I made a poop app once. It did nothing. It was beautiful. I made a game too, some kind of thing where you press a button and a number goes up and you feel good for exactly three seconds before the existential dread sets back in. I made short movies or trailers call them what you want but it was fun and enjoyable and now somehow, against all odds, and against the better judgment of everyone involved I have made an album.
Here is the Bandcamp link: https://d-avethebombastic.bandcamp.com/album/-
How It Started
The initial concept was simple: me and my producer friend Kamlak Bmbo were going to make a communist revolutionary album. Highly provocative. Politically charged. The kind of thing that gets you put on a list somewhere. I was deep into Billy Woods at the time and that man’s ability to pack a century of colonial violence into a single 16-bar verse is unmatched and I wanted to make something that carried that same weight. Something that actually said something about the state of Ethiopia, about the government, about the slow rot of institutions that were supposed to serve the people.
I was on Arch Linux at the time because of course I was. I am the kind of person who uses Arch. I use Arch BTW. I have strong opinions about package managers. I will tell you about them unsolicited. So naturally, finding a DAW that worked on Linux became the first battle of the war.
I started with LMMS (lmms.io). It was fine. Functional. Got the job done in the way a rusty bicycle gets you to the grocery store. Then I moved to Zrythm (zrythm.org) which felt promising, modern, like someone actually cared about the UX. Then onto Ardour (ardour.org), the Linux DAW granddaddy. Professional. Powerful. Also felt like operating a nuclear reactor from a terminal. And running alongside all of this, as a secret parallel operation, I had Reaper (reaper.fm) running on the side, main because I was comfortable in it and have done some edits with it previously also just in case any of the others decided to crash at a critical moment which they did. Frequently.
I was trying to sample. Trying to make beats. Trying to record. Jumping between four different DAWs like a man trying to cook a four-course meal on four different stoves at the same time. It was chaotic. It was frustrating. It was also, in retrospect, incredibly funny and very enjoyable too much dopamine rushing.
The Collaboration
Kamlak and I started cooking in Discord. Dropping snippets in the chat. Hoping on calls every now and then to talk through ideas. Then we discovered Untitled.stream (untitled.stream) which was a game changer. It was built for exactly what we needed: real-time collaborative music making without the latency nightmare. We could hear what the other was doing as they were doing it. No more “send me the file, I’ll listen and get back to you in 6 hours.” It was instant. It was alive.
We spent about four months getting to a final draft. The songs were political. Angry. Critiquing the government, the state of the country, the feeling of watching something you love get slowly mismanaged into the ground. It was the album we wanted to make.
The Breather
Then we took a break. Three months. Stepped away. Let the dust settle.
And when we came back and listened to everything with fresh ears… we had two realizations:
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This was too politically charged. Like, genuinely dangerous. We cannot afford to bail ourselves out of trouble. We are not rapper-rich. We are not even rapper-middle-class. If the wrong person heard the wrong track at the wrong time, we would be having a very uncomfortable conversation with people who do not laugh at jokes about the ruling class.
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Listening to yourself after the hype and dopamine has worn off is the most cringiest thing of all. You know that feeling when you record a voice note and think it sounds fire, then listen back the next morning and want to delete your entire existence? Multiply that by 7 tracks and a few months of buildup. The cringe is astronomical.
The Pivot
So we hopped on a call a week before release. Made some music. The night before release, made more music. And something shifted.
During those three months, I had moved to Windows not by choice, but because work demanded it. And being on Windows meant I could finally use Ableton (ableton.com). The real deal. The industry standard. The software that every producer I respect uses. The golden child. The one to take on the throne.
Obviously it was pirated.
But goddamn. The workflow. The warping. The session view. The way everything just clicked. I understood immediately why people pay for this. I also understood immediately that I was not going to be one of those people. And that if Kamlak was not there I would not make any fucking progress.
The album went from “communist revolutionary manifesto” to a bunch of noises. And I mean that affectionately. It is no longer the album we set out to make, and that is fine. It is something else now. It is a document of a process. A snapshot of two friends messing around with samples and synths and inside jokes and late-night inspiration strikes.
What I Learned
I learned more about music production from Kamlak than I could have from any tutorial. He has this way of hearing a sample and knowing instantly where the good part is, where to cut, what to layer over it. I learned about compression. About EQ. About the difference between “loud” and “good.” I learned that sometimes the best track on an album is the one you made in 20 minutes at 2 AM because you were too wired to sleep.
And I learned that making something anything with someone else is a fundamentally different experience from making it alone. The energy bounces. The ideas ricochet. You push each other, challenge each other, show each other things you would never have found on your own.
What’s Next
PNGMAFIA is in the unreleased tracks. Just kidding. (Mostly.) But there might be more to come sooner or later. The itch has been scratched, but the scratch is already healing and I can feel a new one forming.
One thing is off the bucket list. You only live once and I do not believe in the “YOLO” that gets you into trouble. I believe in the YOLO that gets you to try. To make. To fail gloriously and succeed accidentally.
So here it is. 21 tracks of noise, revolution, cringe, and love and leaked porn sampled.
I am proud of it. I think.