The Blog Where You See If Jordan's Posted Anything Lately

been writing a song these last two days. only wrote the most bare skeleton of it-- the guitar part-- last night, as I had the idea in my head and needed to write it down quick. spent some time today fleshing it out into a full-band type dealie. I see this as only the beginning of a bigger song, probably not even the start of the beginning. this is a song for the one remaining eight colors disc that does not yet have album art.

I do want to share, like, every single song in the works. there are some really impressive ones we have ready that have not been publicly shown. I think this album is insanely cool so far. but I am also interested in using some tact. this is gonna be a Long album when it releases, and it would be a bit silly if the listener has already heard all the best songs when they get to it. plus, as a Long album, we're interested in doing some cool things with structure and flow. it's gonna be a five-disc album, how do you even do that? have you ever even heard a two-disc album that doesn't feel even a little bloated? even The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, my beloved, has "Ravine" on it, literally a song designed to fill in a gap in the runtime.

so how? how? how are we going to more-than-double-down on that risk and not expect the release to be Too Much?

well, it being five discs is actually a point in its favor. two discs is like movie-length, you look at a two-disc album and feel like you can probably push through that, so you listen to it all in one go. but five discs, well, that's obviously too many. you're gonna want to split it up. and we're designing for that. each disc is planned to function as a separate album, almost like we're making five different takes on the idea of "the fifth Sunsetters album." (that's why there's separate album art for each disc!) you can, and should, listen to them separately. there are connections between discs, but, like, c'mon, you've read a book before, you know how to piece disparate information together in your brain, you know how to use your brain to get the full picture of a thing.

there are other angles to this too. the idea of crafting five separate discs that are still somehow related as "one unit," well, textually that's a body, we are making a body of work. but the Sunsetters discography as a whole is also a body of work, intentionally designed as an artistic project. so this is like a microcosm for the whole thing. that's interesting. that feels pretty unique in the context of a rock album. and so, as lindsay and I work on this thing, we're often stepping back and looking at it in this way, to see what that brings to the thing. if we're making a body, can we play with that?

some of you may be wondering why we're going through this extra effort. we could literally just space this shit out, call each disc an actual separate album, and look at that, we're covered up to like album 9 now. this Super Album 5 idea wasn't even in the original plan we made in 2012. so why?

well, it's a little arbitrary. the numbers 5 and 8 are Arc Numbers I've incorporated into a lot of my stories. (as a dream theater reference.) they don't necessarily have intense personal meaning for me, except that they become a fun game to play, an excuse to do fun number stuff. (dream theater used them in the exact same way, for the exact same reason. it's really a music theory thing, the 13 notes in an octave, 8 "white" keys and 5 "black" keys, the 8th/13th key being the same note as the 1st key. their eighth album, released in 2005, had eight tracks, one in each key, with five unnamed interludes in the sharp keys, and the eighth track was a 24-minute-- eight times three-- epic with five movements. that shit is really fun. also dream theater were literally founded in 1985, they have five band members, and by 2005 they had had three past members, making eight total. god that's neat!!!)

in my own stories, I've just kinda been.. doing stuff with the numbers. a lot of times they come up naturally. (my childhood fanfiction, DCA, had seasons with eight episodes, specifically and coincidentally it had exactly five seasons with eight episodes, as every season since then broke the trend. and season eight was meant to be the ending, and it was a five-episode season, but I was doing the 8/5 thing intentionally then.) I had sorta "assigned" the 8/5 game to my monster EAT, and EAT has a presence in the Sunsetters canon, though not a prominent one (yet).

but, like, the 8/5 game has already appeared in Sunsetters, have you noticed? our first album had, well, nine tracks, but the ninth one is canonically not by Sunsetters and not "intended" to be on the album. the eighth track has five movements, and is also quite EAT-themed. Summer Sucks has five tracks, which, while that is also just standard five-act storytelling, it was intended as a part of this game. (and there are parts of the scores for that album where I'd write little comments like "this solo starts with notes in groups of 8, and then ends with notes in groups of 5." when the 8/5 stuff is present so granularly in the music, it's harder to really make a big thing out of. but it is technically still there.) there may have been some 8/5 things in We Excavate, since that is the water album and literally has EAT as a character in it (EAT appears on track 8). but then No Entry and the EPs weren't focused on this game, as they didn't need to be. though No Entry was "released" in 2005, and that does count.

but SO, we're coming up on the fifth album. and we did always know it was going to be significant in some way. and this is how we ended up deciding on it. the fifth album-- "released" in 2008-- will be titled The Eight Colors Trilogy and will have five discs. it's not even gonna be all that EAT-flavored, we have a different character in mind that we wanna focus on, but, the Blue disc will be EAT-flavored. and this song, that I just started working on, and have posted up above, is me writing something for that disc.

so now you know all this context. and now you are "in" on the game we're playing too.

it's not necessarily going to be a super important game. it could end up being that way, but, we're just writing music at this point, and we'll let things land where they land. (and album 8, is a ways off, but, we're not currently planning on it being longer than one disc.)

I really just wanted to show off this neat song. I'm loving where it's going so far. I think I'm doing a great job!

I didn't even mean to ramble about the 8/5 thing. but I guess, since I did, I should leave you with a song that was more consciously designed with that in mind. this is a song I wrote some years ago, and I posted it back then too. I'm thinking of putting it on eight colors somewhere, in some form.

it's exactly 5:58 in length, and it's primarily in 15/8 time.

dreamer.

hi. I posted about The Circus yesterday, and in that post I mentioned The Concert. I didn't go into it then, partly because I've been posting about it on my tumblr in the last like month, but I think it would be beneficial to talk more plainly about it.

so there's this thing, The Sunsetters Project. it started with a series of ideas: "I like to write stories" > "I like stories that have music lyrics in them" > "music lyrics for all my favorite bands are copyrighted, so maybe I'll just make up some lyrics in my stories and pretend they're from a band" > "I guess I should make a little rough plan of what this band's albums are, their tracklists and stuff" > "hey Jordan this is your best friend Lindsay, I like your ideas, and I think I'm going to do something wild and create the actual music for this band" > "hey Lindsay this is Jordan, can I help" > YEARS OF WORK LATER > "hey wow Lindsay we have somehow written six hours of prog rock music. I think I am going to make a website to present it all in a neat organized fashion."

that band is Sunsetters. it has kinda taken over my life, I focus more on it than I do on the stories their lyrics were supposed to enhance. I kinda care very very deeply about it. it's the most fun I've ever had creating something, and I've created many things.

Sunsetters are not real. Sunsetters music is not "real" either, it is polished MIDI music. at first, this was just a necessity of our writing software, but as time went by I got kinda good at polishing the MIDI to sound pretty damn good, and I realized, "wait, I like midi music, I want it to stay this way." I grew up with computer games (like Doom, with its rock music rendered charmingly in midi form) and video games (like Nintendo games, which used limited music channels on old hardware to produce music that was layered and really sounds sufficient as it is). I always had an interest in video game music, how it was actually made. midi music, this particular sound that Sunsetters music was gradually standardizing into a consistent style, satisfied me. it didn't look like a substitute or a rough draft to me, it looked like its own thing, its own art.

and I also have, for years, had this idea that Sunsetters music could be visualized in a particular "video game-y" way. I was thinking of one reference in particular, one video game series that loved to play with music.

I was thinking of MOTHER.

all three MOTHER games have sequences where characters "perform" music on stage. in the first game, it's just the player characters singing and dancing, but starting with the second game, there's a whole fictional band to follow: The Runaway Five.

the Runaway Five concerts in EarthBound are some of the most memorable and iconic in the game, arguably on the SNES as a whole. they play this charming 16-bit Blues Brothers music while the lead singers move around on stage. they even have like two or three different songs they play at different points. even though you know they're not literally playing the music (they're just sprites standing around as more BGM plays), you have no trouble playing pretend that you're really there attending a concert. and goddammit, it is so fun to get to pretend in that moment, it makes my heart go pit-a-pat.

the third game took this concept and really refined it, giving us a rock band called DCMC.

these concerts are absolute gems. you can tell the developers really wanted to capture the feel of live music-- there's sequences of changing stage lights, spotlights, dramatic darkness, and the actual character sprites are animated very well. MOTHER 3 is one of my favorite games of all time, and the DCMC are a part of that.

so, the point here being, I had some ideas swirling around in my brain. I had a website, I was learning the tricks of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and I had this whole fictional band-- specific characters!-- with a ton of midi music to work with. for years, I wanted to do one thing: make little sprites that bob up and down or something, a simple 1-2 animation toggle, as music plays.

and that's where The Concert came from.

that's The Concert in its current form, v1.8. eagle-eyed readers will notice that the sprites for the drum kit are straight-up traced from the DCMC drumkit. (for my first tests of this idea, I did literally use the DCMC sprites. and when I had to make the actual sunsetters sprites, I mean, that drumkit looks fine enough, I wasn't gonna be able to draw something better than that.)

one of the great things about midi music is computers already know how to interact with it. JavaScript can filter through a midi song, break it down into separate instrument tracks, and can recognize when notes are playing. so once I learned about Tone.js (the library that makes this whole thing work), well, it was off to the races. the guitarists (bass included) and the keyboards all follow the 1-2 animation toggle I mentioned earlier, their sprites go from "downstrum" to "upstrum" as each note in their track plays, so you literally get to see them play each note, you won't see them awkwardly playing while nothing is happening. (this perhaps looks odd for the keyboard, but, I am not an animator, I'm hardly even an artist, my goal here was to keep things Simple). the vocals operate a little differently, I think the jargon is they're a "key-driven schedule." the vocalist's mouth is either Open or it's Not, and it's mapped to the notes, so it's Open when there are vocal notes playing, and it's Not Open otherwise.

(the drums... *flips my hair nonchalantly* I may have gotten carried away with those. for some damn reason, I've become someone who pays a lot of attention to drums in the music I like, and I put a lot of care into the drums in Sunsetters songs. I'm not even a drummer. I think prog music is just like that, it brings that out of me. but also, I think in an animation context, the drums are the ones that can get away with laziness the least. they are very.. what-you-see-is-what-you-get. they needed to look right. so, I decided on a set of percussion, the pieces of the drum kit, that would each get its own separate "key-driven schedule." simplistically: the snare, the tom, the splash, the ride, and the kick drum. each of these trigger a "Hit" sprite only when the midi track calls for it. and there are patterns to this, a hierarchy of rules, as the drummer only has two hands. sometimes the songs are written with too many drum parts happening at once, like a snare and a ride and a crash will happen at once, and it sounds right in the song so it stays that way-- in the animation, in that case, the crash would take priority over the snare. stuff like that, there's rules. 60% of my time tinkering with The Concert is me tinkering with the drums. but the end result is a drum animation that I think looks compelling while still fundamentally being basic, like the rest of the band.)

lyrics are also a thing. that took the other 40% of my time. I had to manually write down all the lyrics and exact timestamps for them. it was a fucking pain. but I only needed to do it once, and it's all done. even the MOTHER games don't show us the lyrics when they're being sung! (and there's a handy "Lyrics: ON" button, the user can turn lyrics off if they want!)

so, like. that's The Concert. that's why and what it is. it brings a lot to this whole project. it's literally sprite animation, the sort I grew up with on newgrounds, just without flash. it's even mobile-friendly. it's.. so cool, to me. it is both a sign of and a contributor to my passion for this whole project.

(and the next thing The Concert needs, something the MOTHER games have but I don't yet, is a backdrop. we need to see Sunsetters on a stage. we need a light show too. and maybe some more features. those are all coming in v2.0, which is not done yet and won't be for a while, I have a specific release schedule in mind for it, it will release alongside Something Else I have in the works.)

(but even v1.8 is enough. and it will stay like this; v2.0 will basically be a separate page entirely. I do actually like having this version, with the sprites arranged symbolically on black. it lets you focus on each instrument as you please, nobody gets priority.)

it's all about playing pretend. The Sunsetters Project, in a real sense, is my tribute to the joy of playing pretend. it is, in fact, an art project exploring that space.

I've posted earlier versions of "The Crawl" here on tumblr. this is an updated version. and I wanted to show the score for it as well, as that is an understated part of the art, this is the part I meticulously work on.

I am happy with where this song is. I would be happy if you'd give this a watch.

youtube description:

this is a song I've been working on, by myself, for a few years. it is a Coestts song, Coestts being a fictional band from the 90s that were a massive influence on Sunsetters. this song ends their first album, Reinventing the Wheel.

outside the fiction, this is a personal song for me. it's vulnerable, fragile, and trying to rebuild the foundation on which to live. it's a song about seeing how far you've come, about realizing that time has passed since you hit rock bottom.

the song is in F Minor, and I am learning how to play it on real guitar.

the full album will come eventually and you'll be able to download the song then.

lyrics are semi-present in the video though are cut off, so here they are in full: