are both fans of minimalism, specifically the work of Philip Glass. An eerie-looking autographed program from the Philip on Film tour graces the wall of my room, and the primary piece of music that got me interested in composition is Einstein on the Beach, a five-hour opera consisting largely of slowly-evolving repeated figures using chanted numbers and solfege. Those otherwise unfamiliar might know his music better from the many movies he's scored including Secret Window, The Truman Show, and The Hours.
Anyway, I knew right away where James was coming from when he sent me a midi demo of "Gust of Heir" though originally it was arranged as a piano solo. Without access to a pro recording situation as on the Sburb piano suite, we knew there would have to be an alternate solution, hence the electronic approach. I played pretty heavily with a set of new sounds, specifically the soundfonts of Ethan Winer, an audio professional whose work was recommended by Radiation a good while back.
As I have on many occasions I took cues from Oblique Strategies to get some ideas for the arrangement. Part of the intrigue in producing this piece was that it was fully written, meaning that in some ways I was boxed-in to a complete journey for the song to take musically yet in others free to really explore and discover a unique sound for the song. I really played toggling a slew of effects until this tune became rendering hell for my computer. I stepped a bit outside my own range of comfort and got some drum loops from Clark Powell to really polish off the piece, adding a touch that otherwise would probably have eluded me.
Michael Guy Bowman: (co-composer, Michael Guy Bowman Talks About His Homestuck Music, adapted to text)
[James] was, ah, such a huge fan of Philip Glass, and we really connected on that. Gust of Heir was me taking a MIDI, I think, that he'd written, and setting that to some electronics, and I just thought it was so cool that somebody else got the appeal of that kind of composition style.
(Continued in Sburb)