Becoming Insane

I put Becoming Insane together because I wanted to sit with that space where orchestral ambition meets pure heaviness—not as a gimmick, but as something that actually works when the strings and guitars are doing different emotional jobs. This collection pulls from work across a few years where I was chasing that specific tension: the moment a violin line gets undercut by a wall of distortion, or how an operatic vocal can land harder when it's backed by a proper metal riff instead of just reverb and drama.

“What makes these tracks cohere is they're not using the symphony as window dressing.”

The tracks lean into different angles of that same idea. "Symphonic Wonders" and "Symphonic God" stack everything—the orchestration gets genuinely granular, layered in ways that shouldn't work but do. "Traurig" sits quieter, lets the melancholy breathe through modal guitar work and strings that feel genuinely introspective rather than theatrical. Then you've got "Symphonic Metal of Destruction," which pulls the guzheng into the mix alongside the violin and lets both have space against the heavier material—there's something about traditional string voices cutting through distortion that feels fresher than the expected orchestral sound.

What makes these tracks cohere is they're not using the symphony as window dressing. The orchestration does real work: it shifts the phrasing, changes where the riff sits rhythmically, adds weight where you'd expect emptiness. The collection works best listened straight through, where you can feel the relationship between how "End" closes things out—those clean vocals over the swell—and what was building underneath everything that came before.