s:s&s ep - MUSIC

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*****new record! released Q4 2011

JIM GUTHRIE'S CHILDREN OF THE CLONE

About ten years ago, Jim Guthrie made a pile of music on Playstation One using MTV Music Generator. A few years later, some of these songs inspired the Superbrothers films Children of the Clone & Dot Matrix Revolution, and some of the songs inspired S:S&S EP too (Under a Tree, for example). Most of these songs, however, had never been heard before by anyone other than Jim.

If you enjoyed the songs on Jim Guthrie's Sword & Sworcery LP: The Ballad of the Space Babies then you'll want to hear this new digital-only record, known as Jim Guthrie's Children of the Clone. This record contains some miscellaneous gems (Economica, Jimmy's Lament, Lust In Space) & at least one lost masterpiece (Roomful of Empty People is amaaazing) - it's kind of exciting getting this material out in the open!

On the Superbrothers side, we've been listening to these songs for a long long long time, they go pretty deep with us, so it was a treat to hook Jim up with an album cover image. The Jim Guthrie portrait on the box in the cover image is by illustrator Steve Courtney who created the portrait for an article in Kill Screen Magazine - to see this portrait up-close you can click here. The staff at Superbrothers handled the other visual elements, "we ran out of pixels" they explained.

ENJOY THE RECORD via Jim Guthrie's Internet Record Shop.
ENJOY THE ARTWORK here.

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full-length record released Q2 2011

JIM GUTHRIE'S SWORD & SWORCERY LP: THE BALLAD OF THE SPACE BABIES

This record is amazing.

ENJOY THE RECORD via Jim Guthrie's Internet Record Shop.
ENJOY THE ARTWORK here.

Updated December 21st 2011: Both pressings of the limited edition vinyl are sold out, there are now thousands of space babies out there somewhere! If/when a new pressing becomes available you'll probably hear about it via Jim Guthrie aka @jampants on Twitter.

limited edition print included with S&S LP's second pressing

oo2. THE WHITE STAG [SOLD OUT]

The White Stag of Scythia is depicted upon a bed of inkblots in this artwork by illustrator Charlene Chua

Be sure to stop by Toronto illustrator Charlene Chua's portfolio, she's awesome.

limited edition print included with the original pression of S&S LP

oo1. SPACEWARD SWORD [SOLD OUT]

Artwork by designer & illustrator Cory Schmitz in the key of S:S&S EP.

Hey why not take some time & look at Mr. Schmitz's top-notch portfolio?

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Jim Guthrie helped define Toronto’s musical underground in the last decade, as a solo artist, as a member of Royal City, and as co-founder of Three Gut Records (Constantines, Cuff the Duke), an acknowledged influence on the rise of Broken Social Scene, Feist, Owen Pallett and other international success stories from Toronto.

Today, he’s poised to be part of another entirely different movement. With Guthrie’s new album Sword & Sworcery LP: The Ballad of the Space Babies—the first released under his own name in eight years—he joins Toronto’s new wave of innovation by writing the score for a new videogame called Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, a multimedia project that combines a lush 8-bit inspired aesthetic, Twitter, narrative elements that echo The Legend of Zelda and Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, the lunar calendar and other surprising elements. Wired UK included it in a list of the “Top 10 videogame releases to watch in 2011” alongside larger scale efforts like Nintendo's 3DS, Rockstar's L.A. Noire & Sony's Uncharted 3.

Guthrie and videogames go way back. A self-taught musician and home recorder, Guthrie began performing live with a Sony Playstation in 2002, playing music he composed with the MTV Music Generator software while on tour across North America and Europe in Royal City. The influence of gaming music could be heard on his first two albums, 1999’s A Thousand Songs (a compilation of home-recorded cassettes) and 2002’s Morning Noon Night.

By 2003’s Now More Than Ever, Guthrie had embraced a more organic approach, which got him mainstream attention, licensing deals, a Juno nomination, and respect from a new band from Montreal called Arcade Fire, who borrowed his string section to record their album Funeral. Shortly afterward, Guthrie took a day job writing advertising jingles (including the international Capital One “hit” “Hands in My Pocket”), with some film scores on the side. He joined Islands’ Nick Thorburn to form the duo Human Highway, whose self-titled debut came out in 2008.

Sword & Sworcery represents his greatest challenge yet, and not just for its combination of classic film scores that echo John Carpenter and Ennio Morricone with gaming music both vintage and modern, all the while retaining his distinct personal approach. Guthrie wrote a fully realized score that could not only be deconstructed into loops for various levels of game play, but could also allow room for player interaction.

“Sometimes the music just ends up playing during the game—more times than not,” Guthrie explains. “But there is an element on certain boards where it’s a musical puzzle. You lock into this drone music and you have to interact with the environment and solve a musical puzzle by touching trees and bushes that release musical ‘sprites’ into the forest.” He admits that the game, and the music’s role in it, isn’t easy to explain—and nor should it be. “You don’t want people to understand it all immediately; it’s about designing something that works on a fundamental level that keeps you looking.”

Writing music for a game and having it stand on its own merits are two different challenges, of course. The vinyl version of the album (there are no CDs) has 14 songs and 40 minutes of music; the digital version (available with the vinyl purchase) has 28 songs.

But if the game is as intriguing and enjoyable as its designers hope it is, why would anyone put on Guthrie’s album in their other free time? “You can’t hear all the music at once because it’s mixed differently than the album and spread out over the entire experience—which takes at least one moon cycle to complete,” says Guthrie, not exaggerating in the least (the game is linked to the lunar calendar). “One of our earliest goals for the game was to create a space that could also be described as ‘an album you can walk through.’ That concept changed a bit along the way, but I always wrote the music with the album in mind.”

Guthrie’s relationship with Superbrothers Inc. founder and illustrator Craig D. Adams, the sole artist and animator on the videogame project, goes back to 2004, when Adams, a fan, struck up a correspondence and Adams used some of Guthrie’s Playstation material to score some animated shorts. The two worked closely together on the game's development, a collaboration with the more seasoned videogame designers & programmers at Capy, a Toronto videogame studio making its name in recent years with critically acclaimed efforts like the Playstation Network game Critter Crunch, and the upcoming Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes for Playstation 3 & Xbox 360. Capy effectively made the project happen from start to finish, with Capy creative director Kris Piotrowski on-board as a designer to guide the project to completion.

Guthrie describes both the game’s visual aesthetic and his music as “very 1978 meets 2011. I use some shitty 8-bit drum sounds alongside orchestra samples.”

Being one part of a triumverate allows the normally modest Guthrie to be more boastful than usual about a project he’s incredibly proud to be a part of. He says, “This is three different mediums connecting in an unusual way: the coders, the game designers and me; we’re all working independently in our own fields and we came together here. Not many other people are designing games this way. A lot of credit goes to Capy for putting up with the craziness."

He admits, however, that so far “only the nerdiest of the nerds are super curious. This game might be too weird and too involved for most.” So is Sword & Sworcery to Angry Birds what Jim Guthrie is to Black Eyed Peas? “Could be,” he laughs. “This game is like The Velvet Underground. It may have popular appeal in a cult way. There probably won’t be shirts at the mall with the characters on it. But it will have its place in terms of there being nothing like it.”

Of course, the same is true of Guthrie’s own music. He hopes to release his long-delayed “normal” album by year’s end, featuring tracks started back in 2005, in a recording session at Arcade Fire’s church studio. Sword & Sworcery is no stopgap release, however; it fits in perfectly with his discography, expands his craft and finds him once again at the centre of a creative movement in Canada’s largest city.

Michael Barclay, March 20, 2011

UNDER A TREE: This song dates back to that first record Jim had sent... in my imagination it was always a pre-dawn walk in the woods, a serene & beautiful place with a feeling of quiet majesty.

This ended up being the song around which we built our GDC 2010 playable prototype. We painted each room to match each phrase of the song. We would listen & re-listen and think 'this sounds like the top of a mountain, this sounds like a pristine lakeshore with rabbits & deer... this sounds like the feeling of entering a grove of immense trees... this sounds like arriving home, safe & warm, to a homestead'.

This process was a bit of a desperate gamble, and to get it done we had to chop up this lovely song Under a Tree into bits & pieces and then re-assemble the pieces in fmod, the music integration tool we used on the project. The result was a bit clunky but it seemed to really connect with the audience at GDC. We arrived at the final implementation of these loops very close to the end of the project - it's much cleaner now, but we think it packs a similar synesthetic punch, but really it's all about the quiet hazy moments in the second half of Under a Tree.

LONESTAR: This song has a catchy beat & a hummable melody with a 'we're going on an adventure' vibe - to us it conjured up images of a small party venturing off into the woods & up into mountains with the confidence that one feels at the start of a long hike. The paintings for this section were more or less matched to the phrases in the song, although in this case the song changed shape, expanded and grew as the project evolved & mutated.

DARK FLUTE: This song has a very beautiful, very dreamy vibe... it suggested a lazy hazy sunlit meadow haunted by an eerie darkness, a dimly remembered place rich with myth & other imaginings. In S:S&S EP we use a more background edition of this song to set the mood & fill these spaces, but on the record Jim has expanded this song into a soaring paen to fantasy & adventure.

THE CLOUD: Another song that predates the Sword & Sworcery project, The Cloud was an abandoned composition featuring a contribution by Owen Pallett, formerly known as Final Fantasy, who Jim had collaborated with on 2004's Now More Than Ever.

We had articulated our vision for the vibe of the boot-up sequence, how it would be this mystical non-space with a vibe that's neither-here-nor there in cloud-space, and Jim pulled this song out of his back pocket. Most of what you will hear in this song was unwritten.

THE BALLAD OF THE SPACE BABIES: This song is, in our estimation, the core of this whole Sword & Sworcery project. We knew going in what 'the sword' would be about - punchy, simple Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! style combat - and although this was a challenge to deliver on, the goal was at least pretty clear. With the 'sworcery' aspect, our goals were more diffuse.

We wanted to create situations where the player would stop, relax & listen, we wanted this to be a contemplative activity with a mystical musical score, but we were still blowing in the wind about how this would actually work. In the spring of 2010 we committed ourselves to the idea of 'space babies', bizarre, adorable and unsettling flying infant-like creatures with tiny insect wings that would echo the gourd-like fairies of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask and the forest spirits of Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke. We experimented with a few designs - in truth, these little dudes have been in our doodles for years - and eventually landed on something that felt just about right. We began to conceptualize the mechanics, with Capy's creative director & S:S&S EP co-designer Kris leading the charge, looking at the existing world art & conceiving of simple, discoverable musical interactions.

The next step was to loop Jim in & discuss these ideas... by this point we had started to find a bit of a groove as a collaborative team, and each of us could 'get' what the other was going for even if words failed. A day or two later Jim sent over a song & some sounds he had developed labelled 'The Ballad of the Space Babies'. It wasn't just a pretty song, it wasn't just the perfect score, in one stroke it seemed Jim had found the core of S:S&S EP and validated the whole project. He had found our 'Song of Sworcery'.

In S:S&S EP you'll hear this song & these sounds in a variety of arrangements and you'll have the agency to play along with it, but on the record Jim has delivered a composition that cannot fail to transport you to a world of myth & mystery.

LITTLE FURNACE: The very last song on Jim Guthrie's Sword & Sworcery LP - The Ballad of the Space Babies is 'Little Furnace', another composition that dates back to that initial record Jim passed along to us in in a package back in 2005. This song is surpassingly beautiful, it has always conjured up the dreamiest landscapes & stirred up the deepest of feelings. This song is heard during the Bright Moon in S:S&S EP, but it is also the song around which we constructed the epilogue to The Scythian's woeful errand.

////////////////////////////// JIM GUTHRIE DELIVERY SYSTEM

It is with great humility & immense happiness that we here at Superbrothers Inc. acknowledge the relative success of the launch of our first videogame-type-thing known as Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, a collaborative project with the videogame wizards at Capy & noted composer Jim Guthrie.

So perhaps now it is worth considering the essential goal of this laborious, costly, challenging project? Feel free to hop into the way-back machine and let's start at the start.

A personal message from the namesless/faceless staff at Superbrothers Inc.

Superbrothers Inc. is first & foremost a Jim Guthrie delivery system.

Superbrothers Inc. was created in 1953 in the city of Minsk, Belarus, with the idea of creating a videogame brand with style & soul that would find a home on Apple's mobile machinery. Years later in Toronto, Canada, we were listening to a fair bit of Royal City, I Am Robot & Proud, Caribou & of course Jim Guthrie's soulful solo work... all of these artists are absolutely top notch and they are all, incidentally, from south-east Ontario in Canada.

At the appointed time in early 2005 a package was sent to Jim Guthrie. At the time Jim was a distant rockstar but our sources indicated that he might be familiar with videogames - many of the backing tracks on his home-made debut solo record A Thousand Songs & his follow-up Morning Noon Night were made on a PSOne running MTV Music Generator.

Jim found the package, sent c/o of Three Gut Records, and he decided to reply with a package of his own. When it arrived at Superbrothers HQ, we found that Jim had sent us an album's worth of unreleased made-in-Playstation musical compositions.

Here at Superbrothers HQ we had been stumbling around trying to create videogame prototypes but we would always hit a wall, and with no background in programming we were unable to extricate ourselves. This was a time before 'indie videogames' was a 'thing', when there was no context for what we were trying to do, and we found ourselves running out of steam, staring at little stick figure 'salarymen' running around on a white background who refused to do as they were told. When Jim's record appeared in the mail, it changed everything. The songs had their own stories, they conjured up visuals and narratives for which our art direction laboratory had been diligently developing secret techniques.

One of Jim's songs in particular, The Children of the Clone, was created by recording a single guitar note & replicating it a million times over on the PSOne in order to construct a badass baroque cathedral of a musical composition, seemed to leap fully formed into life. We saw our little salarymen as they should have been in the prototypes - wheeling & dealing, dancing, mobbing & murdering - so we set to work on a pixel animation for the four and a half minute recording. It should be admitted that we are absolute amateurs as animators and we had no only a very limited experience as a film studio.

The end result was this clip, for which we're still immensely proud of, and so began our conversations with Jim Guthrie as a collaborator. What we're most proud of with this film is that Jim's song is the primary voice, the visuals and concept are only the delivery system.

In the summer of 2009, Capy saved the day. They wanted to help us create a videogame in this style, with Jim Guthrie's music as the core of the experience. Jim provided us with a few songs that seemed to fit the vague concept & aesthetic we had dreamed up, and we set about trying to communicate the moods, stories & ideas the songs suggested, filtered through our ideas & influences.