#lofam 4

[insecureillustrator]

Drawing tentacles is fun. I miss Rose, I never drew enough Rose. I think this is the last old-but-unposted picture from my hiatus-time. It was an alternative design for LOFAM 4′s Aura of Colour cover art. 

[sweetjegus]

come with me to Magical Hopalong Cassidy Station!

Track art for @ndividedbyzero‘s “Fruitjam” in LOFAM 4! The prompt was Touhou and Apple Girlington, neither of which I’d been properly introduced to prior to that moment but uhhh I made it up in five seconds ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[shoedrawers]

my part of the lofam 4 album! :^0c

it’s for “scales“ by Helena Ruth

listen here or download here (soon^tm)

[itsnightsyo]

some art i did for LOFAM 4! i did 3 more pieces as well, but i decided to only post my best ones here.

[astartus]

Because so many people asked: here’s what the spectrograms in “Skaian Rebirth” spell out. 

[shadolith]

At long last, Pseudumbra Phauxtasm is here.

My commentary from the LOFAM 4 booklet:

Back in 2016 I got together with @spellmynamewithabang and @jamesroachmusic to compile Homestuck Vol. 10. Everyone was pretty hyped, and there were threads in various places full of people feverishly speculating about what the tracklist would be. Much of this speculation focused on whether @fwugradiation’s elusive song Penumbra Phantasm would finally see release, founded on the rumor that he had agreed to finish it for the album.

Around this time, a couple of us on the Vol. 10 project decided to have some fun with the speculation and put together a fake version of the album to “leak” to the fans, so we gathered a few WIPs that’d been cut from Vol. 10 and arranged them at the beginning of the album for an illusion of Authenticity™. Jamie Paige put together a bunch of awful low-effort vaporwave remixes of Homestuck songs, which we gave names to match what the fans were hoping for. Finally, as the keystone piece to tie it all together, Jamie and I referenced an old Toby Fox piano recording and created a short (but hopefully convincing) song that we entitled “Penumbra Phantasm”. Christened by Toby’s seal of approval and an unholy melding with a vaporwave Sunslammer monstrosity, this one-minute-and-fifty-second piece quickly became a fan favorite once the [sock?] ruse was revealed, and we promised that this “Pseudumbra Phauxtasm” would see an extended release on LoFaM 4.

A year later we’ve completed this task, and now the latter third of the song is just a power metal cover of the Breath of the Wild theme with some rad shredding by Matt Martin, but that’s a story for another day. Ask me sometime.

(Art by @circlejourneyart)

[reasonpeasonold]

So LoFaM 4 came out.  Here’s the track art I did for The End of Something Really Excellent

Like listening to the song this was the first image that popped in my head and it just strengthened over time.  It was a good challenge and honestly pretty hard for me to get a handle on being straight up scenery but I hope it conveys the feeling of finality or the end of a story I was going for.

[circlejourneyart]

Here we go, story time:

Back in June 2013, around the end of the Megapause, I had just finished reading Homestuck. It had been a thoroughly enrapturing experience, one that would quite literally change my life.

Homestuck, to me, is an expansive discourse on predeterminism and free will and destiny. But what truly captivated me about this massive comic, back when I first reached the end of Act 6 Act 5, was the ease with which its tone shifted from grandiose to intimate--the way you could be looking at a planet on one page, and then hummingbirds on snowy mountains on the next.

It was that in this story about light-year leaps and colliding planets, there was somehow room for quietude and personal disclosures. Every detail, every firefly and snowflake, felt like a part of a greater whole, and yet each existed on its own, supreme and independent and blithe and free.

The scenes that have stuck longest with me exemplified this--like that of John gazing up at the sky from the driveway, Jade falling through snow at the end of [S] Jade: Enter, or Vriska watching a younger John through a window.

That is the emotion that formed the core of Frost and Clockwork when I created it back in 2013. I composed it near the end of 2013, back when I was still rendering MIDIs with the Merlin Symphony soundfont and had no idea how to use MIDI events to alter articulation. Younger me was fond of Weird Instrumentation, and younger me LOVED this track--simply because it was my very heartfelt attempt at encapsulating everything I loved about the comic, or, more broadly, that feeling of wonder and joy that came over me when it hit me, for the first time, just how much I loved this universe and story.

Fast forward to mid-2016. I'd just released my HS fanmusic debut, Fuchsia Moonrise, to a positive response. I was asked by @xzazupsilon if I was interested in participating in LOFAM 4, and I dawdled on that decision until I realised I had the perfect track for it. I began to remake F&C for my eventual submission over the course of six months or so, from late 2016 to early 2017, filling it with strings and giving the percussion more weight. It took several stages of tweaking, a process in which Veritas Unae (aka Scott) was of great help (in part for sending it to Marcy Nabors, of all people, for feedback), and through which we became very good friends.

Here you have it: a track that grew up together with me during my time with the comic and my fellow fans. It appears to be heavily divisive for having brilliant composition and terrible production--par for the course for my music, but I don't particularly mind this time. I don't mind that some of the amateurism of bright-eyed 2013 me is still evident in the 2016 version. I wouldn't strip that away if I could.

Maybe this sentimentality means little to anyone outside of me, but that's OK. I hope you like it. Many thanks to @serialsymphony (<3), @veritasunae and @shadolith for help with the mixing. And thank you @rachotamer for the art!

Check out the rest of the album, it's all very good!

P.S. I've been told it sounds like Undertale but I solemnly swear that I composed it a full 2 years before Undertale's release. I just have an Undertale style tbh.