Gymkata - Camelot's Theme (gymkata_camelots_theme.s3m)

 Composed in the first few months of 1997, completed in March.

In the first few months of 1997, I transitioned away from the local BBS scene and sought a wider audience for my music. My days of releasing music on R-Squared were effectively over, and I ceased uploading to the mod downloads section of the Microsoft Network as well.

Now, while the order I completed songs in for this next phase is actually pretty clear to me, the order I released them in isn't. This is because my first five songs of 1997, including this one, all were published on the same day on the Hornet Archive.

This song, Gymkata, was likely the first one I was working on in 1997. Unlike most of my songs, this one was commissioned: My friend The Pro was working on a project in class where he and his group were creating some kind of utopia, and they were going to present it. They wanted me to make a song for their utopia project, and I obliged. This had some limitations, as they needed it to be in S3M format for some reason. I preferred IT format at this point, but I went with it and did this song in S3M format. Because we were obsessed with Monty Python and the Holy Grail, they named their utopia “Camelot.” This incidentally was also the name of the kingdom The Pro and I ruled in a door game called Exitilus.

So, I went to work making a pleasant, atmospheric, and airy sound that brought to mind a utopia. I brought in some soft pad chord samples and came up with a chord sequence. You may recognize another pad in the intro from the beginning of Purple Motion’s When the Heavens Fall (the similarities end there - unlike many of my songs around this period, this song is more of an original work and does not imitate another song). For percussion, I did a mix of manual drum sequences with individual samples, and threw in a beat loop for flavor.

Then there’s the audio clip. For some reason, I used a clip from a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode of Joel Hodgson saying “Gymkata!” as the main vocal hook to the song. I don’t remember why I did it. Because of this, my friends ended up renaming their utopia to Gymkata. I don’t think they were aware that Gymkata is the name of a cheesy martial arts film from the mid-1980’s.

My friends liked the song. In fact, I remember one of them occasionally referencing it and saying “Gymkata!” in conversations. Personally, I think it puts on the “utopian” air a little bit too thick, to the point where you could better use this song as an ironic juxtaposition to describe an overbearing dystopia.

This wasn’t my last commissioned song but it might be the only one that I actually released. I also did a song for a friend’s project in his AP American literature class, on the book Their Eyes Were Watching God. My song just had the same title, and since I hadn’t read the book it didn’t really match up with the book’s tone at all. I do recall one section quoted Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody #2 for some reason. That song is lost forever unless my friend somehow still has a copy of it. Years later, in 2002, another friend commissioned a version of In the Hall of the Mountain King, which I still have and may even release someday.

As I mentioned in the comments, I decided to release this song for Shattered Fixtures. I’ll have more to say about them when I write about Panoramic. I probably assumed I would release this song for Quasar when I started it, but when I finished, I was a member of Shattered Fixtures, so this is technically the first song I completed for them.

On the whole, it’s not a bad song by my standards. The percussion gets a bit too loud near the end, but otherwise the song holds up pretty well compared to many of its contemporaries of mine.
- arcturus