About Me

I was born in Hackensack, New Jersey, but I grew up in the town of West New York for the first five-ish years of my life. At that young age, at my brazilian mother's insistence, our family moved to the town of Bauru, São Paulo, where I would be raised for the next 9 years, 9 months, and 9 days. For most of that time my interest in music was very casual, until one day in October of 2017. I was sick and bedridden, looking through YouTube videos on my iPhone 4. I happened upon a video about Gorillaz lore, and not knowing what it was, I clicked it. The next thing I remember was sitting in the shower, the hot water splashing on my back as Tomorrow Comes Today played in the background on that crummy phone speaker. I was hooked. I got into other bands from there, getting involved in Discord servers where people would introduce me to other bands, and eventually I grew to become an avid music geek. While I toyed around in Audacity occasionally during this time - having also started to pick up guitar through learning Syd Barrett songs - it wouldn't be until after I moved back to New Jersey that I started being interested in writing my own music. I don't remember how I came about the album Eagle Creek by Ashley Ninelives, but something about its noisy production combined with its crude, unfiltered lyricism spoke to me in such a way that made me go "hey, I could do something like this". And so on the week of Valentine's Day, 2020, I wrote my first song: Hey Mr. Kong Guy.

Kong Guy is a song I have very mixed feelings about, even quality aside. It was a love song I wrote for my partner at the time, it was one of those long-distance e-dating things where we had no hopes of ever seeing each other irl. After recording a guitar and vocal track for the song in Audacity, I sent it to a friend of mine who was more capable of production than I was at the time, Owen Duncan. It took him over a month to actually get to mixing and overdubbing the song, but eventually it was finished in late March, if not very early April of that year, right when you-know-what was hitting. Happy with the song at the time, I proposed the idea of me and Owen starting a duo. The name I came up with for it was Chalkboard, and we released the song the very next day, April 2nd. In a cruel twist of fate, said partner didn't hear the song until after we broke up (mere weeks after the song was released, funny enough). Some time later that same month, me and Owen agreed that it was better for me to continue Chalkboard as a solo project, which would remain as my primary outlet of musical output for the next couple of years. A couple of mildly embarrassing covers and collaborative projects notwithstanding, the next Chalkboard release would take afoot during a temporary stay in a subletted apartment in the summer of 2020, while my mother found more permanent residence for us. Around that time I came up with three ideas for albums to release, with the intent of finishing them all by the time I graduated high school: Floorboard (a folk album), Dashboard (a rock album), and Messageboard (an album I didn´t have a sound for, but I knew it was going to be heavily influenced by my then-recent breakup). I spent a lot of that summer trying to write more songs, recording a series of crummy demos and scrap song ideas, mostly on my phone, that I'd later decide to release as the "album zero" of Chalkboard's discography: The Sublet Sessions.

Orignally released as a compilation of almost every single scrap and recording I made during that summer (the original release having 26 tracks), I cut it down to 14 a few months after, that being the current edition avaialble on the Chalkboard Bandcamp. It was also around that time that I started recording the first songs for what would end up being my first proper album, Cardboard. The album title was a conscious effort, deriving from it being a documentation of my first year having moved into a new apartment, where I was surrounded by cardboard from the moving boxes. It was heavily inspired by a lot of what I was listening to at the time, particularly Aaron Freeman's first release, Synthetic Socks. Being the same age as the Ween frontman when the tape was released, I felt motivated to try and do a similar hodgepodge of tracks while I experimented and explored the recording process. After a series of hiccups, especially near the end of the album's release, Cardboard was released on November 25th, 2021. A really bad compilation of covers I also recorded over the past two years was released, titled Clipboard Vol. 1 (2020-2021). I don't like talking about that one, it's bad save for maybe 3 songs on it and even then those are just okay. Following Cardboard's stressful recording process, my output the next year considerably slowed down as I continued to write songs, learn how to record, and develop the ideas for each album. The only things I released in 2022 being two demo compilations under my own name and a melancholic cover of Ween's "Birthday Boy" on my 18th birthday. Around the time of releasing that cover, I would end up writing a song that proved monumental in influencing the direction of my next project: Floorboard.

The Butcher was, rather directly and unambiguously, a song about my gender dysphoria. A somber folk tune, I spoke of my musings of harm towards myself, my desire to tear my face off every time I looked in the mirror, my desire to self-immolate away all the hairs on my body. I was in one of my biggest bouts of depression at the time, and I felt the need to direct that into a song, if only it meant I could direct all that dark energy out of my body and into a composition. The majority of Floorboard's songs were recorded in the following months, especially during early 2023, having juggled Floorboard songs and some other ideas here and there for the rest of 2022. If I'm not mistaken, the earliest songs on Floorboard are Noah's Dog, written in the winter of 2021/22; Tray Cigarettes, which interpolated All Our Lost Minds off The Sublet Sessions; and The Worm from the Apple of the Tree, a completed version of another song from The Sublet Sessions. The latter of those wasn't originally meant to be on Floorboard, having recorded it merely a week before the album's release, after I realized that my intended penultimate track, a nearly 18-minute instrumental improv called Untitled No. 7, wasn't exactly the most captivating climax for the album. In any case, Floorboard was released on my 19th birthday on June 14th, 2023. I made the decision of releasing it under the name "A.J. Vega / Chalkboard", as it was a deeply personal album I felt proud enough of to put my name on. It was also the first time an album I released recieved any true attention, being recieved positively by those I showed it to and others on Rate Your Music. Following a 40-day vacation in Brazil (during which I performed and recorded the live album Departureboard) and getting settled into college, I started recording again. I had finally moved away from Audacity for good, opting to use REAPER for my future recordings, having messed around with FL Studio, Bandlab, and Ardour over the prior year or so. I spent a lot of that year juggling between working on Floorboard and writing out ideas for Dashboard, which would eventually find itself morphing into a hardcore punk album, inspired by my research on punk history for my high school senior essay. I recorded a series of intentionally lo-fi, short and fast songs in September of 2023, but ultimately the project went nowhere as I had grown bored of writing in that style and I decided to abandon the Chalkboard name entirely following putting together what would end up being my "debut" single as A.J. Vega: Bunnydeath.

I was in another pit of depression following the release of Floorboard as I struggled to adapt to the college environment. I spent a lot of time talking with a close friend in Washington whom I bonded with due to our shared interests in music, furry culture, and weird sex things. I had also realized around that time that I was therian, feeling severely disconnected from humanity and seeing myself as more animal than human, something which I feel is a significant part of my queer identity. It was during one of my talks with this friend while sharing art by the furry artist DeadBunny that we discussed our shared desire to get killed as a result of kinky sex. At exactly 11:30 PM on October 30th, 2023, I commented on how it could be a banger song idea, less than a minute later sending the message "two chord 9-minute epic about being disconnected from reality and craving death and feeling more animal than human". I had recorded a guitar demo a few minutes prior partially based off a phone recording of a melody I came up with earlier in the day. I spent the night restlessly working on the song, recording a nearly-structurally-complete demo about two and a half hours after. I spent the majority of my Halloween and the early hours of November 1st working restlessly on the song and its album art. By that afternoon, the song was done and I spent the rest of November 1st working on the design for a new Bandcamp page and promoting the song, with the intent of releasing it on November 2nd, that month's Bandcamp Friday. It ended up being my most successful song to date, leading to me abandoning Chalkboard for good and to focus solely on making the shoegazey noise pop I'm currently working on. I recently released an EP I've been working on since a little before the release of Floorboard, called Anti-Loss EP, with the help of my friend Abby to push it to the finish line. I'll probably write more about it later, just felt the need to keep this page current. :p