BLOG POSTS :3

HOW DID I EVEN GET HERE??

i've been playing music in one way or another since like 2014 which was when i got my first guitar and started taking "classes" (that were just the guitar teacher showing basic chords to a group of like 20 people; you can imagine how well those went) which i gave up on almost 3 years later because they were boring as shit since we were playing the same stuff over and over, i also just stopped playing entirely

then in the dark ages (2020) i started mucking about with that old classical guitar and at the same time i kinda developed a weird obcession with the doom 2016 ost so by the end of the year i got my fisrt electric guitar... a harley benton 7 string... yeah... i still dont know how i thought that was a good idea

thoughout 2021 i was just messing around and playing with friends and properly re-learning my way around the instrument and ocasionally coming up with somewhat decent riffs n stuff some of which would later become actual songs (i did get a regular guitar in the beggining of the year thankfully)

me in 2021 after being pressured into playing "something" at a gathering

in march 2022 i recorded my first ever track bi83 and in june and july i recorded return to nothing, pyromaniac and arson. i really don't like these early tracks, obviously the recordings themselves aren't great mostly because i barely understood my way around reaper but even the compositions just feel at best bland to me despite how many people tell me they like the songs...

also in july 2022 i played my first ever live show which went kinda okay given that i only had 4 songs written at the time and that i was playing by myself with a laptop playing the backing tracks. my second live show was in december of that year at a local band festival, then in february 2023 i played in a bar in lisbon and finally in april i played my last solo show at a local venue...

all of these shows shared the same problems: not enough material and playing alone with a laptop. tho by the time i played the last show i had a bit more music to play, but the laptop thing was still just as miserable... it just sucks so much to want to do something intersting with your music or just something different at all but being just completely unable to because you have to work within the unchangable constraints of the backing track. not to mention how embarrasing it feels to try to be taken seriously as an artist while all of your shows have the vibe of a high school talent show

playing my very first show at beja pride 2022

anyways in late 2022 (shortly after the band festival) a friend of mine proposed we start a band with me and him on guitars, tho we still needed a bassist and a drummer. funnily enough that night he came with a friend his who was jokingly brought on board as a "cheerleader", 3 months later they bought a bass :P we also managed to get a drummer in april i think? and with that supercollider was officially in business x3

we were planning on having our debut concert be in the 2023 band festival (which happened in september that year) so with like just 3 months to rehearse we got to work on the music i'd written up until then. this is when shit started to hit the fan because while our bassist (who in the meantime had become my partner :3 wab u vi <3) was handling themselves pretty damn well, our guitarist was... not great, struggling a lot to keep himself in time with the music...

we did still play the band festival anyways, which went about as well as it could with only 3/4 of the band playing in time. at least we still managed to get invited to play at the same venue i played in the beggining of the year, but the guitarrist had to go...

in mid january 2024 we now had a keyboardist instead of guitarrist and about 2 weeks to rehearse until the show on the 25th. we only did 3 rehearsals before te show but they all went smoothly and so did the show apart from me fucking up a couple times :P, right after we got invited to play in a metal festival in june ^w^

nada fest was definitely our best performance so far, for once we were pretty much in perfect sync and even tho we only got 30 minutes to play, it was a great 30 minutes. since then we were invited to play 2 more shows both set to happen in september but ended up having to decline since our drummer wasnt available :/

me at nada fest 2024

looking back its clear that i've def done a signifcant amount of stuff since at least 2022 but i just can't bring myself to like pretty much any of it...
i already mentioned all my 2022 works but even a higher plane of reality, which released in december 2023 just kinda makes me cringe. tho im happy with the general vibe of the songs i just cant help but feel like they could have been so much better: higher plane part 1 should have been like twice as long; shores of oblivion needed to be way longer in the big part at the end; higher plane part 2 should've been recorded with more time and care and the song istelf shouldn't feel like its desperatly trying to get itself over with; the scream on verge of insanity should be better, the drums shouldn't sound so tight, the main part should be longer (i'm starting to notice a pattern here x3). but the point is: i find it really hard to look at my work past its flaws.

that is really the one thing that has remained unchanged over the years... it kinda feels like it doesn't really matter how much effort i put into my work, or even if i like it while im in the process of making it (which is usually the case), i'm always doomed to look back at it and at best dislike it a bit and often outright hate it. tbh the only reason i still keep any of it up is because some people still tell me they like it, and for "archival purposes" ig, because i'm not sure i'd be happy if it was just gone forever, despite how shit it is...

tho there's something that gives me a bit of hope. since the beggining of the year i've written 2 pieces that i'm genuinely happy with, even after sitting on them for more than half a year, both of which i've played live with the band. the earlier one is called total eclipse of the sun [1] (just a working title :P) which, since first coming up with it in like the middle of december, i still really love. the second one is the great nebula in orion[2] (also a working title), that one is still a wip but what i already have is i think really good and definitely the best thing i've ever written. tho since neither of these are recorded and released(and therefore finished x3) i'm not getting my hopes up too much :3

footnotes

1. this title is a reference to a drawing by Trouvelot with the same name

2. this title is also a reference to a drawing by Trouvelot with the same name x3