20th Anniversary: Arcane Addiction (2004-2011)

I almost forgot this, but on a sudden listening to some older songs I wrote, it hit me like a megaton of bricks.

April 4th, 2004. I had just recently done shrooms for the 2nd time in my life. I had just come off of being homeless for several months, staying in shelters at night, utilizing daytime programs for homeless youth, couch hopping, leaving what we’d call these days a “toxic relationship” and so forth.

And once the psilocybin wore off and a full night’s rest was achieved, I woke up with a surreal cerebral clarity. I had this happen just a couple months prior when I did shrooms for the first time ever, but somehow, this was a bit different.

I reached for the on button to an old PC with a Pentium III processor (perfect if you’re playing the original release of Diablo 2 locally or online). I booted up between FL Studio and Cakewalk, along with my Korg AX10G, Digitech GNX2 and Digitech BP200, as well as my Yamaha PSR-540. I virtually sat in my chair for a two week period doing nothing but jamming out ideas and often punching takes in order to save disk space and arrange ideas together that felt cohesive to me and sounded like what I wanted to do and what I wanted to hear.

Towards the end of all that recording when that clarity started to fizzle out, I had 8 full length instrumental demos and some lyrics written.

The name Arcane Addiction would come around after thinking not just about a name, but also a logo, an abbreviation, and finding something that felt defining of the experience.

This to me was a defining moment in my attempt at building a music career since the late 90’s when I heard things and became fascinated with synthesizers and inorganic sounds.

Here we are now. Almost 26 years since I started experimenting with audio in any form to make music, and I can celebrate 20 years of some of my best works of an era.

More so, I can celebrate that era in the way that they taught me a lot of things that inevitably led me to some opportunities in local bands and being in an internationally recognized band for a bit of time.

The most important part of this era was humbling myself in the sense that I still had a lot to learn despite what I had taught myself up to point.

Fragments of this era still live on today in most of the music I have done this past decade, and I feel like bringing back a large chunk of it again.

Takeaway from this if you read it: be proud of your accomplishments, even if they are not widely recognized. They were stepping stones for yourself, after all. They are the materials you built your own path out of, and they can also be the same materials others use to improve the same path in a cyclic nature.