SANTIRA & SWAMO NOVA PRESENT
BRASH
one
One - Think of a dystopian sunrise. Minimalist intros are everything to me. Examples like “darkseid” and “Don Quan Intro” are the first that come to mind in recent years, and with this song being the album’s opener, it was crucial to me that it did the perfect job of setting the tone for what was to come on the following eleven tracks. Prior to the album’s shift towards a much more sonically vast palette, the Brash & Broken project was originally going under the moniker of “ethereal 9”, an almost post-apocalyptic barren landscape consisting of nine minimally produced synth ballads, hence the title. The song was as bare as I could possibly have made it, with me approaching the album with a “less is more” mentality. Consisting of only a very simple synth passage, and in its climax one single note sustained on a violin, backed with a track of drowned out, heavily fx’d vocals, before returning to its original bare form for its final moments, leaving listeners with just enough to want to continue on the journey of the album listening experience.I wanted to approach the lyrics of the song with enough vagueness as to set up enough questions for the album to tackle later on, but without explicitly coming out and just stating what was going to be addressed next. The song starts homaging the start of my music career back in my early teens, when I was just a thirteen year old kid making rap music on garageband after school. This album, while definitely not devoid of any rapping, was set to serve somewhat as my departure from the genre as I dove into more challenging and unique soundscapes. Being that a good amount of the album was produced between 2022 and 2023, the album ended up having a really large blend of different ideas and sounds, in the end contributing to every song sounding completely different from the last. “one” was my very own moving out song in a sense, a very naive yet determined introduction to a story of distrust, self discovery, misguided epiphanies, and eventually self acceptance.
tear me apart
Another track originally created for “ethereal 9” back in 2022, “tear me apart” went two years without any lyrics and wasn’t recorded until late 2024. The beat went through many stages, with the biggest inspiration for the track being songs like “Computer Blue” by Prince and “Knocking On Forbidden Doors” by Enigma, with a similar vocal style to the first half of “love surreal”.From the very first second of the song, “tear me apart” is blasting bass through your speakers and demanding your full attention. The heavy tuning of the song was the result of months of tweaking the mix over and over again to achieve the most dystopian feeling it could evoke.The writing for this song is extremely unique to the album as it doesn’t take a first person narrative like most songs I write, but rather tells a much more vague pieced together story of paranoia and distrust. The song ends with a self-sacrifice of ego, as the narrator pleads to an unknown being to “Hold me… Show me… Pull me in and tear me apart.”
imperfect machines
Being the last of the repurposed songs from “ethereal 9”, “imperfect machines” was the first new single off “Brash & Broken”. The beat originally had much different drums, closer to the styles of mid-80’s synth pop groups such as Pet Shop Boys and Tears For Fears. In light of creative changes for the new album, I decided to take the song in a more modern direction percussion-wise, with artists like Yves Tumor and ABRA playing a major part in my inspiration for the drum patterns.“Imperfect machines” exists as a critique of the human condition, as per the title - Humans, being the flawed machines of God. The opening verse speaks on the lasting effects of the generational trauma that comes with treating our young generations as expectations rather than miracles. The bridge being so early in the song creates the space and time for these same children to grow up, as the second verse skips to a time when the abused are grown, and fall victim to the same cycles they endured as children. “Come with me, you’re misguided and so am I… Run with me, we’re disguised by moonlight.” As the broken machines find solace and comfort in one another, they slowly begin to piece themselves together in what seems to be a trauma-bond. “Imperfect machines” ends in a bittersweet way as the two call out to one another - “She calls out my name in confusion and pain, but I’m not there… I’m not there…” - but cannot respond as they have not yet discovered themselves despite the years passing by.In the end, they “surrender” and fade away as they return to the eternal labor of self-discovery, and live vicariously through the moniker of “imperfect machines”.
ser
Spanish for “to be”, this short interlude derived from a voice recording I had recovered from a conversation with my grandmother. We had been talking about all the crazy things happening in the world at the time, as this was around the time that the Russia/Ukraine war was at its height in media coverage.She interrupts me to remind me that “Our world is not of that, we must know it clear that our world is of love,” I found her words almost healing, despite knowing that words alone cannot change the world. It made me reflect on my own passion, my work; Could my art ever change anything if it was just that… words?She follows that up by saying, “We must try every day to be better. But not better than our neighbors; better than myself. Better than who I was yesterday.” If my writing is my reflection, and to reflect is to heal, then in some world, my healing can help others too.I backed her words with the somber piano from pt. 2 of “love surreal”, and placed it earlier in the tracklist as to juxtapose the selfishness and isolation of that song, while also connecting the overall album flow even better. Barely coming in at a minute in length, “ser” sits as a checkpoint in the album, an oasis in a sense.
winona's ballad
Another short, almost interlude-like track, yet one of the most beautiful songs I have ever worked on. Once again bringing Winoni back, this song was originally simply the outro to an unreleased song titled “stellar” and was originally intended to be placed on my “STARCHILD: Abducted” mixtape from 2024. After enough listens, I decided to split the two songs up,until this one found its way onto this album. Winona was able to write and record her whole performance in just under half and hour, with this track being her first time ever recording a song. I knew from that moment I had to get her all over this album, and even get her a solo song on it, hence the ballad. She mentions “flying away” in the lyrics, which at the time of the song’s creation, was a reference to an old song of mine titled “fly away”. It was an old demo I had made back in 2021, and one that my close friends have been begging for me to release since. “Fly away” was one of the first songs I played for Winona after we had gotten together, and she absolutely loved it. She pushed me to put the song on the Starchild mixtape along with her ballad, but due to a change in creative direction, all 3 aforementioned songs were shelved until a later time. As of today, she has backing vocals on “fly away”, and who knows, maybe one day that old demo from when I was fifteen will see the light of day. Until then, “winona’s ballad” remains the most beautiful song I’ve released with her, and is a perfect transition into “love surreal”.
love surreal
This song was the turning point of my career. This song is what took me from making music to making art. As of the creation of this song back in Summer of 2022, I split my musical catalog into two halves; everything before “love surreal”, and everything after “love surreal”. The song was originally a freestyle, a chance for me to play around with this autotune plug-in I had just cracked off some website that probably led to the downfall of my last computer, but a crucial tool nonetheless.I had laid down the synth at the start of the song, took my cheap USB microphone and laptop to my recording booth at the time, the backseat of my mom’s car, and hit record. With no lyrics written down, I sang. Immediately I fell in love with the recording. I knew it needed more though, so I ran back up to my room and quickly put together the second half of the song, before returning to the car again. I freestyled the entire second verse of “love surreal”, a feat that I’ve struggled to even come close to since, and immediately uploaded it. It was a game changer in my early catalog. I had never thought to use any sort of tuning, as I felt it was lazy and inauthentic. But hearing that recording from the car, my mind instantly changed. I discovered not a cheat, but a tool. A mask that would take my mistakes and draw them out more, by disguising them as corrected. It was exactly what I was needing, without me even knowing.The recording on “love surreal” is still the exact same take from when I was sixteen, and is the only song that I did not re-record for this album. It sits in the tracklist almost as a time capsule, with everything before and after it existing solely due to that one faithful recording session in my mom’s car. Sitting right smack in the middle of the tracklist of “Brash & Broken”, this song splits the album perfectly into its two individual halves, as it serves as the final moments of Brash, leading into Broken with the explosive intro of the song that would be known as,
get down!
This song played a very crucial role in bringing the album’s essence to life very early on in its conception. The beat was something I had begun working on as half a joke and half a “song too experimental to ever do anything with”. Initially, the only thing I recorded on it upon its creation was the angel-like vocal calls in the chorus, which in turn had transformed the demo into a project I would continue to work on for many months to come.One night, after procrastinating for enough time on the writing for “get down!”, I drove out to a parking garage I used to hang out at all the time alone and sat atop the ledge of the sixth floor wall. With my feet dangling dozens of feet above the hard ground, and my head peering just above the restaurants of Lake Nona, I sat with nothing but my math notebook and pen in hand, and stayed in that exact spot for the next 3 hours while I wrote the entirety of the song.The dance inspired vocal chants at the end, blended uniquely with the deadpan vocal delivery from the first two verses to create what would become one of my most unique and cinematic tracks ever. The outro portion of the song was added closer to the release of the album, and took the whole track to a level I didn’t even know was achievable.The lyrics reflected the almost robotic sounding atmosphere of the song, addressing issues of family dynamics, self-image doubts, and even simply the day-to-day struggle of making paychecks to last to the end of the week.The whole idea of “Will you get down?” is a rhetorical question to the listener testing the limits they are willing to conform to their plastic lives, entertaining the people around them who they don’t even care about, more than they do for themselves.Like animals trapped in a cell, we spend more time making our cell a home than trying to escape the cell, hell even becoming the cell itself. A cage, in search of a bird, who continues to “Dance for me”, “Dance for them”, and inevitably spends its whole life “Dancing around”.
shame
“Shame” is one of the most sonically unique songs on the album, and one of the latest additions to it as well. I originally posted a snippet of an early version of “shame” on my story back in December of 2023. The snippet was just over a minute long and very poorly mixed, and since the style of the song was so different to anything I was releasing at the time, I never thought to do anything with it.That was until one night in March of 2025 when I was playing a roughly mixed version of “Brash & Broken” for JD (Diego June) in the car, and we ran into a spot in the tracklist we thought needed a short song to break the streak of 4+ minute songs. While randomly playing old demos to see if any would fit, we came across the old “shame” demo and immediately felt the connection the song had to the album. That same night, I pulled the stems up, re-recroded my vocals, extended the bridge, and added some fills and effects to spice up the track.In just a day, “shame” had been transformed from a throwaway demo track, to a full fledged album-worthy song. The writing for the song follows the narrative of “imperfect machines” With a very straightforward call and response hook structure. You’ve got the desire in the main vocals, backed by the voice in the head that doubts or shoots down every idea or wish you have.
junkielove
This was the first song I had ever made with Winona. We produced and wrote it back in January of 2024, and it was originally intended to be on “STARCHILD: Abducted”, but once again due to the shift that the mixtape took creatively in the summer, the song was taken down and shelved for a more ambitious slot in the future. “Junkieove” was the first official single for the “Brash & Broken” rollout, which started back in September of 2024, and has a very long history behind its inception.The song itself was heavily inspired by the works of Clams Casino and Arca, with the vision being to make the song sound like a cold, dystopian forest (If that makes any sense). My delivery was as cold as I could make it, matching the energy of the pads and bass, with the drums being one of only two times on the album I chose to use trap drums, along with the second half of “love surreal”. Originally, the song didn’t include either the house section nor the guitar solo. The original song was a much simpler version, with Winona’s vocals being originally intended as background additions. During a mixing session in February, I spoke to Winona about maybe changing the middle of the song to a more electronic instrumental, and she immediately jumped at the idea. We got straight to work by adding the vocal loops and drums, with “April Mixtape 3” by Snow Strippers being the soundtrack to our inspiration for the section.At the time of the song’s creation, I was very much an amateur guitar player, so the solo took days of improvisation to finally perfect, and was then heavily distorted in the final mix. The guitar solo at the end was the only live aspect of the song aside from the vocals, setting apart the three major sections of the song; the cloud rap intro, the dance break, and the distorted guitar solo outro.Lyrically, “junkielove” was written in light of my dad quickly getting a girlfriend following the split from my mother just a few months prior. At the time, me and my mom were still living at the old house, with just a few weeks left until we would be practically evicted by my dad wanting to move back in. He had offered me my room at the house, but never once did the thought of leaving my mother who raised me alone cross my mind.The term junkie-love had nothing to do with drugs, but more of a low-life emotionless connection with someone for the sake of not being alone. The whole section of “Might as well take her overseas, lie to family… Even if you’re clean, everybody around you gon’ still see it as junkie love,” was very much about all the secret trips that would be hidden from the family with this mystery girl we had found out about.Sonically, the song always felt to me like sitting alone in the corner of the club with your own booth after the worst day ever, just trying to distract yourself from everything outside those four walls.
eternity
Eternity had been a hit in my mind since its creation back in 2022. I was 16 at the time I produced the song, with it being one of the earliest songs that I produced almost completely alone, with the synth and drums being all programmed by myself.The song was originally made for ethereal 9, but once the project shifted gears and the majority of the songs from that era were left behind, eternity was one of only four songs that lived to breathe the air of what would become Brash & Broken. The majority of ethereal 9 that wasn’t repurposed for this album was either completely scrapped or placed on my instrumental album, “The Soundtrack: An Auditory Experience”. sulfur, eleven, and into the exhibit were all originally on ethereal 9.The lyrics for eternity came during a very dark period in my life, right on the cusp of my eighteenth birthday. My parents had split up with seemingly no warning, and the foundation of what was my home and family life had been completely pulled out from under me in an instant. This sudden shift in my life led me to surround myself with people who were not the best influence simply for the sake of having company that I knew my parents could not provide anymore, fall out with a lot of my family, and become almost unrecognizable to the ones who I did keep around. I had begun to build a rather unhealthy relationship with smoking weed, as it was the only excuse I could come up with at the time to be anywhere but home, and would numb me to the point where I almost felt like everything at home was still okay. Looking back, there were clearly many things I didn’t handle properly or wish I had done differently, but nonetheless, that experience forced me to mature extremely quickly, and eventually build myself back up to become the man I am today.“eternity” came during a very rare moment of clarity during the time of the divorce, where I found myself almost looking from a third person view into my own reality. I finally returned to my grandmother's house, who I had not seen in months after the split, and stepped foot into the spare bedroom/office that I had slept in while me and my parents found ourselves homeless following the 2008 economic crash. I felt ungrateful for how I was treating myself at the time with everything I had endured and outlived in my life, so I wrote about it.The chorus of the song describes the metaphorical and literal triangle I had been living in for a couple of weeks before the split was official - my mom sleeping in her room, my dad in the guest room, and me next door to him. The song, while short, I find to be one of the most vulnerable pieces of poetry I had ever written, detailing my past, present, and what I sought to be my near future at the time, wondering if the hole I felt within my soul was eternal.
empty as a drum
Empty as a drum stands alone in the tracklist as one of the most minimal yet powerful songs on the entire record. I knew from the start of the album’s conception that I had to have my best friend, JD, on the record. The problem came when he shipped off to boot camp the summer prior. We stayed in very close contact throughout his time in BCT, and drove up to be present at his graduation in South Carolina. Following his graduation, he shipped off to Georgia for AIT and would only have a two week period to come home before his deployment began in South Korea. I was in Brazil visiting family during his first week, and it wasn’t until his second to last day home that we finally got in the studio and began working on music.I played him the album (what was done at the time) and told him to decide which song he thought he could offer the most on. To my surprise, he chose the instrumental to “empty as a drum”, which at the time only had a very poorly mixed chorus from me. He wrote his verse in under 30 minutes, and we recorded the whole song that night.Knowing that would be the last time we would be making music together for the next couple years, I wanted to take the backseat in the song and let him take up the majority of the runtime.The instrumental was heavily inspired by the albums like “Discovery” and “But You Caint Use My Phone”. The vocal delivery was as calm and soft-spoken as we could possibly be, especially considering we were recording out of my closet at 3 in the morning.As a child, drums were my favorite instrument to play. To this day, I consider them to be my main instrument, despite not having played in many years due to my adjustment to apartment life and downstairs neighbors. The idea of sound waves hitting the walls of a drum yet the insides being completely empty was always something I wanted to write a song about, especially with its relation to my emotions at the time. June’s verse added to the metaphor so beautifully, and his short but enticing verse is one of my favorites he’s ever written in the near decade we’ve been making music together.During the recording of “empty as a drum”, I mentioned the idea to JD of a narrated poem to close the album out, and immediately he asked if he could narrate it. Without a second thought, I agreed, and by the next morning, “Brash & Broken” was written. A poem addressing almost every concept explored throughout the album, placed perfectly right before the album’s outro, narrated by Diego June and WINONI.The people I worked with on this album I consider to be the five closest people to me in my life, and I wanted to immortalize the moment of working with them through their contributions on the album. My mother painted the cover art of the album, which I then edited over a picture of myself from the “eternity” Visualizer, my grandmother’s voice was given its own track as the only spoken word interlude on the album, my girlfriend was featured on two songs on the album, and now my best friend who I consider a brother was on the album as well.
sorry, i've been gone
The outro. Where everything must be neatly wrapped up and condensed into one final crescendo.The idea of writing about my absence came from a walk I took one morning where I began to reminisce on my high school days and all the people I hadn’t kept in contact with since. Not necessarily missing them, but acknowledging the value they brought to my journey as a young adult finding my way in this world. Seeing photos back from then, despite the short amount of time that had passed, felt like ages had passed.I wanted to address everything, and everyone, all at once. My complicated relationship with my father and a very uncomfortable conversation we had in a hotel room a year ago, my childhood friends who were now preparing to leave for years for military duty, all the horror and destruction happening around the world, my shortcomings and how I’ve learned to not only accept them, but embrace them. It felt like expelling all the negative energy that had been building up quietly within my being for the past year.Not so much a, “everything will be great and life is perfect” motif, but more of a, “I’ll land on my feet no matter what.” Is this perspective naive or unrealistic? Only time will tell. But today, at 19 years old, I’ve got enough experience to fill an album, and I'm ready to continue landing on my feet as long as I have more stories to share with the world.“Brash forever, broken together”. Held together by failures and dreams just out of our grasp, this is our world. What will you do to try to get an inch closer to your dream and further from that last failure?
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