Not What I Call Bonk Wave – Volume 003 – Thank you all!
I intend to use this blog to talk about Key 13 music, processes, history, influences, and how the Fediverse has had such a dramatic effect. And maybe I'll write a bit more about how this Volume 003 release came together, from my perspective – but today it's not about me, it's time to thank the cast of thousands that helped get the latest Bonk Knob Records release over the line.
Forty Artists!
First and foremost, forty individual artists poured their heart and soul into creating 48 tracks for this release, which was more than the total number of tracks from all the previous releases combined!
All of them gave their work for free – so, if you can, please follow the links to their own sites available on the track notes pages, and show them some support.
Artwork
I put out a call for someone to help with the artwork quite early on in the process, before we knew how many discs there would be. Thankfully several of the featured musicians answered the call, and then worked together to create the art you see today.
Traiken drew the main characters – the robot, chameleon, and Elizabethan Frog – first as rough line art, then gradually evolving into what you see on the final versions.
Desolation Park came up with a number of options for the lettering and typography, which the BonkBoard community voted on.
Ordos Mk.0 added several versions of the Bonk Wave Pig 'mask' which you can see in the robot's screen on Disc A, and in the background on Disc B – and has subsequently been used a lot in the launch party shows.
Track Notes
For the album track notes, fastachee, n3wjack and AmbientSpace collaborated on a shared document to make these happen – if you haven't read through them, please do, while listening – they really enhance the experience!
One of the usually thankless tasks is sorting through the artist links and putting together those track notes pages – and here we have to thank Refrigerator for sorting the fediverse links out, and the always-inspiring socool for the painstakingly boring task of creating the HTML pages.
Mastering
The biggest headache of all was how to master 48 tracks.
When I first put out the submission call, I had no idea if anyone would submit at all – I had visions of a 6-10 track release, with little fanfare. When Ordos Mk.0 put out the call for the previous remixes release, we'd asked submitters to send in unmastered tracks for the first time – and socool helpfully mastered them, as there were only 9 to start with, plus another 4 added in a later batch. So it felt OK to do the same for this release – and we'd sort out the mastering between us later – or, worst case, just pay someone to do a few for us.
However, when 48 tracks turned up, we had a problem – there was no way to afford paying someone else, and it's a huge task for one person to take on. I had a go myself, but it's not my core strength. Luckily Ordos Mk.0 stepped up and did the lion's share of the work, without which there would literally not have been a release – so huge, huge thanks deserved there.
Sequencing
With 48 tracks, the next issue was how to divide them up and what order to put them in – I did the initial division into the three discs, with a tentative order. Then, as the mastering proceeded, Ordos Mk.0 tweaked the sequencing to refine it further – especially for disc C.
A number of other folks helped out with listening, advice on the sequencing etc – specifically n3wjack, Default Media Transmitter and sknob.
Launch Parties
I think we would all agree that the live streamed launch parties were a fantastic success! So much positivity and love, what an amazing experience. But a lot of work goes into making these happen.
First up: thanks to Radio Free Fedi for hosting the first live stream.
Next: to AxWax for putting together the first set of visuals and getting us up and running.
When we came to the second party, RFF was in a less-than-optimal place having just started the shutdown process, so we decided to spin up our own server – AxWax had already got a test server from before, so between us we used the same template to spin up a new one, which just about survived the onslaught! Thanks to everyone from the BonkBoard who helped out testing the robustness of the server one weekday evening before the stream!
And of course, for the second two parties, the awesome James Hastings stepped in to do the visuals – with very different scenes between Disc B and Disc C, both fitting the music and the mood perfectly. It takes a lot of time to prepare and run these, so huge thanks to both AxWax and James for this.
I nearly forgot – both Traiken and Flear made some animated videos based off the cover art to use as part of the video stream for the launch party – Flear in particular managing to animate Traiken's robot really effectively!
Finally, thanks to owncast for providing such a great piece of software.
Everything else
Special thanks go to AxWax for putting up with my incessant chat messages while we were putting this whole thing together.
We wouldn't be here at all if Yoni Den hadn't started the whole Bonk Wave thing, so whichever space pathways they find themselves on now, we will always be in their debt.
Downloads
And finally, don't forget you can download and stream all three amazing releases, along with the previous volumes, completely for free from any of these places: