Captain

I put this collection together because I kept chasing the same thing: what happens when you stop treating the guzheng as a textural ornament and make it the engine. Not layering it on top of metal—making the ancient plucking patterns and modal scales the actual foundation, the thing driving the riffs and rhythms forward. Captain is built on that principle.

“The tuning, the tremolo, the way a plucked string can sustain or decay—it all matters.”

You hear it immediately in the title track, where the guzheng's cascading arpeggios lock into the guitar's heaviness instead of floating above it. Samurai Attack leans harder into collision—the guzheng and distortion aren't complementing each other, they're fighting for space, which creates this nervous energy that spills into the breakdowns. Komurasaki strips things back to instrumental territory, just the plucked strings and drums exploring what happens when you bend pentatonic scales against metal's aggression. Pirate King runs the opposite direction, throwing a narrative voice over the same fusion, letting the seafaring story ride the Eastern-meets-Western friction.

What ties these cuts together isn't a theme so much as a conviction: the guzheng has attack, texture variation, and harmonic depth that metal needs, and metal has the weight and velocity that can make guzheng traditions feel urgent. The tuning, the tremolo, the way a plucked string can sustain or decay—it all matters. This isn't world music plus heavy guitars. It's an actual collision where both sides push back.

The result sits somewhere between traditional East Asian instrumentation and contemporary heavy music, restless and not interested in staying still.