Twenty Years in Eight Tracks

It started the way it always does - hours. Endless hours with a guitar during school, then through university, then after. Legato runs until the fingers burned. Complex chord voicings that made no sense until suddenly they did. Pure improvisation, instinct over intellect, playing until the instrument disappeared and there was just the sound. I uploaded my first experiments to SoundCloud under the name Immense Immersion - "one man improvisation exps" was the entire bio. Tracks called Fxdttt and The Unconscious and Time Does Not Exist. Bluesy jazz, experimental blues, whatever felt right in the moment. Eighty-eight followers who listened to a kid figuring out his sound in real time.

Later, the name changed to UPFUSION - a word born from the strive to develop and fuse different styles and genres into something that didn't exist yet. The jazz fusion obsession was already deep by then. Allan Holdsworth's impossible chord voicings, Shawn Lane's velocity, Pat Metheny's architecture. I wasn't trying to copy them. I was trying to understand how they thought, so I could think differently. This is the story of where that thinking led - eight compositions across twenty years, and every track is here for you to hear exactly how it unfolded.

The First Jazz Compositions (2013)

Spring Vibes came out whole - pure joy, recorded on the first take with the kind of effortless flow that only happens when you stop thinking. I originally called it Spring Vibes, but after reading the SoundCloud comments - "Gives joy to live! Thank's" - I renamed it Joy To Live, because that listener heard exactly what the music was trying to say. Bright quartal voicings, a walking bass line I played myself, and an energy that still feels alive more than a decade later.

D Flat Jazz was a different story entirely. It sounded effortless in my imagination. Recording it meant confronting every technical limitation I had - and discovering that the limitations themselves could become part of the character. Darker and more angular than Spring Vibes, pushing into chromatic territory with chord substitutions I'd been obsessing over for months. The slightly imperfect timing, the moments where the harmony reaches just a little further than the fingers can comfortably go - that's where the life is.

Those early uploads taught me something crucial: the gap between what you hear in your head and what comes out of the speakers is where the real work happens. One track flows out perfect on the first take. The next one fights you for every bar. Both end up mattering equally - the effortless joy and the hard-won complexity are two sides of the same musical instinct.

FATES: Greek Mythology Meets Jazz (2024-2025)

After years of writing, performing, and absorbing everything I could from the masters - Holdsworth's impossible legato, Jaco's harmonic audacity, Herbie Hancock's textural genius - I was ready to attempt something larger. FATES is an exploration of Greek mythology, where the powerful forces of the gods and the unyielding thread of fate intertwine. Through rich, evocative compositions, the album delves into the timeless struggle between divine will and human destiny, capturing the grandeur and mystery of ancient forces that shape the world.

Three compositions from FATES represent a quantum leap from those early SoundCloud experiments. Everything changed - the production moved to Logic Pro X, the bass and piano lines were performed on a Seaboard Grand 49 with MPE expression that no keyboard can replicate, and the harmonic vocabulary expanded into territory the early recordings couldn't have reached. But the core instinct remained: improvisation first, structure second.

Cronus opens with heavy, brooding chords in F# Harmonic Minor - one of the darkest tonal centers in Western harmony, perfectly suited to the Titan who devoured his own children. Nearly every pitch class is active at once, the harmony pushed to its chromatic limit while the Seaboard's bass patches anchor the low end with an expressiveness that fretted instruments can't touch. The guitar improvisation navigates between Harmonic Minor and its Super Locrian shadow, treating dissonance as landscape rather than obstacle. There's a strange tension at work: the tone itself is luminous and bright despite the dark harmonic language, as if the music is lit from within while the chords pull downward. The weight arrives early, then the remaining minutes slowly disintegrate - mirroring the fall the title demands.

Hypnos, the god of sleep, demanded a different approach entirely. Built in D Locrian - the most melancholy and unresolved of all modes - this prelude exists in the liminal space between waking and dreaming. What makes it breathe is the modal interchange: the Locrian center constantly dissolves into brighter major and melodic minor territory before falling back into shadow, like a dreamer surfacing toward consciousness and sinking again. The Seaboard's electric piano patches float through these shifts with MPE aftertouch that makes each note breathe independently, and the wide dynamic range gives the composition room to move from near-silence to full orchestral weight. Downtempo, ambient, trip-hop, jazz - all woven into something that doesn't belong to any single genre.

Poseidon explores Phrygian Dominant territory - the fifth mode of Harmonic Minor, with its signature raised third that creates an exotic, Middle Eastern gravity. The harmony moves fluidly between Phrygian Dominant, Super Locrian, and Harmonic Minor - three modes from the same family, like currents in the same ocean running at different depths. The dynamic range here is the widest of any composition in the catalog, stretching from whispered undertow to full oceanic force. The Seaboard's bass patches drive surging waves of intensity while the guitar navigates the alien interval structure, treating dissonance not as something to resolve but as the entire point. The ocean doesn't ask permission, and neither does this harmony.

The comments on FATES captured something I couldn't have anticipated. "He lost art of Jazz isn't lost! Great musicality and skills" wrote Ande Rogers on Cronus. "A truly refreshing and remarkably eventful production" said AFRICARE PRODUCTIONS. On Poseidon, someone wrote: "Want to test your ear to some new sounds that you've never heard? This is your song! Totally original!" That kind of response makes the years of practice worth it.

AEON: Truth, Illusion, and Everything Between (2025)

AEON contemplates the paradox of presence: how we dwell simultaneously in clarity and illusion, in measured ages and fleeting perfections, forever seeking oases in time's vast terrain. It's a philosophical suite on truth's many faces - axioms we build upon, mirages we mistake for destinations, and the umbral spaces where certainty dissolves into something wiser. Three compositions from AEON close this jazz collection, representing the most mature writing I've done.

Axiom is built on self-evident harmonic truths - and the analysis reveals exactly which ones. The dominant mode is C Lydian Dominant, the fourth mode of Melodic Minor: Mixolydian's warmth with the raised fourth that George Russell identified as the gravitational center of all tonal music in his Lydian Chromatic Concept. It's the brightest-sounding composition in the catalog, with the widest dynamic range of any AEON track, and the weight arrives right in the center - then sustains rather than decays. Simple truths stacked until they combine into complex structures that somehow remain transparent. Every note earns its place. No ornaments, no filler, no compositional convenience. Just the axiom and its consequences.

At over eight minutes, Noir is the longest, fastest, and most ambitious piece in this collection. The title isn't aesthetic decoration - it describes the harmonic DNA precisely. The composition lives between E Locrian and Super Locrian, the darkest corner of modal harmony where the diminished fifth replaces the perfect fifth as home. It moves at nearly double the tempo of every other track, and the structure is cinematic: seven minutes of patient accumulation, tension building without release, until everything converges in the final moments. The entire composition is a slow climb toward its last breath. Shawn Lane's ghost is in this one, in the passages where the line accelerates beyond what seems physically possible and then suddenly stops, leaving you suspended in silence.

Sigma closes this collection the way a mathematical proof closes: with inevitability. The title refers to summation - the symbol that gathers everything that came before into a single expression. The harmonic center sits in Bb minor territory, caught between Russell's bright Lydian gravity and the dark weight of Harmonic Minor - the two forces nearly balanced, as if the composition holds both truths simultaneously rather than choosing. The slowest tempo in the catalog, and like Noir, the weight arrives at the very end - patient accumulation, then release. Twenty years of harmonic vocabulary distilled into three minutes and forty-four seconds. Not a summary - a synthesis. The difference matters.

Noir became the most commented track in the collection - "It's the best thing I've heard in years. Cold cut" wrote JAZZPERS JOURNEY. "Captivating original jazz/blues sounds, had me gripped all the way through" said Annie Dieu-Le-Veut. On Axiom: "PURE Jazz. Everything fits together perfectly" from Ghosts of Mars. "You can tell you not chasing trends, just speaking truth" wrote Shroomgod Reborn. Across all tracks, over 40,000 plays from listeners in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and beyond.

The Influences: 5,371 Artists Deep

Music doesn't emerge from a vacuum. According to my Last.fm listening history, I've scrobbled 5,371 different artists over the years. But some voices shaped this journey more than others. These are the musicians whose recordings I returned to obsessively - not to copy, but to understand how they thought about harmony, rhythm, and the architecture of a composition.

• Allan Holdsworth - The reason I started thinking about chord voicings as three-dimensional objects rather than flat shapes on a fretboard. His legato technique rewired my understanding of what a guitar line could be.
• Shawn Lane - Raw velocity married to deep harmonic knowledge. Lane proved that technique and musicality aren't opposites - at their peak, they're the same thing.
• Herbie Hancock - The master of texture and space. Head Hunters taught me that jazz could groove without apology. Future Shock taught me it could be anything.
• Jaco Pastorius - The bass as a lead voice. Portrait of Tracy changed what I thought was possible on four strings. His harmonic sense is in every bass line I've ever written.
• Dag Arnesen - Norwegian jazz piano at its most luminous. His sense of space and the way silence functions as a compositional element directly influenced Hypnos.
• Pat Metheny - Melodic genius with an architect's sense of structure. Bright Size Life to Orchestrion - every album a lesson in how far jazz can reach without losing its center.
• Jacques Loussier - The proof that Bach and jazz share the same DNA. His approach to reharmonization is embedded in everything I do.
• Greg Howe - Fusion guitar at its most precise and inventive. His rhythmic displacement ideas appear in Cronus and Poseidon.
• Guthrie Govan - The most complete guitarist alive. His ability to move between styles without losing authenticity is the standard I measure myself against.

What Comes Next

From Spring Vibes to Sigma, these eight compositions span twenty years of a musician's evolution - from the first guitar improvisations to the Seaboard's MPE expressiveness to the newest chapter. In 2026 I acquired a Fender American Original '60s Jazz Bass with Thomastik-Infeld JF344 flatwounds - an instrument that changed the entire low-end architecture. The Seaboard's double-bass patches gave FATES and AEON their foundation; the Fender gives what comes next a rawness and physical presence that no digital instrument can replicate.

Every composition featured here was written, performed, and produced by UPFUSION. Guitar, bass, keyboards, drums, and saxophone - all played and recorded in Logic Pro X. The music is available on all major streaming platforms, and the full FATES and AEON albums contain additional compositions beyond what's presented here. Jazz has always been a conversation. These tracks are my side of it. The comments from listeners around the world - that's the other side. The conversation continues.