This album is the culmination of 12 and a half years of playing guitar and being heavily involved in music, which is where the title 'Duodecennial' comes from. These 8 tracks have been written over that timeframe, with some dating back to high school days and some written and/or updated this past year. As a result of that, there are lots of different sounds and influences, such as classic metalcore, djenty riffs, prog rock, atmospheric sections, heavier sections, etc.

The album includes the updated, album-versions of ‘Time’ and ‘Dusk’, originally released last year, as well as entirely re-recorded versions of ‘Memories’ and ‘Peaks & Troughs’, originally released back in 2017 when I really had no idea what I was doing when it came to recording (not that I’m a pro now).

Huge thanks and shoutout to Leah Skiles for providing the artwork photos, the Bintu-fam (Annamarie Nyirady, David McFarlin, Volkan Bakirdan, and Daniel Vieth) for their contributions and suggestions, and my good friends CJ and Emily for their endless support.



Song Descriptions:
Time – I became super fascinated and interested in the concept of time sometime in late high school and/or early college, when I was really figuring out my beliefs. Time is constant and unyielding, yet entirely conceptualized by humans in an attempt to understand it. Originally I had these two tracks subtitled as ‘Nonexistent’ and ‘Constant’ to show that it basically doesn’t exist without humans but at the same time it’s constantly moving forward and impossible to avoid. Musically, this just started as your typical djent intro track, but then I decided to combine it with a heavy song I was working on and it happened to end up being the heaviest one on the record. I wasn’t sure how to end ‘Time II’ and then realized that bringing back the same rhythm with the same clean chords from ‘Time’ would work perfectly and tie the two parts together. Main influences: Intervals, Animals as Leaders, ERRA, After the Burial, techy deathcore

Resource – This continues the concept of time. Originally this song was called ‘Time as a Resource’, but I shortened it because I already had two tracks with the word "time" in the title. That phrase is from one of my favorite movies, Interstellar, where due to time dilation, time moves differently for the protagonists and they must consider it a resource. This is such an insane concept and it made me completely change how I thought about time. Musically, this song started out being directly influenced by old chon – using a major 7th chord to start the song seemed very chon-ish to me at the time – but it ended up being way more influenced by Intervals

Dawn – This is the first song I ever wrote, hence the title. I wrote this in high school when I was in a metalcore band that focused on breakdowns, and I really wanted to write a song that focused more on melody and chord progression and not on being super heavy (granted, one breakdown-ish section made it in). I also wrote this around the same time I was getting into Between the Buried and Me, and I was absolutely blown away by their versatility and wanted to do the same, which is why there’s a couple of clean sections. The bare bones of this track have been written for years, and just recently I updated it with some different leads and layers. There’s one tiny musical foreshadowing of ‘Dusk’ that ties these two songs together. Main influences: BTBAM, August Burns Red, classic metalcore riffage

Syndrome – this is such a weird song. The title comes from Imposter Syndrome, something that myself and many, many musicians and artists suffer from. Basically it means that you feel as if you’re an imposter in your creative or professional field, and that you’re not as good as everyone else doing what you’re doing. I wanted a softer song on the record near the middle that could act as a break or interlude, and to show my prog rock influences. I don’t remember how I wrote this or where most of the riffs came from, but I think I originally wrote it as an entirely acoustic song. A good portion of the song is in 5/4 and switches back and forth between that and 4/4 (bc prog amirite?). Main influences: chon, Covet, some folk/country (I don’t listen to either tho??)

Memories – I originally wrote this song for my college band Binturong, and as such it sounds sort of similar to the other songs we were playing back then, all of which were written by David McFarlin, so therefore he was a major influence for this track. I have no idea where the title came from, it might’ve come from the lyrics that Annamarie and David wrote, but I’m not sure. Regardless, I’ve sort of retconned the title as a reflection and look-back at that time in my life, when I had the greatest time playing in a band with such good people and which meant so much to me. It’s crazy how that feels like just yesterday but also so much has happened since then. We’re all just memories in other peoples’ heads. Main influences: Veil of Maya, Intervals, August Burns Red, TesseracT

More Peaks, Less Troughs – this is the updated version of ‘Peaks & Troughs’, and I decided to rename it because there are enough musical differences (the largest being a different key) to justify it being considered a new song. The title is two-fold in meaning. First, I was in grad school at the time of writing this and constantly looked at peaks and troughs of climate data relating to past and present climate change and how they compare and contrast. In particular, I’m referencing the interglacial-glacial cycles that show how we should be going into a glacial period, but anthropogenic influences have extended the current interglacial period and raised CO2 levels higher than humans have ever experienced before. Second, the peaks and troughs of depression/anxiety are endless. The name change to ‘More Peaks, Less Troughs’ is a reflection of my slow success in beating it, as I’ve had more highs than lows in the past couple years or so (covid aside). Musically, this song is not as deep as the title meaning lol. It started as a simple, bouncy, djenty riff and developed into a full song, as most songs do, and then I added on a heavier intro and an even heavier outro to give it some more variety. Main influences: David Maxim Micić, The Contortionist, Currents

Dusk – this one is sort of the opposite of the previous song, not much meaning to the title but musically it means so much more to me. ‘Dawn’ was the first song I wrote, and this is the most recent one I’ve written for this album, hence ‘Dusk’. It also seems an appropriate title to end an album on, and musically I think it works well as the final song too. This song follows the verse-chorus-verse-chorus-interlude-big epic outro structure that I like to use (guilty of that on more than a few songs here), with some curveballs thrown in there. The intro is the only part in 5/4, but I bring back the lead from that intro into a 4/4 verse section after the first chorus, so the lead guitar is in 5/4 while everything else is in 4/4, which sounds a little weird/unnatural but I like it. The big epic ending sort of just happened, I hadn’t written it yet when I started recording the rest of the song and it just came to me for some reason and it felt big enough to make this the final piece of music heard on the record. As mentioned before, there’s a very small musical connection to ‘Dawn’ during this ending section. Main influences: ABR, BTBAM, The Contortionist