Bowling Green Miscreants

**Bowling Green Miscreants** (BGM for short) is Nicolas Sequeira's 3rd album, produced in collaboration with Conqoor. The album debuted on August 15, 2021, along with a corresponding 1-hour film. Bowling Green Miscreants takes a more electronic/experimental approach than either of Sequeira's previous albums.

## Composition

Bowling Green Miscreants was composed using a folder of unused instrumentals by Conqoor. Most tracks (with the exception of "Car Insurance," "Out Of Whack," and "You Can Go Wild") use instrumentals produced entirely by Conqoor. Many of the songs on BGM follow a strict formula, with vocals by Nicolas in the beginning, followed by vocals from Conqoor in the latter portion. Unlike Sequeira's debut album, "Did You Eat Your Vegetables Today?" where Conqoor was credited only as a producer, here Conqoor is given equal prominence to Sequeira.

Bowling Green Miscreants displays Conqoor's full range as an electronic producer, from the slow and existential love ballad of "One Day She'll See Me Again" to the hauntological wistfulness of "Bowling Green Miscreants" to the catchy and upbeat "A Track." Many of Conqoor's vocals are distorted and given reverb, amplifying the uncanny quality of his contributions to the piece.

The album's description describes it as "100% electronic ear candy that will have you scratching your head at every opportunity." Nic has described it as "Aphex Twin on Coke." Comparisons between Aphex Twin and Conqoor have been drawn. The album and track #2 take inspiration from Kellyanne Conway's fictitious "Bowling Green Massacre," and her quote is sampled in the titular track #2. The album was originally slated to be titled "Bowling Green Massacre" but Sequeira chose to alter the name after finding out that there were already a lot of songs called Bowling Green Massacre.

The album, much like "Rules For Thee But Not For Me," samples old films and scores from the 1940s to the 1960s, particularly on the Sequeira-produced song "Out Of Whack," which makes prominent use of a line from Henry Fonda's *12 Angry Men*.

## Cover Artwork

The cover of Bowling Green Miscreants depicts Sequeira standing outside with a measuring tape dangling from his mouth, wearing a foil blindfold. This foil blindfold appears in the corresponding music video for "yaman" and appeared previously during the sketch "A Millennial And A Zoomer Ask Questions." The solid blue sky behind Sequeira is reminiscent of several music videos- Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun," the B-52's "Love Shack" and Peter Gabriel's "Digging In The Dirt." The yellow, artificial computer font used evokes the genres which influence BGM- 90s electronic and early 2000s pop-punk.

The enigmatic object on the upper left of the cover is the back of the wooden chair Sequeira used to stabilize the camera.

## Corresponding Music Videos

BGM was released alongside 12 music videos, which together form a 1-hour film. Sequeira has stated that the album is on the same scale as Pink Floyd's The Wall, a concept album loosely tied by a central theme. The film opens with Sequeira snapping his fingers and teleporting into an alley, and at the end he teleports back into the same alley and walks off-camera. Each music video features a visual gimmick, keeping in line with Sequeira's expertise in practical effects and reluctance to overuse green screens or CGI. The 12 music videos are:

* **Connect**: Sequeira walks back and forth with black paper taped to the lens of his camera in various patterns, and a wide range of unlit/horizontal shots.
* **Bowling Green Miscreants**: Bizarre out-of-context advertisements from the 1990s are scanned in and displayed in rapid succession.
* **Car Insurance**: Ethereal shots of cars driving along 14th Avenue at night, interspersed with ground level shots taken on Colorado Boulevard and Colfax.
* **Dreamlike**: Long-exposure shots of 14th Avenue and Sequeira are subjected to a number of photo filters which correspond with the beats of the song.
* **The A Track**: Sequeira appears as the host of a show entitled "Conspiracy Theory Delirium," where he makes use of such props as garden shears, a shoe, and a Frisbee. Also features several shots of model trains, in keeping with the song's subject of public transportation.
* **Take Three**: Sequeira displays his domino skills with time-lapse photos of dominoes being stacked, as well as footage of a large domino spiral and domino tower.
* **Out Of Whack**: Time-lapse taken during a complete circuit of Washington Park on the Nicolas Comics Delivery Tricycle.
* **One Day She'll See Me Again**: Segment animated in the Nicolas Comics house style, with some color changes near the end.
* **Sick Beat**: Features a spinning mobile of several paper shapes. The lighting in this portion was achieved by covering a lamp with red and green fabrics.
* **You Can Go Wild**: Sequeira, in costume as his character The Tech Utopian, walks around several prominent Colfax landmarks, including Tiger Kim's Taekwondo Academy and Aladdin Liquors.
* **Yaman**: Sequeira is seen in a small space coated in aluminum foil with an egg whisk, some drinking straws, and some gumballs. The end of this segment features the camera being compressed in a massive ball of foil.
* **Dreamlike: Reprise**: More long-exposure shots, albeit in quicker succession and with less taken along 14th Avenue.
* **Alabama Boy Remix**: Sequeira creates a "shadow puppet" effect on a large sheet hung from the ceiling with duct tape to emphasize the claustrophobic relationship between the titular Alabama Boy and his accuser.

Sequeira has stated that the most difficult music video to film was the one for Yaman, which involved buying 4 rolls of aluminum foil and taping them to the walls of his closet. In addition to the heavy cost and labor-intensive set design, the temperatures in the small metal-lined area approached 105 degrees.

The visuals of the album rely heavily on aluminum foil, from the foil blindfold Sequeira wears in the "Yaman" music video to a foil hat he wears during the "A Track" segment (almost certainly a reference to an incident during which one of Nic's haters accused him of being a conspiracy theorist due to him wearing a foil hat in one of his reviews as a joke.)

## Controversy

The album was popularized on the imageboard 4Chan after a tweet, allegedly from music critic Anthony Fantano, was posted on 4Chan's /mu/ board. This tweet, which sung the praises of Rules For Thee But Not For Me over Bowling Green Miscreants, was picked apart by the 4Chan community, who stated that Bowling Green Miscreants was "such high quality that it completely one-ups every album Sequeira has put out up to this point." The legitimacy of Fantano's tweet has also been called into question, given that nobody can find it on Fantano's Twitter. Sequeira has stated that if this tweet is real, it could be the prelude to a dedicated review of BGM on Fantano's end, however as of writing the tweet's validity has not been confirmed.

## Merchandise

A line of Bowling Green Miscreants-themed merchandise, including a ceramic mug and stickers, was created by Conqoor shortly after the album's release. This merchandise is significant as it marks the first Sequeira-related merchandise available through something besides the mail.