Just Me Being Me: 9 Years After the Zombie Apocalypse—A Look Back at "Decompose"
Or: We Don't Die, We Just Decompose.
Just Me Being Me is literally just me being me, living my life outside my comfort zone when it happens as it happens. Since I’m a dedicated introvert, this doesn’t happen much, which makes it doubly interesting when it does.
I didn’t grow up with the typical American Halloween experience.
(In the Philippines, November 1 is All Saints’ Day—smack dab in the middle of a three-day celebration honoring the dead. My family didn’t take it as seriously, but it’s common for Filipinos to pitch a tent or canopy beside the graves of their dearly departed relatives and camp out at the cemetery from October 31 to November 2.)
However, almost 10 years ago, I inadvertently started a personal/seasonal tradition. My (then very new) friend Tim (Water Gun Water Gun Sky Attack) and I released a zombie apocalypse-themed concept EP on October 31, 2011. Each year since I’ve relistened to this EP sometime during the week leading up to Halloween.
Here’s a Decompose retrospective no one asked for (because I really wanted to write it). I talked to Tim to get his perspective, too—after all, this was a collaborative EP. In many ways, my musical partnership with Tim set the tone for how I would work with other music artists past 2011.
Can You Still Find Decompose Online?
The EP is still available for download and streaming on Bandcamp:
You can find the follow-up release (a 12-track remix compilation) there, too.
Where Did the Idea for the EP Come From?
Tim sent me a screenshot of our first interaction ever, which started with me emailing him and straight up asking to collaborate. How brave! Where did that Miao go?
“It was you who came up with the idea for (1) zombies, and (2) getting it done by Halloween, which would've been in just a month or two,” he says. When Tim brought this up, memories from 2011 came flooding back.
Obviously, this was during the height of my “productivity equals worth” period. Two months to finish six songs? Ridiculous.
But the gag is that we did it. We literally “met” because I asked him to work with me. We began our friendship with a large, unwieldy, and completely voluntary creative project. Tim was in college working on his math degree, while I was newlywed unsure of where my career path was heading. Also: He was in Texas and I was in Manila.
How we made it work is a miracle we still haven’t figured out to this day.
Do We Play Favorites? (Of Couse We Do.)
Both Tim and I like the fifth track of Decompose, “Starting Tonight,” the most.
“The most fun, absolutely,” Tim says of the song. “Found that wavy gliss sample in a sample pack from Berklee, which started it off, and the rest wrote itself from there. I still use that particular kick sample all the time.”
This song was the most demanding for me, simply because I recorded so many stems. I don’t remember the final count. But a huge part of the sound was the concept of multiple instances of my voice, stacked, singing the same lines. In my childhood bedroom in Cubao, I sang into my cheap dynamic mic until my throat was raw.
Tim’s least favorite track—or at least what he found the least fun to do—is “Regret.”
“The freeware chiptune VST that makes those bleeping noises was really temperamental, and the drums just weren't fun to work with,” he explains.
I, on the other hand, really had fun with this one. Looking back, I’m pretty sure that the phrase “shoot first, mourn later” was a literary darling that I’d refused to murder—I’d written it on some piece of paper and kept trying to find a place for it in my creative pursuits. It finally found a home in “Regret.”
My least favorite track is “Decompose.”
Recording the vocals for this wasn’t challenging. But I remember this being one of the first songs of mine where I recognized the need to pay attention to my enunciation—so whenever I listen to it now, the way I eat some of the words is all I hear. I love the last 30 seconds of this track, though. What a stunning conclusion.
Also: This is the end of the narrative of the EP, and it was difficult to capture the ambiguity we wanted to deliver in the lyrics.
No one’s supposed to know how it ends. How do you write that if you have a preferred ending in your head? (Not that I will tell you or anyone other than Tim what that unwritten ending is—that’s reserved for our still-hypothetical Decompose 2.)
What Happened Next? Or: Living in the Aftermath of Decompose
There’s a lot of tangential stuff that we don’t necessarily need to get into here.
(To be brief: A few months after Decompose came out, Tim and I became founding members of a creative collective called The Hai. We worked on music together more often with each other and with other friends from all over the world. And while we don’t really do a lot of collaborating anymore, we’re all still in touch.)
But yes. Decompose, to me, was very special because it honestly shouldn’t have worked so well. We finished the entire thing in less than two months! And we managed to get some art done for it. And it really was one of the seeds that grew into a music-based community that is still part of my life today.
“When I was playing shows in Denton, many years later, I had a few people come up to me and tell me they’d recognized my name from Decompose, which they still liked,” Tim adds. That’s wild! We never played live sets (obviously, as we lived in different countries) and didn’t really get attention.
The EP was a labor of love. Really, we just put together something that sounded good to us—because we enjoyed doing it.
What Does Decompose Mean to Me?
It’s complete fiction, of course, but sometimes I think Decompose is one of my most honest works.
“Despite the fact we barely knew each other, we kind of worked like an assembly line,” Tim says. “I think it’s because I was ‘not a singer’ at the time and you were ‘not a producer’ so we kept very much to our own sides of things and just put them together and added feedback.”
He’s a mathematician and that is a mathematician’s explanation. It’s very telling that I can remember no people-pleasing behavior from me anywhere in the process of creating this EP. Somehow I knew what I wanted to do, intuitively sought out the best person to do it with, and it all came to fruition.
That’s what happens when you listen to yourself. That’s what happens when you trust your gut! Why do people pretend to be deaf and blind to this all the time?
Like I brought up earlier, how I interacted with Tim back then is also how I developed the way I collaborate—not just with other artists but with everyone. Respect was always there, but honesty, too. I was never afraid to point out things because Tim never minimized my input or dismissed my opinions. I’d like to think I did the same.
What a huge impact this little EP made in how I live! Geez.
What impact has your favorite creative output had on you and the way you live and craft new works?
Decompose cover art by Nikita Sacha
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