2019: The Year of Transition

          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”.