09/17/2022 - Update: "Path to Damnation" now on Spotify

I said from the beginning that I wouldn't write here often…and here I am, close to a month after my last entry. But I do have some news…

"Path to Damnation", the opening track to my latest album (and the one I'm most proud of) Radical Christianity, is now out on both Spotify and YouTube music. This is definitely a milestone that I'm proud of. Previously, under my old instrumental solo project by the name of "71011-NINJER", I released a good chunk of my albums on Spotify before decided to take them down after committing to doing something else, and the process to take them down was very painful, and there's still one album on there that, on my RouteNote profile, is completely absent, implying it's taken down, but it's there on Spotify, it'll be there forever, and there's nothing I can do about it.

Amuse.io is very much a breath of fresh air, because the option to take down releases is built-in, whereas I had to email the RouteNote staff to delete all my albums. The process to release my music (for literally free) was very straightforward. As a matter of fact, I have another little announcement to make: my entire fourth album, Radical Christianity, is coming to not only Spotify and YouTube music but also Deezer, Tidal, Pandora, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio. I'm very happy to be growing my platform and getting my music to places besides Bandcamp and BandLab.

In terms of music production, things are going well. As I'm living in a college dorm room, I obviously can't cut vocals. But I have the instrumentals of two albums all ready to go for when I return home for the holidays. In addition, I'm currently working on the instrumentals for a third album. I should definitely have a number of additional albums ready for vocals by the time I return home, but obviously I'm going to release them gradually instead of all at once. That's pretty much all I wanted to write about, thanks for reading.

08/21/2022 - Update: A Few Changes Going Forward

 Hello. I haven’t written in this blog for a while…I might as well update the people who are reading this (I’m not sure how many are, but you know who you are) as to what’s going on with me. The way I create, produce, and share my music is going to be real different going forward as a couple of days ago I, an incoming college freshman, moved into my dorm room. The walls are, according to our residence hall assistant, “thin as fucking paper”, so as such, that changes how I record and hear myself playing guitar. I’m also making some changes as to the distribution of my music, and I’m also doing things differently musically outside of Decimate Our Kind as well. I’m going to be writing about all of that here. 

First of all, I’m going to discuss how music distribution will change. For starters, I got a PayPal account set up. Yes, this does mean that on Bandcamp, I have started to charge for my music. I know this represents a feature previously available to you the listener being removed, but it is what it is. Literally every artist does this, so it seems. Besides, there will soon be a way for you to still listen to my music for free. Thanks to the power of amuse.io, I am going to start distributing my music onto Spotify and YouTube music. I’m going to start slow (so far I’m just gonna release the “Path to Damnation” song as a single) but I hope to grow the library from there. 

Which brings me to the second main thing - college. I am starting college. My current goal is to get into the college of music. I’m most likely going to be auditioning in January or February. The only thing they have for electric guitar is jazz, and funnily enough, they have no available jazz guitar teachers on campus, so I’m going to be spending a hell of a lot of time studying jazz guitar online and practicing plenty in order to have the best shot at getting into the college. Obviously I want to study music production while I’m here, and there’s also a whole bunch of music-related clubs, organizations, and extracurricular activities here that I want to get into as well, so I’m going to be very musically active here. 

With that being said, I will most likely be unable to record vocals here. Like I said, the walls are thin as fuck here and I have a roommate, so there goes my ability to comfortably record vox with my phone. What I will do is write and record and produce the instrumentals for the next couple of albums (and write all of the lyrics) while on campus, for none of it requires my voice, and when I go home for the holidays (which lasts about a month), I’ll do all the vocals for all the ready albums then. I think it’s the best way for me to stay productive during college while not disturbing anyone, as I have wired earbuds in order to quietly play while still getting the full metal sound for me to hear. 

Anyway, that’s about it. Thanks for reading and understanding. 

08/05/2022 - Update: “Radical Christianity” Out Now

The following piece of writing is outdated and as such it contains content that no longer applies and therefore cannot be considered accurate to current circumstances. 

Hey everyone. Just wanted to write a bit about how my fourth album “Radical Christianity” is out now on bandcamp, and per usual with my albums, it is completely free to download and play (I have no intention on making money with my music, at least for now). But nonetheless, this is definitely one of my proudest efforts yet, not just with Decimate Our Kind but with all my music in general (I have a couple of other projects besides DOK). This is definitely, in my opinion, the best thing I’ve created production-wise, and I also think it’s one of the first albums that I think really does achieve what I was trying to go for - a classic extreme thrash metal album. 

This album definitely took the most time for me to complete in terms of when I started working on it to when I completed it. Some of the songs on this album are, relatively speaking, quite old. The song I wrote first was the title track, back in autumn of 2021, right after my third album was released. The most recent song was “Path to Damnation”, which was started and completed this July (2022). This also marks the first time where I triple-tracked all the songs, most of which was done long after the songs were already written because I guess I never really thought about triple-tracking before up until very recently. And I apologize if this is information I already wrote about before. 

In terms of what’s next for me, I already have a couple of unreleased songs in the vault that I might put on the next album, and I already triple-tracked some of them (they’re pretty old too, so obviously the third guitar track was recorded much later after the first two were). I am also in two other bands (one’s metal, one’s rock, the metal one hasn’t released anything yet but we do have an EP coming out for the rock one. The band is “Empty Hallway” and the EP is “Rally of the Forsaken”) so I’m going to be doing stuff with them, and then of course there’s my other solo project (71011-NINJER) that I haven’t touched for a year. I’m also going to college in a few weeks (gonna take some music classes and audition for the college of music), so there’s a lot for me to look forward to.  But for now, I’m proud to present Decimate Our Kind’s latest and greatest, “Radical Christianity”!

07/29/2022 - Update: The (Completed) 4th Album

Hi!

I’m happy to say that I’m feeling much better, and my fourth Decimate Our Kind album is now completed. 

Firstly, I’m going to clarify/correct some things I mentioned in the previous post. 

I said that there was no grand concept in this album. That is now only partially true. Yes, there is a small concept to this album. There are four songs that tell an original story put together. A very small concept when compared to what most people picture in their heads when the phrase “concept album” happens to come up, yes, but still a concept nonetheless. In addition, the nine songs from the last post have now been cut down to eight, and as such the album is now just over 40 minutes long. After experimenting heavily with the last two albums, I wanted to go the more traditional route this time around. 

Regardless, I know every artist says this right before releasing a new album, but this is easily the effort I am most proud of so far. This album is, admittedly, a pretty been-there-done-that traditional thrash metal album, but with my own unique twist and style and flair steering the wheel, of course. It’s got fast, thrashy, shreddy and technical guitar parts, but there’s also some slow and heavy songs as well. There’s (admittedly poorly executed) death growls as well as (even more awkwardly performed) harsh spoken word as well (what, I have to get my music out there somehow).

I maintain that this is easily my best-produced/best-sounding album ever, and it represents my composing, songwriting, and guitar playing skills higher than they ever were before (though that should be logically obvious). As far as releasing the album goes, I’m currently without a working computer (I made the album using entirely myiPad and smartphone, as I have always done) so release of the full album will have to wait a bit. However, the instrumental versions of two songs from the album are already published on my BandLab page (https://www.bandlab.com/71011ninjer) if you’d like to get a preview. Thanks for everything, everyone!

07/27/2022 - Update: The 4th Album

The fourth Decimate Our Kind album is almost complete.

There will be nine songs on the album, and it will be almost 50 minutes in length. This isn't going to be a colossal conceptual overly-ambitious album like "Plagues and Commandments", or an overly condensed extreme package like "Decency is Dead". This album will be closest perhaps to my first album. It's more of a traditional extreme-adjacent thrash metal album, nothing particularly groundbreaking. This album will definitely, at least according to me, have by far the best production out of anything I've produced so far. This is the first time I've triple-tracked all the rhythm guitar parts, and after mastering all but three tracks, the songs definitely have a powerful and resonating punch with the drums and the guitar beats. I'm definitely quite proud of this one.

All that's left to do is I still need to record vocals for three songs and then arrange (because the DAW I use doesn't allow for BPM changes mid-project) and master those same songs.

However, I don't know when I'll get around to doing that. I've recently been sick with a cough and sore throat (thank hell it's not COVID, I have immunity and vaccines exist so yeah), and yesterday morning something rather shocking happened within my personal life, so I need to take more time for my physical and mental health. I'm going to be okay, but I need time.

But the album is almost finished. It should be releasing before the end of the summer.

Just wanted to update on this. Thanks for reading.

07/19/2022 - First Post: What to Expect

Hello. Nice to meet you. Words simply can't describe how glad and happy I am that you came across this brand new blog of mine, but I'll try to make them - I feel like, with each additional person that's stumbling across my creations, my artistic works and projects, I feel more and more like I'm contributing something creative and artistic to the world, and thus I feel more like myself and my dreams (of which I might not even fully understand myself), whatever they are, are coming truer and truer.

Anyway, enough of that.

I thought about something like this for quite a while. I wanted to have a specific and particular kind of outlet for expressing things such as the current status of my artistic projects, Decimate Our Kind or otherwise, as well as other statements I feel are necessary for me to make under the Decimate Our Kind profile name. Admittedly I am writing this more for the satisfaction for myself, as opposed to my fellow metalheads (I don't want to use the word "fans" or any equivalent like "followers" because I really don't like calling people who like my work my fans/followers, for that implies a hierarchical relationship between myself and them. We are equals, the people who like my work are obviously people who enjoy the arts, and as for myself, the creator of my works, I'm just another person who enjoys the arts. Nothing more, nothing less), but I do hope that you enjoy what you're reading and I welcome you into an additional section of my nerdy, metal world.

I'm not intending on fully committing to this project in any way. My primary focuses are, obviously, on my music (Decimate Our Kind, and the bands I'm in, more on that in the future) and my other writing projects (short stories, a novel I'm working on, multiple memoirs and nonfiction book-length projects, several personal journals, and of course poetry and lyrics). Don't expect me to write posts here all that often. That being said, I will definitely not refuse the opportunity to write here when I deem it necessary. After all, although IRL I'm very much an introverted, shy nerdy metalhead, when given a pen (figuratively speaking, technically "keyboard" is a more accurate term), I have a lot to say.

As briefly mentioned before, the stuff I will be writing and posting here includes but it not limited to: updates on the current status of my projects, mostly Decimate Our Kind projects but probably other stuff too, written commentaries on already completed DOK projects, and my statements/takes on topics that relate to music, the arts, literature, politics, religion, etc.

Hopefully you find my totally unprofessional and perhaps laid-back and lazy-minded blog posts worth reading.  Thanks very much for everything.