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Why & What Is Music From The Bride Of The Gator?
Well, the simplest reason I've made Music From is that I wanted to package up the music I had created / adapted for my largest released game as of yet, Defense Shengly Castle 2 - Bride of the Gator. It soon became so, so much more than that, as my game did not actually feature 50 songs! Music From went from being a short soundtrack release, to a huge project spanning from my first music productions to the present. It breaks personal barriers of what I "have" to do for an album, namely, putting only my best stuff on it. It's been hard, but I've stopped seeing everything I produce as having to be compared to everything else.
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The first step was taking my fifty guitar recording segments (ranging from one second to a minute long each), and finding ways to piece them back together into something enjoyable, or at least intentional sounding. I quickly decided upon the naming structure of the tracks, trying to reflect the mood I felt from each piece, most of the time. This covers every track of mine with 'guitar' in the title. Dedicated fans will be able to find one guitar piece in Shengly Castle 2 not featured on the album, as well as one on the album that is very different than the version in my game.
A (lot of) word on my approach to playing guitar: my guitar is the one I first had when I was a young kid, which ended up in storage at somebodys house for a long time. After some 8 odd years I have it again! It's tuned exactly the same as when I first had it, and as such I don't want to have it re-tuned. I've never learned how to play guitar, and I don't plan on learning how to any time soon. I can't even read music sheets! (Though, that didn't stop me from playing a french horn in grade 9 band class).
What I want to do when I'm holding a guitar, or laying it flat, or hanging it upside down, or holding it backwards, is to create spontaneous sounds that I find interesting. This includes finding objects to roll on the strings with, smack the strings with, and to shove inbetween/under the strings to create new soundscapes. I feel like learning how to play it properly would restrict the room I have to explore all the possible sounds I can make so freely.
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fig. A) From Left to Right, Front To Back: X-28 Multi-track cassette tape recorder, Juno-106 synthesizer, my personal computer, "Barracuda" guitar along with the gluestick I use to play it with. (Click image for full view)
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Next up was my figuring out what to do with the synthesizer piece I had used in my game. It was the first take of an idea for a live performance song structure I had imagined, to be done on my Juno-106. I had six more takes on the piece recorded, across two sessions. My original idea with them was to shape them into an EP, which I intended to call Final Days Of The Windy Isles.
Since I certainly needed that first take to be on my album, how would this affect what I could do with my other already-recorded takes? Including all of them on Music From, and dropping the Final Days project, seemed like the best idea. I needed a way for them to make sense though, since only one of the pieces actually appeared in the dang game. I spontaneously created titles for them that suggested connections with names from and events in Shengly Castle 2, despite the abscence of the tracks from the game.
These songs are, to be clear: 3) 10 - Space, Adventure, In; 10) 200 - Theme From Wufflepuff The Wonder Dog (Take 5); 18) 513 - Zepulon's Journey; 21) 550 - The Bald Space Marine Is Quickly Lost In The Grip Of The Cosmos; 25) 592 - BurgZone Warp Drive Sector Worker Congragulatory Tone For Personal Achievement; 42) 800 - BurgZone Prime Executive Beach-side Space-port Re-sort; and 45) 900 - Farewell Thee, Brave Voyager!.
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I'm not sure when in the process it happened, but I had the idea of bringing in many more "official" soundtrack songs. Where to get them from, though? I decided I would repurpose my old folders of discarded song projects, previously slated to never be released in any way. I had decided, for Music From, that I would conciously ignore standards of quality, to pefer attempting to create an interesting narrative of fake-video game songs. Also, I find most of the tracks hilarious.
Many of those old pojects are still in their discard folders, though. Much of what appears on the album from them is from my unfinished album of converted computer-written music into something partly from my hand. (I once wrote a highly customizable Python program to generate random notes and effects for my music tracker of choice, OpenMPT).
fig. B) From Left to Right: Python Code of forementioned program; several columns of output of the program in Openmpt. (Click image for full view)
I never got far with putting better intent into those files, back then. Coming back to them, I found myself with a more clear goal of what to do with them, and much more experience on how to do so. I took the incidental sound sequences I liked best, focused on them, and just went with it. There's too many of these tracks for me to list them all, but they're pretty much every other track that isn't named in this article.
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There's a few more tracks that are a bit unique (in terms of Music From) in what they are, and aren't covered by the next two parts I'll be writing about, so I'll talk about them here. 8) 175 - Intruding Aboard The Interstellar Ship That Crashed In Your Backyard; and 15) 500 - Mouth Of The Cavern are both made from a segment of one of those computer tracker songs, the whole of which does not appear on this album. I made them by playing a single line of notes in two different ways: "Intruding" is a couple of looping samples being muted and un-muted repeatedly, recorded live. "Mouth" is a segment of two out-of-sync samples played for a long time.
38) 650 - Out Of Fuel... Turn Off That Racket!!, like the next track I'll discuss, was an old project that I found myself unable to bring to what it could have been. I certainly had the idea down pat when I first made it, and my arrangement and timing was very good. The actual effects, though, just had no punch. Under the project umbrella of Music From, I was able to re-approach the song and make it everything I had wanted to be. A small payoff, honestly, but a meaningful one.
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22) 555 - Simulation Of Dolphin Watching Simulator is easily the oldest audio recording featured on the album (at least three years old!), and very endearing for me. It features audio from Parts 1 and 2 of a musique concrete 'series' based around water, previously trapped in perpetual planning. Two friends of mine even did remixes of Part 1, both of which I sampled in "Simulation" as a thanks. I had originally wanted to go far with the pieces, but I had found myself unable to even finish Part 2, or clean up Part 1 to be more meaningful.
I ended up moving the song files for the unfinished series into a folder that I wouldn't notice often, because I just found myself being unable to do anything with it. It was a small project that I should have much sooner seen as having reached its limit, but I didn't approach creating like that at the time. As such, it means so much to me to have taken out the best of my work, and mix it all together into something greater than even my original vision!
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Some more on my Juno-106, and another thread of the album explained: all of the "A Dark Dawn On The Distant Horizon" songs come from a single, ten minute long playing/recording session, of me idly tapping keys without much focus, with settings similar to those for the Final Days of the Windy Isles takes. It speaks greatly to my musical ear (or perhaps the quality of my synthesizer...) to how cohesive and planned these segments sound!
The naming of these pieces (ordered by: ^, I, II, III, M, O, X) came from wanting to create a listing that defied any possible numerical system it could be seen to have. Also, it divides the series into sub-series: ^, the shortest piece, is a sort of intro to the others. I, I, and III are the "lighter" side of the pieces, whereas M, O, and X are the "darker" side.
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To end this article on a soft note: possibly the most under-represented angles of my approaches to music on Music From are my tracks created entirely in Synth1. They are 44) 890 - Hostile But Slow Total Sphere Take-Over; and 46) 910 - Transmission During The Heat Death Of The Universe. In-game the synths are combined into one piece, but I wanted to isolate and focus on each instrument for listening clarity. They both come from one of my rampant Synth1 playing sessions, which take me to unique creations quite easily.
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Why & What Is Artworks From The Bride Of The Gator?
Well, the simplest reason is that my album needed an album cover, right? What better way to do so than with the same program I made Shengly Castle 2 in, Clickteam Fusion 2.5? I had already created a preview screen for the game by re-using klikart assets from the program. So, making an album cover in the same way seemed ideal! After finishing the cover, I decided I would make a full tracklist booklet for the music, in CF2.5 too. I soon found myself with even more ambition: the entire booklet would be based around glitch art!
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For the cover, I started with the background, a bunch of arranged tile objects, mostly from my "Dig" level. Arranging them all by colour and texture was pretty fun, although I had to cheat a bit at the end. A few obscured spots have no tile, and one of them used to be a large chessboard. Also, I found a huge "DIGITAL" rectangle graphic that I shoved in the middle. I like it though! The objects in the foreground are all from my "Future Stereo" interactivity room, which I thought would be fitting cause hey, this is meant to represent some music! The title itself was made from some font I liked, embellished by me in CF2.5's image editor (which I love using!).
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After making the "reverse" album cover and the first intermission page, I started on the tracklist proper. My first design choice, one I was very glad to have made later, was to put each title over one of the blank buttons from the "Personal Organizer" background I used on the main menu of Shengly Castle 2. Other recurring themes starting here are the re-used half-circles, a cd in front of a glitched square, repeating the "DIGITAL" graphic with glitches overlaid, re-arranging/destroying the title, and a progressively larger layer of objects built on in most every successive page, seen in the top-right.
I quickly got into the groove of misusing objects, functions, editors, and generally making a big mess of everything. Each title was formed in various ways, sometimes wholly unique. Titles often started as text, with a semi-randomly chosen font and colour, then were edited as an image. Other art assets used in Shengly Castle 2 are mixed in frequently, often distorted beyond recognition.
Tracklist Page 1 features the first 4th wall breaking instance, where two windows are laid on top of each other. Tracklist Page 2 takes my starting ideals to a continued level. It is with Tracklist Page 3 though (which I'll discuss in a moment) that I feel my methods evolved significantly, effectively defining the bar to reach for my future pages.
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Some words on my methods of glitching. My tools for this album were Clickteam Clipart, CF2.5's image editor, MicroSoft Paint, and GIMP. A primary method I have for creating random glitches is copying an image from CF.5 (while the program is in 256 colours mode) and pasting it straight to GIMP. For some reason this causes the images to burst into arrays of colourful messes, sometimes containing pieces of the original image, but usually not.
fig. C) Example of what happens when I try to put an image from CF2.5 and put it into GIMP. (Click image for full view)
Intermission 2 is a great example of me using this process many times. However, it can be hard to consistently get interesting results from this, occasionally forcing me to resort to other means. I can edit images in GIMP itself in controlled, if time-consuming, ways. To safely move an image from CF2.5 to GIMP, I can easily paste it into MS Paint, then copy+paste it again into GIMP. Also, MS Paint is awesome for quick, simple edits, mainly expanding and shrinking sections of images.
fig. D) Example of how I can avoid what normally happens when I try to put an image from CF2.5 and put it into GIMP. (Click image for full view)
A more frequently used source is Fusion 2.5 itself. Image editing within the program has many controls that can easily be misused. Whole images can be rotated by a few degrees at a time, smushing the result because it doesn't handle that well, like the blob in the middle-right of Tracklist Page 2. Images can be streteched and shrunk, messing up or leaving out fine details. Images can be slowly chipped away at, pixel by pixel, which I've spent many enjoyable hours doing.
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So, Tracklist Page 3. This is where my creativity got to the level it needed to be. I already had made Page 3 a lovely mess of artifacts and colours, but then I took it further by taking a screenshot of the page within CF2.5, selecting it in a browser to have a blue tint over it, and taking a screenshot of that. In GIMP, I layered the two screenshots over each other a few times, and started erasing chunks from each layer to create the confusing mess it is now. Retrospectively, I wish my styles of Page 3 & 4 were switched, since it would make the progression feel smoother. Pages 1 & 2 feel a bit dull in comparison, I think, and having page 3 be less of a jump in style would improve that a bit.
Tracklist Page 4 is my destructive approach to layout and formatting, continued. I experimented with new non-string methods of displaying text, created a series of devolving images along the top, and started replacing the half-circles with hyper-glitched versions. I don't really have much to say about this page specifically: I think it speaks for itself!
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Since the next page in the series is my explosive Intermission 3, I'll switch the topic to that, and the other two intermissions that follow it up. This page was created by taking a screenshot of Intermission 2 and pasting it many times into GIMP, shifting each layer around a bit, sometimes flipping or rotating them. Similar to Tracklist Page 3, but taken to a more extreme extent, I erased parts of each layer to show through to those below it, confusing the previous cohesion. The biggest feature, for me, is the highly split and chopped "DIGITAL" image. The original image had by then taken on a deeper meaning as a backbone to my album art. Dissecting it in such a manner says much about my intentions, I think.
There are quite many more sections of the image I found fun to create. I want to give viewers interested in examining the page many little puzzles to figure out: what is going on in this part, how did this section come from the original image? Most of it was made by just making hundreds of micro-edits I think looked good, sometimes trying for a specific goal, other times just doing whatever I felt like. The sum of the parts is greater than its whole!
Intermission 4 + 5 are both made from my classic glitches that result from copying images from CF2.5 to GIMP, with different results wanted for each image. Intermission 4 is meant to be a very choppy, but recognizable, remix of 3. Then Intermission 5 wants to take everything possibly understandable from 3, and distort it beyond comprehension, creating something wholly new. It may be visible from just looking at the images, but each page is started by splitting Intermission 3 into four somewhat-equal squares, and working on them one at a time. Each part is edited similar to how Intermission 3 was: several layers of glitch outcomes I enjoyed, each having parts erased to show my favourite sections through the gaps.
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Tracklist Page 5 is heavily informed by all of the pages leading up to it. Yet again, the main structure was made in CF2.5, with several layers of it pieced together in GIMP. This time though, I included many more elements of windows into it, and mixed up the panes to bring them on par with the rest of the image. The little application logo in the top-left has been removed, and placed (twice!) into the rest of the image. Also, most of the titles are made to reappear in varying degrees. As for my work pre-GIMP editing, on this page I put a lot of focus on making the core titles line up cleanly, which I hadn't done before. The final title on the page was created using MS Paints' poor font-resizing.
Tracklist Page 6 was one of my longer pages. I decided I would fit all but the last two tracks onto this page. It was quite an effort, but it worked out in the end! Following Page 5, many elements are lined up to others. That probably sounds like a minor point but honestly, most of my design in glitching builds up on my previous ideas, and it's very visual. What jumps out to me to mention is specific, over-arching choices I make. One other aspect of Page 6 I rather like is the final evolution of the backgrounds. It's pieced together from several GIMP glitches, making it recognizable as what it is, but crushes it into a mess at the same time.
Tracklist Page 7 focuses on the final two tracks of my album, which are closely tied together. I wanted them to be alone because it's sort of a send-off to everything I've made leading up to this point. I decided I would go all the way on these two titles though: each segment (word or character series) has a unique font and formatting. Page 7 is not the final page in the booklet, but it's the last one I made. It was a big relief to finally cap off a major part of this constantly-growing project! Page 7 also includes the main title again as a sort of circular design, or something like that.
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So! That's my thoughts on my process and outcomes for my album art book. Oh yeah I forgot to mention, at some point during the art process I made the Album C Side, a chaotic parody of the A Side cover. It was made completely in CF2.5, like the A and B sides, using only the assets in the original cover. The title sequence mess was glitched repeatedly to create my first teaser promo!
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Why & What Is Your Goals With The Bride Of The Gator (The Game, The Music, The Art, The Everything)?
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Well, the simplest answer is that there is no goal. The better answer is what I'm writing right now. Thing is, what my goal(s) are have shifted often since the start of this project. Originally, I had just wanted to package up the music I made for Shengly Castle 2, as I've said previously. Over my time spent putting it all together, Music From went from a dozen tracks to a total of 50! The single cover page turned into a few alternate cover pages, which turned into a tracklist booklet, and that turned into a larger glitch artbook. Packaging up the album and its extras has too added much more to my initial scope.
Deciding to make a website as another method of viewing the art book lead to everything you see here. I felt like having the art gallery by itself felt a bit lacking for the potential for a website. So, I've made this "ABOUT" page, with it's extensive articles, as well as the promo roundup page.
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That's mostly the structure of the content itself, though. What am I doing with Shengly Castle 2, Music From, and all this? I'll start off with the game. It was made for a secret santa game gift exchange, where most people posted lists of things they'd like in their game. Thankfully I got my good friend Octophore as a giftee, so I knew I would have fun making something for them. And make a lot of somethings I did! Most of Shengly Castle 2 is meant to be humourous, or at least bizarre. My goal was to make something that my friend would love, but also that hopefully many other people would enjoy. There's also a short "prequel" to the game I made in Twine, included with the game, meant to give partial backstories.
Shengly Castle 2 is composed of about seven different parts, each trying to express different situations of different scopes. There's a anti-capitalist wage worker struggling in a dystopian future; a highly controllable stereo system that plays a messy mashup of Venetian Snares songs I put together; space explorer Zepulon trying to find resolution between two sides arguing over a giant blue pyramid before the universe dies; a dolphin watching simulator from a highly evolved society that lives primarily in virtual reality; a goofy puzzle sequence; a cartoonish parody of space marine space heros trapped in a crumbling space station that he must destroy; and a semi-hidden non-interactive page of flashing numbers and random sound effects blaring constantly. Most of these sections are represented by reference on Music From.
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My goal with the album, mostly in the titles of tracks, is to create a narrative of an extensive video game soundtrack that, despite the overbearing length, is still a fraction of the possibile depths. Of course, most of the songs on the album are not from the game at all, and quite a few don't even have anything to do with the game itself. I wanted to suggest something bigger going on than the reality, and keep in to the theme of a soundtrack to a fake video game that actually exists.
As for the music itself, as I've pretty much said already, I wanted to break through barriers I put in front of myself in terms of music. I've in the past had a lot of success with trying to change what I can do for other media, like games. Music has still been a tough medium for me to do this in, but I think I've gotten past that now. Notice that it's been three years since I last put out an album. I've had another one in the works for a while, but it's been difficult to make things I found "good enough" to put on it. With Music From out there now, I think it'll be much easier for me to finish that album.
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Most of the art I've made has been for my games, and I've for a while highly enjoyed creating very self-destructive pieces that don't try to adhere to standards of quality. As such, I faced no issues in actually creating my album artworks, unlike with the music. The goal of my art is to create meanings that hopefully give more context to the track titles, while devolving and destroying the world they exist in. I think I've done a good job of that, and made some enjoyable glitch art along the way.
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I think that about sums it up! My goal or goals aren't some cohesive idea, but a collection of jumbled thoughts that find difficulty in forming into something that can be understood in a simple look. That is part of why I've wanted to create things for all of this across so many different mediums, so that each can give a different view of what I'm getting at.
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Why & What Is Your Advice To All Possible Brides Of Gators Or Other Creators Or People Who Don't See Themselves As "Really" Being Artists But Who Like To Make Stuff Maybe?
Now, this all is what I'd say to myself. I don't want to say I speak for others, or that I'm the final word on any of this, but these are my thoughts on creating as of now.
Make what you can and want to make, on your own terms. There's a lot of ways to be empowered with creation, but there are a lot of ways for you be barred from those that may be valid or invalid. An important part is realizing how much you can do!
If you don't want to work in a medium, that's okay. There's plenty more out there. If you've tried a medium and found it unpleasent or unfulfilling or undoable, there's nothing wrong with that. There's always more avenues of expression to find and try. If somebody tells you you can never work in a medium, they're gatekeeping you.
If somebody tells you that you can choose to work in a specific medium, that you have to do this to truly express yourself, that you should of course totally be able to just do so: well, they may be right about your ability work in that medium, but you don't have to listen to them as it being what you have to do.
There's always going to be things you can't do and things you can do, for various reasons. It's up to you to decide what is the best choice and reasons for why, although those can vary. I don't think it's a good idea to do something solely because it's popular, or that you've been told you have to. If you enjoy a medium greatly, and it happens to overlap with those sentiments, or you got started because of them, well that's great! Since you enjoy working in it.
If you don't enjoy working in a medium, and those ideas are the only reason you keep going on in it, you should re-assess your standings in that. It's OK to not want to continue making in a medium you have for a long time, or are still learning. If it doesn't work for you, then either you need to find a way to make it work, or find something else that does work. You shouldn't have to work hard to make something enjoyable to do.