1001 Knights - A people-positive art anthology (with music by me!)

[DarkeSword]

 

1001 Knights is an art anthology project focusing on creating people-positive characters with feminist overtones, created by Annie Stoll and Kevin Jay Stanton.

Kickstarter: bit.ly/1001Knights
Official Site: onethousandandoneknights.com
Twitter: twitter.com/1001_Knights
Facebook: www.facebook.com/OneThousandAndOneKnights
Track Artwork: Annie Stoll (twitter.com/aniistoll) & Kevin Jay Stanton (twitter.com/kevinjaystanton)

Annie is a friend of mine that I met at ConnectiCon a few years ago. I was there for OC ReMix and she was our table neighbor, promoting her webcomic, Ode. While planning the Kickstarter campaign for 1001 Knights, she put out a call for a musician to do trailer music. I volunteered, and was immediately impressed with the incredible artwork being produced for the anthology.

Annie asked me to put together a piece of music that felt mysterious and important, with fantasy and fairy tale overtones. I wrote a piece called "Gather Your Courage," which would serve as the main theme of the 1001 Knights project. Annie, Kevin, and I were all pretty happy with this piece for the Kickstarter trailer, and everything seemed set.

I loved what I'd written in "Gather Your Courage" so much that I felt like experimenting on my own. I decided to arrange my own piece in 6/8 time, and ended up writing this piece, "The Winter March," a heavier, more militaristic arrangement. I sent it over to Annie and Kevin, and they loved it so much that, eventually, we decided to use it for the trailer instead.

"Gather Your Courage" is still the main theme of the 1001 Knights project, and I'll be posting it in the coming weeks. I'm also planning on releasing a small EP for purchase including these two tracks (along with a few more original pieces), which is why this track is streaming-only.

But for now, please enjoy "The Winter March," and be sure to head on over to Kickstarter and back the project!

[DarkeSword]

Hey all, just letting everyone know that this Kickstarter is still going! They've hit the funding goal already but books are still available and they're working their way up through stretch goals. Don't miss out! Anyway, I thought I'd post another piece of music I did for this project.

This is the original piece of music I had written for the 1001 Knights Kickstarter trailer.

When Annie asked me to compose something for 1001 Knights, she'd provided me with a rough treatment of how the trailer was going to flow: different ideas about what was going to be happening on screen at different times. I tried to follow the treatment pretty closely, but as we all know, art is ever-changing, so the trailer ended up being a bit shorter, which is why we used "The Winter March" instead.

That said, I'm quite proud of how this piece turned out. Annie and I discussed what the main theme of 1001 Knights should sound like on the phone, and I sat at my DAW playing some different ideas for her with my cell phone held up to the speakers (21st century communication techniques, man) and we managed to figure out exactly the sound she wanted.

I thought a lot about the works of Hiroki Kikuta and Yuzo Koshiro when writing this track. The two of them are some of my favorite game music composers. Kikuta in particular captured such a wonderful, ancient fairy tale quality with his Secret of Mana soundtrack, and I wanted to do something similar. The piano and buzzy synth guitar featured in this track are actually instruments sampled from the Secret of Mana soundtrack!

I also need to say that the melody I've written here is probably one of my favorite melodies I've ever written, which is why I ended up writing "The Winter March" in the first place.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy listening to this track as much as I did writing it. I can't reiterate enough how lucky I feel to be playing a small part in the 1001 Knights project. If you haven't checked it out, yet, please make sure you head on over to Kickstarter and back the hell out of it!

[Brandon Strader]

That sounded really cool, it's awesome to hear more of a folk-ish direction and it seems fitting for a fantasy world. 0:48 of that last one reminded me of Chrono! Haha!