My name is Jhoan Manuel Munguia and I was born on March 29th, 2004 so as of writing this I am 19. I was born in Miami, FL but am now currently based in Tallahassee, FL.

2017

          So to start, I never necessarily had a love for music per sé, but I was always good at memorizing the songs on the radio, as my wonderful grandfather never fails to mention. I started really falling in love with music after YouTuber jacksepticeye posted this video in which he covers System of a Down’s song, “Chop Suey!” on August 30th, 2017. After that, I started listening to Chop Suey. Then the Toxicity album. Then System of a Down’s entire discography. Then around December of 2017 I started listening to XXXTENTACION after he dropped “A GHETTO CHRISTMAS CAROL” and that changed everything.

          I started listening to him constantly and that introduced me into rap, alternative, folk and every genre in between that caught my ear. Country wouldn’t come way later until around 2021-2022. But regardless, I was hooked. On not only music but also it sparked an interest in maybe pursuing a career of my own. Around that time I was angry, sad, and at a low point mentally so listening to his lyrics made me feel seen. I wanted to be him. I wanted to be in the same position he was in.

2018

          So in order for me to start making music, I downloaded GarageBand on my phone and started making beats. They were horrible. And I knew that but for some reason I just kept going. I kept making beats and kept progressing and… I didn’t get any better. I was just using the stock loops in the Apple library. I didn’t hear any progression whatsoever. But what I didn’t  know that I was teaching myself at the time was an appreciation for musical arrangements and sounds. I started having an ear for what sounded good and where it would sound good. I started noticing little details in my favorite songs that I wasn’t picking up on earlier. Small details like in Chop Suey!, there’s a piano that starts playing at 2:49 or in Save Me by X, there’s a vinyl crack at 2:03 and things like that.

          I kept using GarageBand for a while until I started watching a music producing YouTuber named Simon Servida to try and learn a couple things about producing and any other content that he produced at the time. I noticed he was using a program I didn’t have so in order for me to follow his tutorials, I downloaded FL Studio 20. It was definitely a hassle to try and get used to at first, of course, but I did find it fun. It was like a video game. And little by little I started getting better. I started downloading asset packs from Reddit and other corners of the internet. Slowly but surely I was getting better at producing but I never posted anything or was able to work on it for longer than a day because I had the trial version of FL Studio so I couldn’t save my projects. I think that’s why I have a quick workflow when I’m in the zone nowadays; having to rush to finish a project and make it sound good in that timeframe is not for the faint of heart.

          Regardless, I was getting good at it (relatively), but I had to take a break. The most important trip of my life was about to happen and I didn’t even know it. For the summer of 2018, I was invited to go to my cousin’s quinceñera in Costa Rica. It was a good chance to go on vacation for the first time in 6 years and see my father for the first time in 2 so we packed our bags and took the 2 hour flight from MIA to CR. The first 2 weeks or so was just kind of a blur to me. I spent a lot of my time on my phone using social media, playing games, and the worst part, I was texting and calling my girlfriend at the time straight from my phone with no international plan. On no Wi-Fi. As you can probably tell, as soon as my mother saw that bill, she called my dad and told him to take my phone IMMEDIATELY. LIKE YESTERDAY. And of course I was pissed about it the first week but after that… man. It was the greatest time of my life. We were going to the beach and I was getting tanned like crazy, even burnt on a couple occasions. I was walking over to my Tio Pitoy’s house pretty much every day and I ended up sleeping there more than I was at the main house. It was a great time. Damn near all my uncles on my dad’s side are pastors and Pitoy is no different. That means he had a keyboard at the house and when we went into the church, there was a drum kit and a couple guitars. Now, as someone that was recently getting into music production, I was ecstatic. Before I got to Costa Rica, I would mimic jacksepticeye’s drumming video to Chop Suey! to try and learn the song. That means I would only practice with my hands or sometimes chopsticks so finally being able to use a drumkit after all that was like a dream come true. And that practice translated surprisingly well. Of course it wasn’t perfect or anything and I was missing a couple segments  but I could play the drums well enough for my uncle to tell me I had some talent. That was the first time anyone said anything positive about my music or anything musical whatsoever. And it lit a fire inside me. I started playing the keyboard too (completely raw.) I would watch tutorials on YouTube to learn some songs I liked at that time such as Orlando, Dead Inside (Interlude), and Jocelyn Flores by X. Yeah I was obsessed, so what. I kept practicing the keyboard and drums as much as I could in the time that I had, knowing it wouldn’t last forever.

          Some people say they know exactly where they were and what they were doing when a specific thing happens and I only have 2 of them. One of them for me is when X died. I was in my grandma’s house playing GTA V with my cousin Luis when my brother walks in the door and tells me, “yo X just got shot.” And I was kind of in shock. I started asking all the questions I could like “how many times did he get hit” and “is he still alive” and “where did you get the news from” and things of that nature. It was kind of a weird day after that. I walked in the room and kind of just cried a little. I didn’t have my phone at the time so I couldn’t even search up information. I was kind of just in the dark. And I was hoping and hoping and praying that he survived it but at one point, my brother told me that X had been confirmed dead. The rest of the trip was filled with good moments but there was just an odd feeling around it, I couldn’t really explain it.

2019

          The next year was kind of just hit after hit after hit with a couple good moments here and there. As soon as I got back home, I kept practicing on FL Studio every single day. I would play with melodies and make drum patterns but I never made a full beat, let alone posted anything. That would change on April 1st, 2019, a couple days after my 15th birthday. I came back from school that day a little more inspired than usual so I started making a beat. It was a Lo-Fi beat I ended up calling “skeletons”. I started working on it at around 4-5pm and finished it at around 11pm the same day. I then posted it as soon as I finished it on my SoundCloud account, which at that time I called “MOON”, because of my last name Munguia and how I related to the moon in many ways at the time. I would end up changing my name a couple times afterwards but at the time, I was hooked. I was hooked on making beats and posting them. Working on my skills was like a rush because I just kept getting better and better rapidly. I would show my friends the beats and, they were most likely lying to me, but they told me they liked them so I just kept going.

          It was all going great for me up until around mid-to-late May, where my mom told us she got a promotion at her job, and that we would have to move away from Miami to Tallahassee. Bro, I was devastated. Imagine growing up in such a culture-rich city like Miami, then having to move to relatively rural Tallahassee. It was a massive blow to me. All my friends lived in Miami, I had a girlfriend at the time (different from the Costa Rica trip), and I was just starting to gain a little self-confidence. This move would end up being a blessing in disguise but, of course, I didn’t know that at the time. I wasn’t even thinking about any positives whatsoever; I was just negative all the time. Then a week after that, my girlfriend broke up with me. I was mad and confused and I said some things I truly didn’t mean but was hurtful nonetheless and I apologize, A. A couple weeks after that breakup, we moved. My first day in Tallahassee was June 16, 2019.

          I should probably mention that right before we moved, I changed my name from MOON to DemoXYS. The name came from a long series of events so let me explain. I first started with the explanation of XXXTENTACION’s old Instagram tag “heroinfather”. The meaning of the name came from his music being like heroin cause once you listen to it, you can’t stop. So my dumbass was like, “oh yeah what do people need”, y’know, thinking about the heroin part, so I finally said “oh yeah people need oxygen.” So I put ‘demon’ in front of it and came up with “demonoxy”. I had the absolute minimal amount of foresight to realize that having “demon” anywhere in your name is just corny so I dropped the ‘n’ and got left with “demoxy”. I tried to put this into Instagram but it got rejected because someone else had the name. I just added an ‘s’ at the end of it and ended up with “demoxys”. I decided to capitalize the ‘D’ and the ‘XYS’ to at least stylize it a little. From then on my name was “DemoXYS”. The meaning for the XYS would come a little later when I realized I would need a label name for my releases. I tried a few different things but the one that always stuck with me was “Exempt Your Sins”. I know ‘exempt’ doesn’t start with X but… if you have a problem with that then you must be real fun at parties. Anyway, “exempt your sins” stuck with me because what it means to me is that you have to forgive yourself for the mistakes you made in your past, whether they were your fault or not, and move forward. So that’s XYS. DemoXYS also worked nicely because it gave me a nickname for when people found “Jhoan” too difficult and it was also like a trial (a.k.a demo. I grew up playing video games) because after I gave the XYS meaning, it meant so much to me that I was just gonna drop the ‘Demo’ part as a whole and just go with XYS moving forward. That ended up not happening because a friend of mine decided he wanted to start making music too after he saw me posting about it on Instagram and he went with the name “SmokeXYS”.

2020

          Covid year! This one was really weird and I’m gonna try and make it quick. The summer of 2019 was possibly the worst time of my life mentally. I was heartbroken, starting to gain a lot of weight, and alone because I had just moved to a brand new city in which I knew absolutely no one. As you can imagine, it was a very dark time for me.

          It’s always been hard for me to make friends because I never really had much time nor the confidence for it. Usually people grow up in one city around the same people for their whole lives up until they graduate from high school and move on to college. It wasn’t like that for me. I spent Kindergarten to 1st grade in one school. Then from 2nd to 4th in another. Then from 5th to 8th in another. Then I went into freshmen year to a high school that was outside of my school zone and with north of 4,000 students. It was hard finding an identity or any friends that would help form that identity cause it was pretty much always a new friend group every year. So I thought being in that high school would finally be a chance for me to break out of my shell and be someone. Then we had to move to a completely new city and all the progress I made that year was gone. Now I’m in this new city in a new school with around 2,000 students that have mostly grown up with each other their entire lives. And it’s Tallahassee so it has a completely different culture and atmosphere than Miami. In Miami, 99 in 100 people are some form of Latino born outside of the US or first-generation American citizens. Everyone speaks Spanish. It’s a culture. In Tallahassee, you have to look in crevices and corners to maybe find one Latino. If you speak Spanish up here, you’re considered a unicorn and people look at you differently. Sometimes positively but, in my experience, usually negative. So now I’m in this position where I can’t even be 100% myself to the people around me or they’ll look at me differently and not want to be friends with me. And I was also coming in as a sophomore so I couldn’t even really be friends with the freshmen cause they’re either looking for other new freshman friends or they already have other freshmen friends that they grew up with for their whole lives.

          All this to say that it was a very lonely year. I would usually eat alone in secluded places, watching a movie or a video on YouTube. Sometimes if someone took my usual spot, I would look for a new spot and eat there. If there were no empty spots, I would eat alone in the bathroom. It was a very low point for me. And this lasted for most of the school year up until March of 2020. Something happened, I’m not sure what, but we were sent home for a week. Right before my birthday! I was gonna spend my 16th birthday on break from school. What a blessing. After that week, they gave us another week. And then another week. And then… another week. It was great for me cause I got to stay home and play Fortnite in its prime with some friends at the time. But then they started giving us online assignments to do at home and… nobody doin that shit. I literally don’t think I ever submitted a single assignment. Like if I’m gonna be home, I’m not gonna do schoolwork and it’s just as simple as that. Thank God it was only a couple months and I already had decent grades from before lockdown so I kind of just coasted the rest of the year. It was great to not do work but I was missing the most important aspect of school: the social aspect. Meeting new people, growing from certain interactions and just being a better person. Like if you grew up homeschooled or in private school… lmao. Anyway, that reason is why I decided to return the physical school for the 2020-2021 school year; my junior year. I thought maybe I would actually have friends and stuff like that and grow or something but when I got to school on the first day, it was a ghost town. Most of the other kids decided to stay home, of course. It felt like only 19% of the school was actually there. I won’t get into too much but it was lonelier than last year. I was still eating alone but now there were even less people. Realistically the only thing I would like to mention from this year was that around November I started working out with the football team cause I needed a reason to start working out. It then kind of went on to me starting to practice with them and things of that nature.

2021

          2021 was definitely a year of growth for me. I stopped making shitty music for the validation of others and started making music for myself. Music that I would enjoy. I got the full version of FL Studio 20 and a new microphone + interface and just started working like a dog. I would listen to 100s of beats per day and from those 100s, I would only like about 20 at most. From those 20, I would only use 1. And that’s still the rigorous process that I use to this day. I get people asking me all the time where  find these beats and I just say YouTube. There are so many talented producers on there and they could be found if you’re just willing to put in the effort. But back to the timeline, this is when I started working on ‘329’. I went from mainly rapping to trying to get more into singing and this project was my attempt at doing that. I started by working on both “Maelstrom” and “Starborn” at the same time (both produced by eeryskies.) The beats were the same BPM so I tried combining them and just making one long song but when that didn’t work out, I cut it in half and started working on Maelstrom. The first idea I remember coming up with was following the guitar melody in the background (starts at 1:16) and I kind of just worked forward from that. The intro verse came later on and that one was a freestyle that I did in one take. I then cleaned it up a bit and maybe changed one or two lines but the intro is like 95% a freestyle. When I finished Maelstrom, I immediately started to work on Starborn because I was just so inspired with this new sound and I didn’t want to let that feeling slip. Starborn kind of came easier to me than Maelstrom did in that most of it was freestyled. Firstly, I wanted to make it feel like the antithesis to Maelstrom so to set a darker tone, I lowered the pitch of the beat by 3 semitones. Then after I heard how the beat sounded after that, it was wraps. The chorus was written and prepared but the “When I say too much and it never even matters” line, the background vocals, and the verse were all freestyled. The rest just came down to how I mixed it and what I added to the already amazing instrumental so what I ended up doing was drowning my vocals in reverb, adding the risers that swirl back and forth at the end of the second chorus, and my favorite part, slowing down the guitar solo at the end to make it feel more ethereal for lack of a better word. Starborn is still one of those songs that I play very often because I just love the sound of it and falling asleep to it is a different experience. If you haven’t tried it yet, please do. Anyways next came “lover’s interlude”. This one’s interesting because I literally finished the song exactly how you hear it the same day I found the beat. And that day just so happened to be the very same day that Fantom uploaded the beat. I don’t know what else to say. I was inspired. Next came “Desert Red” (also produced by eeryskies.) The title came from the name of the beat that eeryskies. gave it. I liked the term so I started freestyling to the beat and got the idea for the chorus and my first verse. I texted Smoke to put a verse on the song because I knew it was going to end up being a rap song and we meshed very well at the time so putting him on it just felt like a no-brainer. After he sent his verse in and I mixed it and put it on the beat, I knew I couldn’t let it slide cause he did very well on his verse so I had to bring some heat of my own. And I did. And the song ended up being one of my favorites for the longest because the vibe was so warm but the song was so hard at the same time. It was this dichotomy of vibes and feelings that took me aback at the time. After I finished Desert Red, I made “Goodbye, My Love”. It was kind of a similar process to how I made Starborn so I won’t get too far into it but I do want to point out that the guitar solo at the end is still one of, if not, my favorite outro to any of my songs. I planned on making 329 a full-fledged album with 8-9 tracks but I couldn’t finish the other songs by the March 29th release date. I had Goodbye, My Love ready by the time of the release date but I thought that if I put it at the end of the project, It would kill the pacing so I held off on it for now and stashed it away. I would end up releasing it alongside “We Are Infinite” and “Antigone” on the We Are Infinite EP (which is just the tail end of 329 so I saved you the trouble of imagining what that would sound like and put the ‘hidden release’ right here.) I would get to those songs right now but there’s some life shit happening!

         So some day around mid April, I played in my first football game. Well, “played”. I’m using that word very loosely. I never played a snap that game but just being in that atmosphere made me want to keep playing and practicing to maybe be able to play in a game. I kept practicing and working out with the team. There was a stretch of 20 days during spring training called the “Tough 20” where you would have to show up every single day and practice. I came 19 out of the 20 days. The only reason I missed a day is because the day before I got my second COVID shot and I couldn’t even move the next day. It kind of pissed me off having to miss a day but fuck it we ball. I wish I could’ve stayed for the summer to practice with the team but before I even started working out with the team back in November, I had agreed to go to Oklahoma to visit some of my family members from Costa Rica that stay there. The only thing I would like to mention from that trip is that the first night I got there, I recorded ‘IN THE NIGHT’ with my cousin Yoel, who goes by the artist name “Novak”. During the trip we also recorded ‘TELLTALE LOVE STORY’. But after that trip, I came home and got right back to practicing with the team and I was out of shape conditioning-wise but I was thinner than when I left. The season was fun. We won the first game but lost every single one since then :) Thanks Unnamed Offensive Coordinator! You’re ass! Being on that team during that season taught me a few life lessons that I’ll carry with me forever. The absolute most important thing, however, is that being on this team led to my first performance. Let me explain.

2022

          So being on that team, my teammates were pretty much my friends and brothers so, of course, we all followed each other on Instagram and things of that nature. One of my teammates always reposted a local artist that had a bit of a following so I followed him too to try and reach out and maybe collab or something. One day this local artist reposted a flyer from a photography studio called “Dandy Photography” located right next to the McDonald’s on West Tennessee St next to campus (they’re not there anymore :( ). They were hosting an open mic event for $20. I signed up immediately because I was just begging for any opportunity to perform at the time and this was my first chance.

          The day was March 5th, 2022. I was wearing a white T-Shirt with jeans and Air Forces with a puffer on. To be honest, I had/ have never been more nervous about anything in my life. I was literally shaking because this is the first time anyone outside of the internet and a couple friends would be listening to my music and I wanted to make a good first impression. I knew the music was good, I was just hoping they thought so too. The performance couldn’t have started any worse because the mic was at a low volume and I didn’t even know how to hold it so the audience could barely hear me and I was singing in a lower register than the actual songs cause I was scared to mess up and… it was a lot. But the audience liked the music so I started hearing “woo” and “oh shitt” scattered around and that started building up my confidence so I started getting more comfortable up on stage. I should mention that I was sitting on a stool for nearly the entire performance so I wasn’t giving them much to look at but I didn’t realize it at the time, I was just trying not to have a panic attack on stage. Anyways it’s all kind of a blur to me until the last song, Antigone. The song has a good rap verse and literally nothing vocally in the second half until the outro so I don’t know how I pulled it off but I got up from the stool, rapped the verse, and just started dancing and moving my shoulder like Uzi but the audience loved it. I was glad to have that sort of feedback for my first performance cause it meant I was doing something right. And that felt nice after years of not doing anything right.

          At that show I met a lovely woman named Jordan Roberts (she makes amazing music man fr yall can check her out here). She gave me an opportunity that kind of led to the momentum I have now. She offered me a part in an upcoming show called “Suburbia”, helmed by Gabriel Curtis. I was ecstatic at the offer and accepted immediately, having very little acting experience prior, but I didn’t care. The time between the offer and shooting was time well-spent on my end. I started searching for any other shows I could perform at while also performing at Dandy weekly to try and get my stage presence up and also perform different songs every time to try and see what worked and what didn’t. This worked wonders for the setlists from my future shows. Speaking of, I had booked myself a spot in a Battle of the Bands at Lincoln High School. Now, I don’t even know how this was possible, considering I neither attended Lincoln nor was a band. I went to Leon and I’m a one-man show. The odds were literally stacked against me. I thought about wearing one of my Leon hoodies to the show just for shits and gigs but when I realized that the winner would be decided by a panel of judges, I switched my mind up real quick. I just went with plain black. Honestly, walking into the event I was insanely nervous because I knew it would be a challenge. As the event progressed, I only got more and more nervous