Daywalker ~Rise~
By Catboss
catboss
Bandcamp
catbossstudio
SoundCloud.
Cover art by Emily Jane.
Released 9/9/2017.
Duration: 3:12.
Listen on Bandcamp or YouTube.
Read artist commentary.
Tracks that Daywalker ~Rise~ references:
Artist commentary:
Catboss: (composer, booklet commentary)
holy shiiiit it's uh that third track I made for the Homestuck music contest. wow. remember that? that was so long ago. anyway this was a track for Kanaya, at that part where she comes back as a rainbow drinker and slaughters everyone. it's super great.
I redid this track from the ground up for lofam 4, updated the flute playing and everything. Is it better? Is it worse? who knows, really
It occurs to me that I never did post the finished version of this, did I?
This was my third submission to the Homestuck Music Contest. I was at a mental block after finishing Guns Blazing, so I asked my girlfriend for a prompt, and she gave me “Kanaya” and “Geisha” (to my surprise, I might add - her favorite troll is Karkat). I more or less discarded the latter portion because I didn’t think it would fit, but it DID get me thinking about Kanaya. I hadn’t even thought of making a song for her before that point.
I wanted this to be… well, the major songs for Kanaya so far - Virgin Orb and Darling Kanaya - have been beautiful piano pieces (at least they are in my memory), and they’re p. perfect for Kanaya, but her rainbow drinker form is so much more badass and… assertive. Especially that. So I wanted to go for something that was simultaneously graceful and kind of badass at the start. And after I had conceptualized the harp part and the melody, I went back to write the intro, because I wanted some sort of contrast between alive!Kan and daywalker!Kan. The bass drum I used to simulate heartbeats; the entire intro is supposed to be her life slowly fading away.
And then she comes back as this awesome vampire creature and proceeds to send Gamzee hooooooooooooonking into abyss.
Also it’s a waltz because Kanaya is friggin’ classy okay.
Production-wise I think this is the weakest of my three entries. I played the flute for this piece, and honestly I think my terrible recording and audio processing skills might have hurt it, since this was my first time working with real audio at all. And all I had to do it with were my shitty laptop mic and absolutely no experience. (Also I hadn’t played in a couple months, that probably had something to do with it.) I really love both the harp part and the flute part I wrote for this though, and it was really fun to play!! I might bring it back in a later piece, we’ll see.
Kal-la-kal-la: (album help, booklet commentary)
This image has three Kanaya Maryams in it. Having two more Kanaya Maryams than Homestuck itself had is a bold creative decision, one which, in my opinion, works out rather well. I very much like the 'Naya in the foreground's halo, illuminating her face, while the Maryam furthest from the front of the scene is relatively shrouded in darkness. Consequently, her bright yellow eyes shine like a wild animal in the dead of night. Cool as hell all around, this image.