Beforus (album)

*Beforus* is an 82 track, unofficial (fan-made) Homestuck album themed around the pre-Scratch (Beforan) trolls and their story in Homestuck. The album was created by the Beforus album team, lead by Blackhole/NTP, which later developed into the Team Virgo group which went on to create *Bee-forus: Seatbelt Safebee*, and founded the *Rubric of the Guardians* project prior to the group later being absorbed into the consolidated Unofficial MSPA Fans group.

The album is split into three discs, each led by its own bookend track. Disc 1 contains character themes for all 12 Beforan trolls; Disc 2 is a chronological soundtrack for the story of the Beforan trolls, their Sgrub session, and their time in the dreambubbles; Disc 3 contains additional bonus tracks on top of this main story.

The album was released on April 10, 2016, with a celebratory release livestream, although the Bandcamp mirror and download links were not finalized and put online until two days later on April 12. At the time of its release, *Beforus* was the longest Homestuck album in existence with 82 tracks. The release includes a complete commentary and lyric booklet with information on each track, as well as a compilation of track art for the album, one per track which, including the cover art, equals 83 art pieces in total.

A humorous followup album from Team Virgo, Bee-forus: Seatbelt Safebee, billed as "Disc 4" DLC for Beforus, was released four days later.

## Background

The *Beforus* album project was created on February 24th 2015 on the now-defunct MSPA Forums by Blackhole/NTP, in response to the declining output of the official Homestuck music team and a desire to fill "gaps" in the Homestuck music canon - to create albums for major parts of the Homestuck canon that were not covered by the official music canon. Whilst the pre-Scratch trolls did have a few tracks in the comic, that played during the "Openbound" game segment, these were very few in number and were never officially released by the music team. The *Beforus* album was conceived to address this gap, as well as providing an opportunity to flesh out the fan mythos around the characters, and provide a showcase of talent in the Homestuck fan music community. An official project tumblr (the now defunct Team Virgo tumblr page) was created to promote the project to the fan community.

Initially the project had low momentum and low numbers of contributors due to lack of exposure, which remained the case for several months during the project's initial development. Later on however, the project was able to expand due to increased attention when promotional posts on tumblr were reblogged by a number of well known Homestuck fan artists. This allowed the *Beforus* team to recruit a large number of musicians and visual artists and helped push the track count up to its eventual number.

The *Beforus* project was among the first of a series of fan album projects and teams that were formed in response to declining official music team output on the Homestuck Bandcamp page. *Beforus* itself went on to spawn spin-off projects such as *Seatbelt Safebee* and lead to the formation of the short-lived Team Virgo, which created the Rubric of the Guardians project (currently under development by the Unofficial MSPA Fans group). It also inspired the creation of the similar Ancestral album, intended as a sister album for *Beforus*.

## Release

The *Beforus* album was released on April 10th 2016, the seventh anniversary of the Homestuck Beta, and was timed to release before the end of Homestuck on April 13th three days later. The bandcamp release and download links were not finalized until the 12th, but were still online prior to the release of Homestuck's final act. This makes *Beforus* the last Homestuck fan album to be released within Homestuck's lifespan, if the Homestuck credit sequence is not included as part of the comic proper. Otherwise, it is the second to last Homestuck album released within this same period (with the official album Act 7 being released to coincide with Homestuck's final animation).

The initial release of *Beforus* was celebrated with a several hours-long livestream of the complete album, its track art, and commentary, hosted by Blackhole/NTP, and followed by an open hour-long Q&A session with various members of the Beforus album team. This livestream's chat was the source of the Cronus seatbelt safety meme, in response to the artwork of the track Land of Cruisin and Bruisin, in which the character Cronus is depicted driving a car without wearing a seatbelt. Additionally, at various times during the livestream, images of bees were shown for humorous effect. These two jokes were later combined and resulted in the creation of the humorous *Bee-forus: Seatbelt Safebee* DLC album four days later by the initial members of Team Virgo, composed of *Beforus* team members who had been present in the Q&A chat group on Skype.

## Download links

The album is hosted on the unofficialmspafans bandcamp. It also has its own page on the Skaia.net Homestuck fan music index.

The album download links are as follows:

* Torrent
	+ Magnet link
* Album and commentary booklet download:
	+ Link 1
	+ Link 2 (mirror)
* DLC
	+ Art for the project (track art)
	+ ♭ Disc 4 ♭ - Seatbelt Safebee
	+ Art of Seatbelt Safebee

For the Bee-forus: Seatbelt Safebee download links, see its wiki page.

## Track list

Here listed are the 82 tracks on Beforus, along with their artists and cover art visual artists, and other songs that are referenced/quoted in the tracks (e.g. the latter contains a leitmotif from the former). Click on the track names for the individual page for each track to see the track artwork, songs referenced, and read the track commentary from the Beforus commentary booklet.

## Trivia

* "East Beforan Funk" by Blackhole (Not-Terezi-Pyrope) and The D is a parody of "Uptown Funk" by Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars.
* "Rex Duodecim Daemonia X (ReDuX)" is a song similar in concept to *AlterniaBound*'s "Rex Duodecim Angelus", and features motifs from tracks 2-13 alongside the Black King Theme to represent a hypothetical battle between the alpha trolls and their Black King (despite never occurring in *Homestuck* canon).