Maybe my favorite Homestuck volume, if not simply because this one has the most contributions I've worked on personally out of all the volumes. We achieved both an enormous amount and an enormous variety of songs, with this album clocking in around two hours in length. This is not to say we rushed through this one's production - with increased separation from the main content of the comic itself (the only featured music from the comic being the End of Act 5 flash tracks) we graded ourselves a lot more strongly and dedicated ourselves to creating some very solid tunes.

I dedicated myself to being strongly represented on this album, if not for the sake of making up for my light contributions to the previous two volumes. The album opener, "Calamity", interpolates the breakdown from Jit's "Walk-Stab-Walk" with the "Warhammer of Zillyhoo" chant, and with the addition of an incredibly loud saw, starts the record off with both a bang and a laugh (assuming the honks don't simply terrify you). My composition "Escape Pod" attempts to merge kind of a classic gaming sound with a classic rock sound and has one of the more thrilling mixes I've attempted. Meanwhile "Frog Hunt" goes into a relaxed space inspired by jazz fusion and exotica.

I also made an effort to do some collaborative tracks. I produced "Revered Return", a track that Nick Smalley had written with pxtone ages ago, and gave it much more of a rock sound. I also produced "Gust of Heir", a minimalist piece by Tyler Dever, which he sent to me as little more than a midi file containing a single piano part. I also did an indie rock-inspired cover of Mark Hadley's track from the Squiddles album "Ocean Stars", titled "Ocean Stars Falling" (a nod to "Ruins Rising").

The theme I attempted to emphasize with my tracks was the movement from lightheartedness into seriousness, a theme which is central to Homestuck in many ways. Just as "Ocean Stars" had been swept under the rug with what the fans largely considered a gag album, "Ocean Stars Falling" brings back the theme bashed out on guitars and sung by a chorus almost to the point of meditation. In bringing back the "Warhammer of Zillyhoo" chant on "Calamity", I made a serious attempt to use it to increase the drama of the song, giving the familiar listener a bizarre sense of evolution.

The new cover of "How Do I Live", now the "D8 Night Version" (a bonus track), was made to emphasize that same shift from youthful obsession with irony to adult seriousness. Humor has been made of its utterly saccharin content and use in a relatively mindless action movie, but given that this has become a signature song of mine (whether I like it or not) I made this cover in an attempt to find the emotion in it. Realizing the theme of the song is fear of loss, I stripped down the elements of the original and put the song at the pace of a funeral march. To me, the theme of the song became much more real when presented with stakes that were much more resonant.