Bowman is a musician and producer from Austin, Texas. He writes a lot of songs and occasionally performs live. You may have heard his music in Homestuck.
Contact the Bowman for any reason (fair use of material, live booking, knock-knock jokes) at the incredibly self-indulgent email address bowmanisgod@gmail.com.
If you'd like your question answered on the blog, please send a tumblr ask.
homestuck compilation released 26 august 2010
The second virtual band effort we took on was proposed after Alexander Rosetti wrote a theme for the fictional children's program "Squiddles!" which characters such as Jade Harley apparently watched at a young age. The idea was to create a lot of cute music with a subtle undertone of deep, inhuman evil, foreshadowing the later appearance of the Horrorterrors in the comic. Almost immediately after Andrew Hussie declared this our big new effort, the rest of the team beat me to the punch in composing the profoundly cute J-pop style tracks, so I looked to a variety of other influences to make the record more eclectic.
"Squiddles Samba" was based around a 30 second musical cue I had written for one of Tavia's student film projects, initially sounding a lot more low-key with a lounge feel. I gutted the pastiche of jazz sounds from the record and instead went for some pretty chunky-sounding synthesizers to give it that overstimulated kids show feel. The results are halfway between Return to Forever and Sesame Street, and despite the very out-of-key guitar solo I'm proud of this track.
"Tangled Waltz" was an attempt to capture a child's sense of wonder, and while I drew on a couple of different places for this track, I was primarily inspired by Amelie, a film whose soundtrack I've listened to a number of times, but have only seen once.
I finally succeeded in the ultimate act of self-indulgence inserting my own name into "Mister Bowman Tells You About the Squiddles", a track truly inspired by children's shows, but with a certain corniness perhaps a generation removed from the Homestuck reader base. The feel-good softshoe beat was initially going to be the backdrop for a song which delved into a much more sinister set of lyrics, as the sound effects slowly became more demonic. I got as far as writing the line "they smile because they have no sense of heaven or of hell" in place of "they smile because they have so many stories they'd like to tell" before I decided this concept was bunk and settled on being only distantly evil.