Download 3 New Songs, Watch Lyric Video of New Song + Upcoming Album Title Announced for K432.
Updates + Important Message from Jeff, July 2024
“we don't need to rot ourselves away in misery”
How are you doing? Hope everything is going pretty well. Thank you for taking a moment to read this month’s newsletter. We’ve passed the first half of 2024 now, and I have some new updates on K432, plus an important message to share. Please read until the very end of this newsletter.
Watch the Lyric Video of K432 - Rotting Away
K432, Kekal’s sub-unit dedicated to acoustic guitar music, is moving forward steadily. I don’t want to do this project in a hurry because there’s no deadline to meet. So far as I’m typing this message, the project’s first 3 songs have already been recorded, mixed and mastered. The 3rd song is called “K432 - Rotting Away” and it is an acoustic guitar re-interpretation of the very early Kekal song called “Rotting Youth”, which was originally written in 1995, first demoed in January 1996, and appears officially as the opening track of 1998 debut album “Beyond The Glimpse of Dreams”. “Rotting Youth” is considered as one of Kekal’s early classics that helped the band to establish itself and be recognized among extreme metal fans around the world, and multiple bands have also performed covers of that song live. The main reason was probably because the song has its unique yet fun factors with structure that’s relatively easy to play. As a combination of intense groove and build-up/breakdown interplay, plus added catchy riffs and vocal phrases, it became one of the highlights of early Kekal. Although “Rotting Youth” was initially written with the extreme metal structure in mind, the foundation of the song is actually based on blues-rock with its typical 6/8 time-signature. It can be re-interpreted and re-arranged with acoustic-guitar and clean singing quite easily without having to alter even the base chords of the song itself. This song was one of the first to be picked for K432, simply because I still can enjoy it, even the original version. Without changing the actual meaning of the lyrics which is about recognizing and overcoming deceptions that always try to keep us in darkness/ignorance, but however they have been updated to be more relevant and ‘mature’ (that can relate to this 50-year old man instead of a 20-year old agitated metalhead this 50-year old man once was), so as you can see, the title has also been updated to “Rotting Away”. With that being said, I’ve made the lyric video for the song and you can watch it on YouTube. What do you think about this new interpretation of the old Kekal song done in acoustic guitar? Please leave some comments there and don’t forget to hit the like button if you happen to enjoy this version of the song.
Let’s watch the Lyric Video below! Feel free to share around. Sharing is caring.
Download First Songs from “K432 - Revisitation” album!
I’m also here to announce the project’s album title: K432 - Revisitation. The album is still updating with more songs to be added later on, and it may take a while until everything is all done. So for now, it’s not considered as a finished/released album just yet. But as promised, you can now download the first few songs from this not-yet-finished album on Bandcamp. Why? Because I feel this approach would help you to get used to the songs in a more intimate way, rather than having to download the entire album at once upon the release date. Also, this way you can have an option to donate some $ and contribute some form of positive energy that’s needed for me in completing the rest of the material. However, you also have an option to download these songs using free download codes given away here. See the set of images below. A little donation is recommended ($1 or $2 is good) because it definitely helps Kekal to keep going and be able to pay its ongoing operational and promotional expenses. There will be 2 more updates coming to make this album complete, the last one upon the release date of the album with 8 or 9 tracks total.
K432 - Revisitation track listing (so far):
K432 - Inward Journey [music video]
K432 - Born Anew [music video]
K432 - Rotting Away [lyric video]
K432 - Default
to 8. (or 9.) to be announced
See linked button below to download (price is set as low as $1 for donation purposes). Thank You in advance!
If you ever wonder why the album is called Revisitation, it is because all the songs are not completely new. They are existing Kekal songs in which I have a good relationship with, meaning songs that I still can relate to until these days. I wanted to revisit these songs with a new approach utilizing acoustic guitar, clean melodic singing, and new arrangements that can support me in the current stage of my life journey. Although you may find the music as straight-forward and even pop-oriented compared to what Kekal has done, this is never an attempt to produce songs that can appeal to a broader audience with a mindset that they may become hits at all. Absolutely not! Speaking of hits, I still have bruises and wounds from being hit by mental and emotional traumas, and currently in the process of healing. Hopefully, working on this K432 project will help me to get through the healing process more effectively. I always believe that music can become a powerful tool for healing.
Humanity is at the Crossroads of Destiny
To close this month’s e-Newsletter, let me share another message here that I feel to be very important. Within the past 3 years, the utilization of AI has been speeding up like crazy, up to the point of being unhinged or uncontrolled. The first victims are now those who work in the creative fields (including yours truly), because many aspects of creative works can now be done by AI. I’ve observed how AI started to learn from millions of songs submitted to streaming services in order to be able to compose songs, exactly the same way why industry-leading corporate software manufacturers like Adobe switched their software to subscription-based only, with works that can only be done online (requiring internet connection) so that they can harvest the data in real-time when we do the works using their tools. Although data harvesting for machine-learning has been done several years earlier since software makers switched to subscription-only services and music streaming platforms popping up, and also since social-media tried to encourage and reward people in posting their photos, artwork, life stories, etc., we can see that only within a very short period of time, AI has become “too clever”. Right now, AI can do pretty much what normally graphic designers, illustrators, audio mastering engineers, video editors and animators do: creating digital artwork, layout design, motion graphic composition, logo design, audio mastering, and even producing ultra-realistic fake videos. In the literature scene, same thing happens; AI can now write articles, business and news reports, lyrics/poems, even essays and books. In the music world, right now it can compose songs pretty good - here’s one example (on YouTube), although it lacks depth and emotion because only organic soul that can put extra depth into musical composition (if done authentically), but most people won’t be able to notice it, right? Even a majority of human-made music released today lacks depth already.
Within the competitive, deceptive and manipulative systems encompassing our mainstream entertainment and showbiz industry, greedy and lazy songwriters can now use AI so that they can provide new songs pretty quick and make money with much less effort. There’s an instructional video on YouTube that encourages people to utilize AI-generated music and distribute those songs on streaming services as some sort of “passive income”, in a similar way as publishing books with AI-generated content to be sold on Amazon and make money from that without much effort. If that ever happens, the mainstream industry will soon be over-saturated with AI-generated outputs within art, design, literature, and music scene, creating a nasty self-eating cycle. In this reality, we learn about healthy exchanges of life-force energy, regulated by universal law. If we take or receive more than what we put out or give in terms of energy, it creates an imbalance in the energy field. If energetic imbalance becomes a repeated cycle, at one point it will then collapse/self-destruct. It’s called Entropy, because it continuously feeds off itself within the closed system.
There are moral and ethical implications with the utilization of AI as a replacement of human creativity as described above, but we’re actually dealing with far more bleak outlook if we choose to normalize this tendency of using AI to replace our organic soul-based creative expression that carries infinite life-force energy. The issue of AI is actually much deeper and far more sinister than what’s visible on the surface. It’s part of the antichrist system or the “beast system” written in the prophetic Book of Revelation. There’s the global agenda about that, the so-called Transhumanism; connecting human mind with the AI, which is the endgame of the world’s rulers. They want the human collective to generate a hive mind and to lose individuality and even free-will. This has been well-documented. It is about reducing (or even removing) soul-driven elements to properly function within the human species, thus deleting humanity from human species.
However, on the other hand, I’ve also observed more and more people returning to the organic way of life. People are waking up all over the world in great numbers, only unreported. In Canada where I live, an increasing number of people go to nature like forests and urban parks these days, they sit under the tree or on the riverside while reading paper books, writing or drawing/painting, feeding the birds, and I don’t even see the use of smartphone at all. Many people choose to eat healthy foods, adopting dogs or cats, cancelling data plans for their smartphones, no longer watch TV and mainstream news, and no longer hangout on social media or depend on messenger apps too much. Going back to simple lifestyle is also part of this new movement. This ‘opposite’ phenomenon is part of the expansion of consciousness within the human collective that drives the movement at the grassroots level. This movement creates a whole different collective pathway than the one being imposed top-down by the rulers of the world and being promoted heavily via mainstream media and social media.
If we consciously observe the current state of the world and not becoming too distracted or ignorant of it, we can clearly see that we are already at the crossroads of humanity’s destiny. Obvious choice points have already been given to us individually since the past few years. Right now, either humanity wakes up and decides to align to its spiritual nature, becoming more in-tune to the soul’s purpose and be more connected to all that is alive, or else; humanity would be reduced to a fully mind-controlled slave species, disconnected from nature, and even further becoming part of things that are artificial and fake within the technocratic dystopian reality. These are the two distinct paths of common destiny that everyone of us is currently choosing either one or the other. These two paths are heading toward the opposite directions just like the “T intersection”, and will soon completely separate from each other along with the souls walking any of this two, fulfilling the ancient prophecies from thousands of years ago regarding the final separation during the time of harvest. One path leads to the Golden Age, and the other one to destruction.
That’s all for now! Feel free to share this post to your friends as you see fit. You can also read past months’ messages posted on Substack if you haven’t yet. Next month, Kekal turns 29 years as a band. Please keep yourself subscribed to this newsletter and stay tuned. Thank you.
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