#circlejourney

Happy Birthday, @circlejourney! I've been having fun experimenting with MIDI, and I always liked this song, so I figured I'd try my hand at covering it. I also may have added some bells and whistles. I don't know if you wrote the lyrics for Bird Song with Adelaide in mind, but it reminded me of her, hence the picture.

Ikenfell: Yearn to Bloom (Orchestral/Folk Cover) - Circlejourney

[Yearn to Bloom]

Songs from the Planet Earth is out! In conjunction with the release of our album, we’re doing a series of interviews with members of our artist and musician team. Read all interviews here!

This may or may not be the last interview (we’re waiting on one more), but while we wait, here is the interview with...me.

Q: What did you make for the album?

Hi I'm Circlejourney, the mod of this project! I made Oceanic Flight, a song about Lapis with vocals by Lillie Blue Lennox, and I composed What Once Was, about Pink Diamond and the past, with production by Grace Medley. I also illustrated four tracks.

Q: Tell us a bit about yourself and your music!

I'm a hobbyist musician with a penchant for combining orchestral music with synths and instruments that should not be there. I enjoy spinning out nice tunes and harmonies and messing around with instruments until they sound right. I’m not a very methodical composer; I just make whatever sounds good to my ears and best evokes the feelings I'm trying for. And apparently, it works!

Q: Briefly describe the process of working on your track/illustration!

With Oceanic Flight, the whole song concept started with that big building chord right at the start. Then I wrote the lyric line, "free me, free me, free me!" I felt that the punchy melody really captured Lapis’ desperation and fear of being forgotten, but it was just as easily flipped into a determined declaration (“take me, make me, break me!”). The rest of the song was structured around building up towards those lines.

I really only composed on What Once Was. It was an experiment with instrument sounds, but I found it hard to continue. So I put the unfinished track in the server, and I don't remember how it happened but Grace stepped in and offered to finish it, and I thought her style would fit my vision for it perfectly. She overhauled the instruments, produced it to realise the sound I was going for, and bam, we had some album-worthy material!

Q: What’s your favourite Steven Universe song?

Oh, this is tough, but I’m gonna say Peace and Love (On Planet Earth)! It captures a peaceful but critical moment between life-threatening conflicts. It casually juxtaposes life and death, peace and war, without making a big deal about the drama of it all. It’s just Peridot learning about Earth with Steven, and coming to a gradual realisation that it’s worth protecting. For a song that marks such a transformative moment, it’s very subdued, and I love it for that.

Q: What's your favourite thing about the track you made?

Oceanic Flight is a big storytelling track and it goes a lot of different places, compositionally and instrumentally. I’m glad it manages to sound coherent even so.

Social media links

Website: circlejourney.net

Twitter: twitter.com/circlejourney

Tumblr: @circlejourneyart

--

New remix up on YouTube by @circlejourney!

Offshore fanart for @circlejourney's birthday last week! The first piece was the real birthday gift, but I decided to do the second just for fun. These characters are so fun to work with, and even more fun to read!

If you're interested, please read Offshore! It's a novel about two competitive sailors on their last big race as a team and the feelings that come to surface from that: old regrets, newfound comforts, the uncertainty of changing waters, and lots of longing. It's finished!