The Album We Never Made

I wrote these songs before the band played them.

That sentence matters. It is the beginning of the story, not a footnote added after the fact.

I began in Donostia–San Sebastián around 2005. I was a young guitarist trying to make a band and writing the music I wanted that band to play. I wrote the melodies, chord progressions, structures, riffs, and lyrics. I mapped the songs in TuxGuitar and developed them in Logic Pro. I kept the tablature, MIDI, lyric files, and original project sessions because they were the working memory of the compositions.

Then I brought complete songs into rehearsal.

Rehearsal changed them as performances. A drummer finds the weight of a chorus. A singer decides how a line should leave the body. A bass part makes a shape underneath a progression. Those contributions mattered, especially in a band whose recordings were captured live. But the framework was already there: the melody, the harmony, the lyrics, the sections, and the guitar.

Rage of Fénix never made a studio record.

What survives came from rehearsal rooms and small stages: fixed cameras, phones near amplifiers, bleed between instruments, room noise, and performances intended to be lived rather than preserved. Some recordings have the blunt intimacy of a practice room. Others caught the band in front of a small audience. None of them was the album I heard in my head.

The band did not end with a dramatic rupture. It stopped by degrees. The lineup had always moved around me; eventually everyone moved elsewhere. There was no farewell record, no final meeting about the archive, and no decision to abandon the songs. There was simply a growing distance between the music as composed and the music as it had been recorded.

The files remained

For years, the recordings sat beside their other traces: tablature, MIDI, lyrics, and project files. They were not souvenirs. Together they documented a path from an individual composition to a band performance.

That is why everything could return.

An old rehearsal recording can tell you what happened in a room. A tablature file can tell you what the guitar and structure were before the room. A lyric file remembers the exact language. A project session remembers the solitary work that happened away from rehearsal. No single artifact carries the whole history. The archive does.

I kept it because the songs remained mine to finish, even when finishing them seemed technically impossible.

A new production became possible

In 2026, the tools changed.

I used Suno AI as part of a production process built around the original compositions and recordings. I did not ask a machine to invent Rage of Fénix. I did not ask for a style, a new melody, or a replacement concept. The production used the historical recordings at full audio influence and no style prompt. The point was to let what already existed drive what came next.

Suno rendered new audio. I directed the process, listened, rejected, iterated, selected, sequenced, and mastered. The result is a new phonogram: not the old rehearsal recording placed on a streaming service, and not a fictional band assembled from a prompt.

The distinction is simple:

• I composed the songs.
• The historical band performed them in rehearsal rooms and on stages.
• The archive preserved both the compositions and those performances.
• I used that material and new tools to produce the 2026 recordings.

AI did not supply the authorship. It changed what one person could produce from surviving material.

That does not make the process uninteresting or uncomplicated. It makes transparency necessary. The production method is disclosed throughout this site because hiding it would weaken the story. These recordings exist because a new tool arrived at the same moment I was ready to reopen an old archive.

Responsibility

The final decisions are mine.

Every version that stayed, every version that disappeared, every edit, every master, every cover, every release date, and every public claim belongs to the project I direct now. I do not assign intention to software. I do not use the former lineup to imply participation in a recording they did not make. I acknowledge the historical performers where that history belongs: with the original recordings.

The released music stands on a longer chain of work, but the 2026 phonograms are new productions.

Rage of Fénix was already the band’s name. Fénix is the Spanish word for phoenix, but when I chose it the name was only a name: slightly excessive, a little strange, right for a young band.

Years later, it became literal.

The band that never made its album disappeared. The compositions remained. The files remained. The recordings remained. From those remains, I made the record.

The name had been waiting for the story to catch up.

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Songs composed by Taig Mac Carthy. Produced by Taig Mac Carthy using Suno AI from original compositions and recordings.

Read how the archive documents the compositions, what AI-assisted production means here, or the public legal and IP posture.