Homestuck, Vol. 1-4 (2011)
12 tracks, 65 minutes
Bandcamp
The album by Shnabubula from the other day wasn’t a video game soundtrack, and neither is this one, although you might mistake it for one. Instead, it’s the soundtrack to a webcomic, one of the most famous there has been, actually. I can’t think of any other webcomic that has a soundtrack, but then again, this isn’t any other webcomic.
Homestuck was written and drawn by Andrew Hussie, and the plot starts with a bunch of friends acquiring a new video game and spirals out of control from there. It’s an epic adventure in terms of both the story and the length. Not only does the plot grow increasingly more outlandish and complex, but so does the comic itself: it starts as single panels with a short subtitle, and expands to includes gifs, Flash animations, side projects, games, textlogs, interesting bits of URL-fu and more – so of course it would have a soundtrack. The style of the comic is in the manner of an old-school illustrated text adventure video game, and the music it includes is in keeping with that style. It makes sense that the music is just as in-keeping. This album is a collection of the music featured in the first four acts of the comic.
Because there are a bunch of different composer-performers on the album – the material was written separately by a community of twelve fans – there is a variety of approaches to musicifying Hussie’s adventure. The music stretches from straight-up 8- and 16-bit programming that could be direct from the NES or SNES, to touching solo pieces on piano or violin and grand classical-style pieces. There’s also some plain mad shit, like a dirging lament sang (?) entirely by cats. All of it has a creepy and foreboding atmosphere, which echoes that of the comic, but there’s also more than enough to make you laugh in there too. Like many soundtracks, motifs are used throughout that pertain to certain situations or characters; it means that, when you listen to this album from start to finish, it evolves and grows, making it a rewarding listen on its own without any knowledge of the source work.
The highlight of the album comes right at the end, in the form of a piece called ‘Black,’ written by Toby 'Radiation' Fox*. I used the word ‘epic’ before, and that is extremely appropriate for this one. Here, I'll attach the video:
It’s a perfect culmination of the whole album. It’s dark, it’s funky and it uses General MIDI in a way that I’ve rarely heard paralleled. The sounds of General MIDI are quite crap reproductions of real instruments, but here they are used in their own right, turning their uncanny-valleyness into a strength: my favourite is a saxophone sound that is warped to play so fast, exceed the normal range above and below, make pitch-bends and even chords as to be wildly inhuman. Together with 8-bit sounds, synthesisers, pianos and even a sample from by 1910s vaudeville star Eddie Morton, this is a right headbanger that brings in so many references from the history of video game music to create a masterpiece.
I have to admit, with regret, that I’ve never been able to finish reading Homestuck. I’ve tried starting it from the beginning twice, but both time I’ve gotten, well, ‘stuck’ at the same sort of point and just haven’t been able to push past it. It’s a shame because I really enjoy it. Maybe I should try again…at least I know that there will be much more great music in store for me.
*Really interesting thing I found out just on proofreading: this is the same Toby Fox that went on to create (and compose) the game Undertale, which has been a massive hit over the last few years, and another game with an excellent soundtrack. Cool!
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