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Sburban Jungle

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By Michael Guy Bowman bowman Bandcamp YouTube YouTube mguybowman Twitter michaelguybowman.com Other mguybowman Instagram ← Hauntjam Previous track by this artist → Happy Cat Song! Next track by this artist.
Cover art by Alice Hu coccodoodles Tumblr coccoderma Twitter → Sburban Jungle Next track art by this artist.
Released 4/13/2010.
Art released 5/26/2023.
Duration: 3:39.

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Artist commentary:

Michael Guy Bowman: (composer, from Music and Stuff)

"Sburban Jungle" finally comes into its own with its full reveal after being on the shelf for months. That we didn't delay the thing further amazes me considering the scale of the story, although I'm still indebted to Andrew for making the animated sequence which the song accompanied especially iconic. Who doesn't love the picture of Rose making her incredibly stylized jump to catch the bottle during the piano break?

Michael Guy Bowman: (Bowmantown Discord, excerpt)

wow guys, i mean i know sburban jungle kind of wedged itself into the lore of homestuck but it's cool to hear how much it means to you guys

it was probably the first "full" song written for the project, andrew told us to do loops at the beginning thinking all the flashes would be loops. the short version was written as a loop, but then the loading screen ended. i wrote out a "full" version to give it a tag and andrew loved it so much he decided to sit on it, so the full version was ready to go as early as August 2009 but didn't end up in the comic until 2010

Michael Guy Bowman: (Michael Guy Bowman Talks About His Homestuck Music, adapted to text)

So, the first major piece I worked on that ended up being used in the comic was Sburban Jungle. Andrew had wanted something that sounded like music from SimCity 4. He had linked us to this piece called Epicenter, and said, "I want something that sounds a bit like this," and he specifically focused on the marimba breakdown in the middle of it. And, it had kind of a pulsing beat, and sort of this evolving, atmospheric thing going on.

I was at my computer, at the time he posted it, seeing the speed at which people were working, where they were like, seeing these little requests on this forum, where we'd just kind of talk with him. I was like, oh yeah, I gotta sit down and immediately make something, 'cause like, Andrew's style of working is to pick the first good thing, really. You know, he doesn't want to dwaddle. He could only really make that comic as quickly as he did because he had a philosophy that's sort of, like, I think kind of an improv philosophy of like - go with the first idea that isn't so bad you go eugh, you know, and sometimes even go with a bad idea and see if by decorating it, you can make it a good one. I knew that the gauntlet was thrown and that if I didn't make something, like, right away, it might not happen.

And I sat down in FL Studio, on my terrible Dell laptop that I had had to uninstall Windows Vista from and put Windows XP on because it was so buggy and bad, and immediately got around to composing a piece that involved looping... xylophone. I think I was drawing a bit from the kinds of music I'd studied in percussion, actually. Anyway, what I ended up writing was about a minute of material - it was like, the first thing that got posted that night. I think it might have taken, like, an hour or two of, you know, feverish "let's just get something in there and figure out", and he immediately liked it, and was like, "This is what I'm going to use," and within days, it was in the loading screen for SBURB, with the spirograph and the graphics and I was just like, pleased as a peach. It was, like, one of those moments where it transitioned from comedy to an epic.

Sburban Jungle was so clearly necessary to expand upon, and I went ahead and just wrote the full thing out, you know, with the big bridge, with the piano breakdown and all that stuff, just to see what would happen. Because, actually, the main emphasis was going to be on loops, originally - we thought that everything that appeared in the comic was just going to be a piece of looping media, the idea that he was going to do full animations, with a beginning, middle and end, that wasn't in the scope of the project yet. Finishing out Sburban Jungle and saying, like, "now here's something that could progress from start to finish, and stand on its own," motivated him to later bring it back at the end of Act 3 as this big moment. And that's what ended up happening, with a lot of the project, is [that] people said, you know, "let's move away from just doing loops, and let's also focus on full-length pieces." Everybody just started working that much harder, as we saw that Andrew was willing to do that kind of thing.

Michael Guy Bowman: (YouTube description, excerpt)

The theme song of #Homestuck, first appearing as an excerpt on page 137 and then later in full on page 1149 ([S] Enter). The full song was originally released by What Pumpkin on Homestuck Vol. 4 on April 13, 2010.

Alice Hu:

Big thank you to Michael Guy Bowman for featuring my art on this new official upload of Sburban Jungle!

If you pay attention to the video, you'll notice it moves!!

Homestuck: (original track art)

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