by @ohthewhomanity

@dialmformara’s had a stressful week preparing for her thesis defence (and as of posting, she’s successfully defended it! Hooray!), so I’m going to step in and talk about something relaxing: my favorite album on the Homestuck bandcamp, Mark Hadley and Tarien Ainuvë’s Song of Skaia.

[album art by mintyfizz.tumblr.com]

This album has only three tracks. The first, “Null”, is fully white noise. I close my eyes and hear the whispering of wind, or maybe it’s ocean waves. Then a low grinding sound joins in–the hum of bees, or cars on a highway? It’s difficult to nail down exactly what I’m hearing in this track, but it’s soothing. I like to think of it as the whispers at the beginning of something. The things you hear before there’s anything substantial to hear, the very first breaths of the universe.



In the second track, “Skaian Birth”, the windlike whispering continues, but it’s soon joined by something new: strings and bells, light little sounds. Then the piano begins, tentatively putting a few notes together, and then a few more, gradually forming a melody, as if the song is being written as I listen to it. The track gradually builds into something bigger and fuller, adding more and more notes, and just as it nears completion, it fades into…

…the third and final track, “Song of Skaia”. It builds as the previous track did, but more quickly and confidently, with a greater variety of stringed instruments, like violins and harps, joining the piano. Then the vocals begin, with two stanzas in Latin and another pair in Tolkein’s Elvish. The track’s Bandcamp page provides a translation–“around the new-born world, wandering spirit flows in the wind”, reads one line, and another, “all is created out of nothing; all is created”.



And there we get the meaning of it all, and finally know what we’re listening to. This album is an illustration of Skaia, the core of the Incipisphere and source of “unlimited creative potential”. The melody is Skaia’s theme, present throughout the comic, notably when Nanasprite first explains Skaia and slightly remixed when John nearly wakes up on Prospit. And the album literally builds that melody up from nothing, from silence and wind, into a majestic swell of sound. It is creativity in action–an example of the creativity of Skaia. It is the entire road from the potential of the void to the light that shines out from it. It is a demonstration of the goodness that the heroes of Homestuck are out to protect, the goal of SBURB.



And it is beautiful.



(@dialmformara points out that in Tolkein’s Silmarillion, which I haven’t read yet, Middle-Earth is literally created by the gods singing. That’s probably this album’s inspiration–and would explain the Elvish lyrics.)