Ughhhh... where to begin? (this page is going to be quite lengthy)

Back around 2012, my dad's friend introduced me to an artist that many of you know as "Skrillex". As a 10 year old kid who was soul-searching for something to do in the long run (since due to having a naive, low knowledge brain, game development was out of the question), I fell in love with the concept of dubstep music. I was already a fan of electronic music (since my parents already introduced me to acts like The Prodigy, Fatboy Slim, Daft Punk, etc when I was even younger), but this kind of music was on a whole new level. The entire genre focusing around surreal and heavy sound design, it reminded me of the Transformers for some reason, and I really wanted to make music akin to that. It was ear candy at the time for me.

Aside from Skrillex, my mother also introduced me to Madeon, after seeing one of his videos go viral, which used a device called the Launchpad to create live music in real time. I was mesmerized by the kinds of equipment producers used, both hardware and software, and this kind of stuff made me more interested in me wanting to get into music. I was even subscribed to Sweetwater magazine to gloss over musical equipment! Eventually by the end of 2012, I said "fuck it" and for Christmas I received the Launchpad, and proceeded to learn about how EDM music in general was made. And in terms of software, I started off with both GarageBand and Ableton Live, the latter I still use to this very day! For the Launchpad, surprisingly enough, I rarely used it. I was more focused on music production rather than jamming my fingers on a 8x8 button board.

I studied how to make music for a few months, but the results were abhorrently ear-grating. It took an absurd amount of time to finally figure out how to properly make electronic music on my end. My focus was on sound design, creating extremely gritty and loud bass sounds, rather than music theory. And to this day, music theory is my Achilles' heel in terms of working on music. But alas, most music I made wasn't sounding good, and even though I sometimes would open up my DAW on occasion, I was mostly distracted with a lot of other things. Things such as life, school, and naively being a part of a online community that was absolutely terrible and I got relentlessly bullied in.

However, after a few years, around 2016 or 2017, I suddenly started to get back into making music again. I went anonymous on the internet after someone nearly doxxed me, and without revealing who I was, I slowly crept back onto the internet with a new purpose: music. By 2018, I was somewhat satisfied with the music I was creating, and thus, started publishing music as Spectre. But... Spectre is a very generic name for a musical act. One day in 2019, I was minding my own business, when someone on Instagram tagged me saying I was opening up for a well known act. Then I learned Spectre wasn't really a unique name. I went through nearly 3 months of thinking of a new name, when some rando on a Discord server was talking about Limewire and old peer-to-peer file sharing services. So I said, "you know what, I might as well name myself after a relic of the 2000s!" in typical fashion. So I changed my alias to Lymewire.

By 2019, I was fully ready to release music, and properly released my first single after NEARLY a decade of learning, waiting, contemplation, and self-doubt. The first single, Nova Prospekt was released around June, and it did alright. I also remixed Space Laces' track "D.A.W." around this time as well. I was pretty satisfied with the music I was starting to release, even if the numbers weren't exactly impressive compared to others. I was good at making silly noises, but I still struggled with music theory, and also mixing/mastering since my hearing was still somewhat hit or miss.

Then 2020 hit, I was ready for the Lymewire project and my life to finally spring up. It felt like I was finishing up high school, I was trying to figure out how I could get a job as an autistic & introverted hermit, getting a driver's license, and so forth. I was fully prepared for the future!... then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. I was then forced to move to a rural place that my parents owned, since all other places lacked vacancy due to the pandemic and I needed to be safe from anywhere or else death would come knocking on my door. It sucked being in the middle of nowhere. The internet and cell signal was horrid (we had satellite internet, this was before Starlink was publicly released, fyi) and I was extremely lonely, since it was just this one lonely place, and trees around me. No neighbors or anything. The nearest city with hospitals and groceries? 30 minutes away. I hated it.

Regardless, I still trucked onwards, and around April or so, released Guru Meditation, which did wonders despite my living situation. However nowadays I kind of regret calling it that, because that means a bunch of dubstep raver kids are now suddenly aware of the Commodore Amiga and it's quirks. It's whatever, I was still somewhat naive around this time, so I just named my tracks after whatever I liked or found interesting. The track did well enough that I even made a VIP mix as well, which also did well. Then a month later, I released a remix LAXX's track "The Limit", and that did EXTREMELY WELL. Mainly because various people who were friends with me at the time, shared the track to big acts such as Virtual Riot, among others. To this day, it's theoretically the most popular track I've made to date. However, this was slowly the beginning of the end.

Even though Guru Meditation and my remix of LAXX's track was successful in some way, it never broke the ten-thousand mark (both are still around the single-thousand mark), and I was having to do tasks for my parents within this rural area. Stuff like gardening, renovation work, carrying 30lb logs, all within the sweltering heat for 7 hours a day, sans weekends. Not to mention, the poor satellite internet prevented me from having clear & direct communication with my peers, so it was harder for me to spread awareness of my music, or get advice from others, and so forth. It was brutal and I felt like I never recovered from this.

There were some key moments that did happen that were interesting, I nearly got a manager, but nothing happened aside from "can you please put my email on your profile?" kind of stuff. And I did move out of that rural cabin and returned to my home place some time in the fall of 2020 when parts of the pandemic slowed down a bit. And the biggest thing that happened that no one cared about was someone noted my name "Lymewire" sounds a bit like Lyme's disease. I was unaware Lyme's disease was spelt like that, since I pretty much named it that on a whim without doing any major research; and the name "Lymewire" was trying to put a pretentious spin on "Limewire" to create a unique DJ name. So I finally renamed my alias to Digiwire, and no one batted an eye that much. I did shadow-drop an original track Inertia on my 19th birthday, but that was about it for 2020. People were supporting others, and constant drama among my former peers and other musicians started cropping up in an obnoxious way. That time in the mid 2020s felt like the peak, and now it was all winding down.

By the time 2021 rolled around, I was slowly inching my way towards being an indie game developer rather than a silly dubstep musician, and even though I released another track at the start of 2021 named Boombox, the writing was on the wall. I made some friends, but over time these friends slowly showed their cracks. Some were nice but had ideas I didn't felt comfortable with. Others looked like they could be good friends with me, as they would share a chemistry with me; before becoming complete assholes later on. It was all starting to crumple apart in my eyes. And as time progressed, I was getting tired of dubstep. I like electronic music, but you could really only tolerate one genre for a set amount of time. I was actually getting into more contemporary music, like jazz, IDM, prog rock, orchestral music, Frank Zappa-tier shits n' giggle music, pretty much anything that wasn't modern glitzy normie pop music. And thus, after nearly a decade of making music, I retired the Digiwire project around March of 2021. Hilariously enough, this was also around the same time I started work on my game dev passion project.

Looking back, am I proud of the music I've made? I dunno. Dubstep makes me cringe nowadays, but I wouldn't be here nowadays if it wasn't for me creating and learning music on and off for a decade. Did I ever earn a dime from my music? No, because I didn't get a proper bank account until after I retired from making music, funnily enough. Even nowadays, when the Digiwire Bandcamp page was still active, no one really bought my music, so I never made any money off my music. But looking back, I'm kind of embarrassed by my past. I don't know if it's due to me being me, but my past up until I retired from the Digiwire project was quite frankly cringeworthy. Granted, I was more careful than when I was bullied back when I was a tween, but even then I still acted like an annoying teenager. I've learned so much about what it's like to be an adult and how to live life comfortably for myself after I retired. Stuff such as using zoomer lingo (i.e. bruh, based, cringe, lit, peak) was starting to give me a headache, I started growing out of memes and found comedy elsewhere, and overall I focused myself on making my life feel more relaxed than being exposed to extremely monotonous content throughout the internet. This is also why I'm mostly quiet on social media, I'm trying my best to make my internet experience comfortable and not consist of doomscrolling and being exposed to either annoying and/or majorly upsetting content.

But what does that mean for me? Do I still make music? Yes, I do, but mostly it's either soundtracks for my personal projects, or something occasional like my DSIS album, or something I'd dump on my personal SoundCloud page. Even then, I don't really crank out music at a blazing rate, it really only happens on a blue moon. Will I ever return to the Digiwire project? Doubt it. Even if I do consider to return to using the name "Digiwire", I'd doubt I'll make dubstep music ever again. It could be a completely different genre, like industrial metal, art rock, etc. Porter Robinson used to make EDM music, and now he makes atmospheric pop music, so doing that kind of genre shift towards Digiwire would be something I could do (albeit genre-wise, be more darker than Porter's music), but I doubt it. The only time I have returned to the Digiwire alias was to remaster Nova Prospekt back in 2023, but that's only because I was getting tired of the original song's sloppy mixing job, and wanted to improve it slightly. That's it.

In conclusion, my old music makes me feel impressed, but also uncomfortable from the genre I've delt with, and the people I've been with. It was a rocky and horrid ride, but all of that paid off for me focusing on the things that make me feel comfortable. If you are curious about listening to my old music, you can do so on the Digiwire SoundCloud, and download all of the tracks for free. They we're previously paid on Bandcamp, but considering no one buys them and I don't want another account to deal with, it's gonna get deleted. My journey making music is both a curse, but also a blessing; and unless Digiwire we're to return in name only, I don't think I'll ever create music focused on obnoxious sound, and rather focus on things being more relaxed, contemporary, and consistent. I've moved on, and it's time for me to focus on the things I've been truly passionate about.

TL;DR made crummy EDM music for 10 years, retired due to drama and because EDM is rubbish, have better tastes now, and now calmer and more relaxed, blah.