Lexi Karma is my music moniker. My one-man-band, if you will. I haven't released any actual music under Lexi Karma since 2017 and there was about a three-year gap between releasing anything on the Lexi Karma YouTube at all. But 2021 is the year it comes back, as announced this past week on May 6th, 2021. Why is the prose of this like a press article for Lexi Karma? I don't know why it came off like that. Let's stop that now.
tl;dr:
Sometime in Autumn 2021, I will be releasing a full-length album and an EP under Lexi Karma, hopefully on the same day or at least in the ballpark. The full-length album is called "Self Titled Again" and is a remake of the first album from 2016. The EP is called "Fake and Stupid" and will be comprised of all synths, vocals, and various sampled instruments. If neither is done by Dec 31, 2021, I'm just going to bounce them both and release them before the year ends.
That's all you need to know. I guess I'm going to keep going though.
Fake and Stupid
Fake and Stupid is an electronic EP for lack of a better term. It will have six songs on it, none of which have any guitars on them. I say "for lack of a better term" because compositionally, they are still pretty much rock songs. The first song is called "Clingy", which I showed a demo of last week. "Clingy" is about the closest thing to what most people would expect from electronic music on the whole EP. They are all electronic by the pure instrumental definition but it probably won't feel that way to people who frequent the genre.
The reason the EP is called "Fake and Stupid" is that this is probably what I would have called it if I could go back in time and show this music off to myself in high school. I was a stupid metalhead and listened to a lot of rock and metal. I thought the only good keyboard and synth stuff was stuff that was technically impressive or fast like Children of Bodom. Yet I still didn't listen to jazz until after high school. Idiot. The title also falls in line with the story being told across the EP.
The concept of Fake and Stupid is my love life but wait yeah I know it's fucking lame wait just hold on! I'm a virgin in my late 20s who has been tossed around and fucked up for as long as I can remember. At the same time, I wasn't perfect in this field either and I wanted to throw some elements of that into the lyrics too. The EP is organized to reflect how a lot of this works psychologically. It also linearly tackles a story that lasts about a decade and attempts to sum it up in under thirty minutes. So the EP takes adolescent obsession and slowly injects ideas of abuse and gaslighting as I grow into my early-to-mid 20s. The end of the EP takes place around 2017-2018 where I spend almost an entire year trying to undo a lot of psychological damage others did to me as well as damage I did to myself. I'll talk more about that later this year when it's all out though.
"Clingy" is a perfect intro to this concept. It is a kind of first-person sarcastic vantage point of a lot of men I knew in romantic/sexual relationships that would fuck up the ABCs of dating at every turn. Imagine the lyrics are being sung by a bunch of puppets at a puppet show and I am giving them all voices. This is more accurate to how the lyrics to Clingy work. I feel like a lot of people are going to misconstrue the lyrics as me being quite the filthy misogynist. This is understandable. I just think it was a fun way to depict it. Sometimes we don't understand how stupid or harmful some of the stuff we say is until we hear someone else say it, which is a large point of the song. I should probably release that demo on YouTube sometime soon.
When it's done, I will probably release "Clingy" in its finished form on YouTube and perhaps another song as finished promotional material to tell people to go listen to this thing already. Don't hold your breath for a second song though. It seems kind of weird to release two songs before the whole thing since the whole thing only has six songs. It will be on Spotify. I am also going to try Bandcamp this time. You can support Lexi Karma in advance on Ko-fi but you can always do that. Bandcamp has a kind of "pay what you want" feature and I want to play with that. I'm not sure why I shied away from it when I released that album. Oh, speaking of that thing.
Self Titled Again
I'm remaking the Lexi Karma debut album Self Titled. It will be called Self Titled Again because there's only so much you can guess from that title. I will probably talk more about why I decided to make this when it comes out. I showed off a demo of "Crystal" last week. That has always been one of my personal favorites from the album. Someone somewhere might find it interesting that it was also pretty much the inspiration for making Lexi Karma and committing to it. I think it might have been the first song I actually wrote for the purpose of being a Lexi Karma song but I don't remember that for sure.
Anyway. Self Titled is something I'm proud of myself for making but I'm always kind of embarrassed to show it to people. The vocals are mostly on key but they suck. There's no pitch correction. The guitars are typically layered pretty okay because I at least understood subtractive EQing but beyond that, I didn't really know what I was doing with mixing. I'll be honest, as a certified audio engineer, I'm still flying by the seat of my pants. Every time I sit down with the express purpose of mixing something, I feel like the biggest fucking idiot on planet Earth. This is one of many reasons why I decided not to do it for a living early on. Anyway, the problem with Self Titled is that I love the songs. I hate that I'm embarrassed by them because I think if money was no object, I would have put out a great piece of art in 2016. But studio time is expensive and I was making less than $9/hr at the time. The fact that I put that out with almost no help and a budget of $1k was impressive. Unfortunately, that spirit doesn't make the mix any fucking better. The mastering engineer I commissioned tried but he could only do so much with that awful mix.
So Self Titled Again will come into the fore-front with the hopes of at least remedying the sonic quality of the music I released in 2016. I miiiiiight put out "Masked Appeal" as a kind of "almost finished" tease since that and "Crystal" are the ones closest to "finished". A lot of quotation marks, I know.
"So what makes it new? What makes it better? Isn't it just a remaster lol?"
It's a remake. Calling it a remaster ignores what I'm going to be spending the vast majority of my time doing for this album along with what I have already done. Over 90% of the vocals and guitars will be re-recorded, all of the bass tracks will be re-recorded, all of the synths will be re-programmed/re-arranged, and all of these tracks will be mixed and mastered with an entirely different digital setup than what I was using in 2016. Oh, and now I have pitch correction.
As of writing this, I still have a decent amount of vocals to record. However, that's the perk of these being previously released songs. I don't have to mull over "should I add this, should I take away that" so much. As is apparent on the "Crystal" demo I released, I am making a few minor changes to some of the arrangements but I'm not doing anything compositionally drastic. Easily 93% of the guitars are done being recorded. I think there are only two songs left that need any more guitar work. About 99% of the bass is done. There's a really bad take on the beginning of "Selfless" that I still need to re-record.
That said, most of this is really going to come down to me being consistently happy with the mix and how fast I might come to that point. I have no idea when that point will come. As I said with Fake and Stupid, I am placing a hard deadline for Dec 31, 2021. Wherever I'm at with Self Titled Again and/or Fake and Stupid in December is just what you all are going to end up with. Then we can move on to more new stuff.
Normally, I'm the kind of fuck that says "never say never" when it comes to just about anything. In the case of Self Titled Again, I can safely say I'm never going to do anything like this again. At its worst, Fake and Stupid will sound "okay". In their unfinished forms with a little bit of leveling and panning, some of the stuff I'm doing for Self Titled Again already sounds arguably better than the versions that are currently out. So it's going to be very hard for me at this point to slap out anything that sounds more amateur than Self Titled in its original form.
One other major difference I want to mention that some people might honestly not even fully notice: key changes. Four of the songs are going to be in a different key, I will probably talk about this more in-depth when the album comes out. I used a pretty decent amount of different physical guitars along with two different basses on the original Self Titled. None of these are current gear anymore. I now have an Ibanez SIX7FDFM, a Chapman ML1, and some cheapo Ibanez 5-string bass. They are all tuned a half-step down from standard tuning. I could have tuned them to different tunings for different songs or just learned new fingerings for the songs that relied a lot on open strings but I didn't want to. So without going into every single tuning of every single instrument I used in the original version; "Mendax" will be in Gb min (was in F min), "Selfless" will be in Bb min (was in C min), "Masked Appeal" will be in Eb min (was in E min), and "Six Minutes" will be in C# min (was in C min). "Six Minutes is the only one out of these four that I feel sounds significantly different because of the different chord voicing. Perhaps, most people won't be able to tell either way, they'll just know that the song sounds better than the original. The other three sound just as different as the songs that didn't go through a key change, except for the blatant key change.
Release
They'll be on Spotify and hopefully Bandcamp. I might put them both out elsewhere too depending on how I do distribution this time. I might release each individual track of Self Titled Again on YouTube as well. I probably won't do that with Fake and Stupid, or at least not right away.
Future Lexi Karma
I already have the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Lexi Karma projects fueling up on the strip. The 3rd one is going through little tweaks in writing but is almost done as far as writing goes. I haven't written all of the lyrics yet. A good portion of them is done though. I have fucked around with recording the vast majority of these songs already. That said, I wouldn't be shocked if another major Lexi Karma release drops in 2022. Just set a more realistic expectation of 2023. The 3rd Lexi Karma project is more of a progressive metal kind of thing. Other than the fact that I made it, it has a gratuitous amount of vocal harmonies at times, and there are synths and fake drums, it is nothing like Self Titled or Fake and Stupid.
The 4th Lexi Karma project will be another prog-rock project but then again, arguably all of my stuff is. It won't be as aggressive sounding or spastic as the 3rd project. However, it will still try to cram genres into each individual song. This one is more jazz fusion-y than it is trying to be particularly heavy. It still has its heavy moments but it will be significantly more melodic than the 3rd project. The 4th project is also a concept album that I'll talk about more when it becomes relevant. Almost none of the lyrics are finished for this one but roughly 75% of the music is. I'll end this point by saying this; I have written a lot of music in my life thus far and this stuff is collectively some of the best I feel I have ever made.
The 5th Lexi Karma project will be some prog-rock but with a lot more synth implementation. It will be much less stand-offish than the 3rd project. It will have plenty of heavy moments but that's not really the point. The 5th project is mostly songs I have already been pretty much done writing for years. I won't lie, I just felt more immediately inspired by projects 3 and 4. Originally, I wanted this to come out around the same time as Fake and Stupid. I am glad I held off on that idea because both this project and Fake and Stupid had some true garbage on them at the time. Thus, this fifth project is almost 100% done being written across the board. This statement will hold true until I finish the lyrics and the melody line for one part of one song. I might also write and add a new song into it since right now, it isn't a very long thing. I really like these songs and in much worse condition than they are now, friends I have shown them to thought they were really cool. I wouldn't expect this one to come out for quite a few years though.
After that, I'm going to start making Lexi Karma releases with more specific gimmicks, namely "what if this genre was tackled by Lexi Karma" kind of releases. That won't be all though. I have other ideas that aren't just genre-bending.
That's it for now. Damn, this one's long. I'll come back with another update sooner than later.
-Ayden
sleepy musician and insane person
