Unbecoming

2026–Present | Solo Recording Project

After more than thirty years of playing in other people's bands, I eventually had to find out what happens when I don't have to.

That's Unbecoming.

I've spent decades writing songs, playing guitar, recording, engineering, learning what works, learning what doesn't, and figuring out how to make heavy music sound the way I hear it in my head.

I've also spent decades learning how much of that process involves compromise.

That's not necessarily a bad thing.

Being in a band means listening to other musicians, working within someone else's vision, figuring out where your parts fit, and sometimes accepting that the thing you really want to do simply doesn't belong in that particular song.

Unbecoming is what happens when I remove that limitation.

There is no established lineup.

There is no previous version of the band to live up to.

There is no sound anyone expects me to reproduce.

There are no rules.

If a song needs guitar, there's guitar.

If it needs something ugly, I'll make it ugly.

If it needs something atmospheric, strange, heavy, quiet, dissonant or completely fucking ridiculous, there's nobody standing next to me telling me it doesn't fit the band's sound.

I can make the sound fit the song.

The project draws from everything I've done before — extreme metal, death metal, groove, thrash, sludge, decades of playing, writing and recording.

But I'm not interested in recreating any of it.

That's already been done.

Unbecoming is about taking all of that experience and seeing what happens when I stop trying to become the guitarist I thought I was supposed to be.

The name is intentional.

Unbecoming is about stripping away the expectations, identities and definitions that accumulate over the years.

It's about taking everything apart.

Keeping the useful pieces.

Throwing the rest into the fucking fire.

And building something new.

This is a recording project right now.

Maybe it becomes something more.

Maybe it doesn't.

There are no expectations.

There is only the music.

Unbecoming is not a new beginning.

It is everything that came before, stripped down and rebuilt into something new.

Steven M. Jasinski
Guitar | Writer | Recording Artist | Engineer
Phoenix, Arizona

Gasping

2023–Present | Active

Before Unbecoming, I was still doing what I've been doing for most of my life.

Standing in a room with other musicians, guitars plugged into amplifiers, trying to make something heavy.

That's Gasping.

I joined Gasping in 2023 as a guitarist, bringing a few decades of experience with me.

By this point, I'd already learned that making heavy music isn't just about playing fast, playing loud, or writing the biggest riff you can think of.

It's about knowing when a song needs more and when it needs less.

It's about listening to the other musicians in the room.

It's about knowing when something actually works — and when you're just fucking with it because you can.

Gasping gave me another opportunity to put all of that experience to work without trying to recreate anything I'd done before.

We released a four-song record, and we're continuing to write and record.

There's something pretty cool about walking into a room with musicians from a completely different era of my life and still finding common ground through ridiculously loud guitars.

The scene changes.

The bands change.

The equipment changes.

The music changes.

The desire to make something heavy apparently doesn't.

For me, Gasping isn't a reunion tour or a trip down memory lane.

It's current.

I'm still writing.

Still recording.

Still playing.

Still trying to come up with a riff that's better than the last one.

And after more than thirty years, that's probably enough proof that this isn't going away anytime soon.

Gasping Website

He Who Binds Himself

2008–2021 | Inactive

Going back another chapter, this was probably the point where a lot of the pieces of my musical life started coming together.

He Who Binds Himself was a different animal.

I joined the band as a guitarist in 2008, stepping into a particularly deep part of the Phoenix death-metal scene.

The band had connections to musicians who had already spent years making a name for themselves in Arizona's extreme-metal community, including musicians with ties to Vehemence and Metal Blade Records.

You could hear that experience in the music.

You could feel it when the amps came on.

And you could smell the beer, sweat and party musk.

My role in HWBH eventually became much more than playing guitar.

I became involved in the recording and production side of the band, as well as management and booking.

I contributed guitar and CD layout design to the eventual self-titled full-length, He Who Binds Himself, released through Metal Devastation Records in 2020.

I also engineered all of the bass tracks and the guitar solo for Alone and Suffering.

The album was recorded, mixed and mastered at Villain Recording Studio in Phoenix.

That part of the experience was important to me.

By then, I'd realized that I enjoyed the technical side of making music almost as much as I enjoyed playing it.

Writing the riff is one thing.

Playing it is another.

Getting it to sound right coming out of a speaker is something else entirely.

HWBH gave me the opportunity to work on all three.

The band went through multiple lineups and eventually became the version that produced the self-titled record.

After years of writing, recording and playing together, that record finally became a reality.

For me, HWBH was where the guitarist, songwriter, recording engineer and the guy who actually gives a shit about how the final record sounds all started occupying the same room — and where I started realizing that I could contribute to a record in a lot more ways than simply playing guitar.

That experience would follow me into everything that came afterward.

Then COVID hit, I learned who my real friends were, and everything went to shit.

Old EPK website I designed

Autumn's End

2010–2013 | Inactive

Before He Who Binds Himself became such a major part of my musical life, there was another experience that taught me something completely different.

How to walk into an established band and figure out where I belonged.

Autumn's End had already been around since 2003 when I joined in 2010.

They already had a sound.

They already had an identity.

They already had a history.

And I was a fan first.

That made joining the band a very different experience from some of my earlier projects.

I came into an existing machine rather than helping build one from scratch.

I joined as a guitarist alongside musicians including Chris Cannella and El, and we hit the ground running.

I remember learning songs in an RV on the way to EMG TV Studios to record two videos and play some shows in California.

This was a different level of musicianship.

I had to learn where I fit, figure out what I could contribute, and make my playing work with musicians who had already been doing this together for years.

That's a different kind of musical education.

Autumn's End had a darker, guitar-driven sound that pulled from groove, death and thrash metal.

My time with the band included the recording of The Siren's Lament, released in 2012.

I didn't write the material, but I wrote most of my guitar parts with Chris, and the record represents an important point in my development as a musician.

I wasn't the same guitarist who had walked onto stages with Eroticide years earlier.

I'd been playing for a long time.

I'd learned how to write, perform and record.

And now I was stepping into an established band and bringing all of those experiences with me.

This was NOT just another band.

These were established professionals operating at a professional level, and they left an impression on me that has stayed with me long after the band ended.

Autumn's End was a different chapter.

Try not to suck.

Eroticide

1993–1997 | 2000–2007 | Inactive

And before all of that, there was Eroticide.

This is where the story actually starts.

I joined the band in 1993 under the name SiN MDK, shortly after moving to Arizona.

I stayed through 1997, stepped away for a few years, and eventually returned in 2000, remaining with the band until 2007.

This was a very different time.

Phoenix had a much smaller underground metal scene, and if you wanted people to know who you were, you played.

There was no social media.

No streaming service waiting to recommend your music.

No easy way to reach thousands of people from a bedroom.

You put up flyers.

Called people.

Passed around tapes and CDs.

Loaded your gear into whatever vehicle would fit it.

And showed up.

Eroticide was never particularly interested in being subtle.

The music was aggressive, dark and unapologetic, and I played a significant role in shaping the band's sound, writing and musical direction.

The theatrical side of the band was an important part of what we did, but the music was always at the center of it for me.

We pushed the theatrical side of extreme metal hard.

Sometimes probably harder than was necessary.

There were costumes.

There was blood.

There was controversy.

And there was a lot of noise.

Our 1997 performance at the Nile Theater in Mesa became one of those shows people remembered for reasons that went well beyond the music.

Several members of the band were arrested, and the incident eventually became part of the band's mythology.

But the spectacle was never the whole point.

The music was.

Looking back, Eroticide was a huge part of my development as both a guitarist and a songwriter.

I was young, angry, ambitious and surrounded by musicians who were trying to figure out exactly how far we could push the music.

I wrote a LOT of material during this period, and pieces of that writing would continue to surface in Eroticide recordings for years afterward.

Demo '96 / Thou Shall Not Bow Down came out of that period.

In 1997, two tracks were featured on the Legion of the Scroll 2 compilation.

Recordings made at Vien Studios in 1998 later became known as Comatose Lover.

In 2004, Dawn of Obscenity was released after being recorded at Villain Recording Studio in Phoenix.

A handful of material I wrote was also eventually recorded and featured on If It Bleeds, It Can Be Butchered, released in 2015.

These recordings are some of the permanent artifacts from that period of my life.

But the records aren't really the only thing I remember.

Eroticide taught me how to play on a stage.

It taught me how to write.

It taught me how to develop a musical identity.

It taught me how to promote a band before the internet made that easy.

It taught me how much work is involved in keeping a band alive.

And it taught me that if you're going to make music, you need to give people a reason to remember it.

You have to grind.

You have to leave a mark.

Looking back at Eroticide now is complicated.

Eroticide was an extremely obscene, sexually explicit and deliberately offensive band. That was part of its identity, and at the time, pushing boundaries and provoking reactions was something we embraced.

It was the underground metal scene of the 1990s, where being offensive was practically a competition, and we were more than willing to participate.

I'm not going to pretend that everything we did, said or represented back then is something I'm particularly proud of today. Some of it makes me uncomfortable looking back, and there are things I simply wouldn't be involved with now.

Age, experience and a few decades of perspective have a way of changing how you look at things.

But I also don't believe in rewriting history or pretending something wasn't part of my life simply because my perspective has changed.

Eroticide was what it was.

For better or worse.

There are parts of what the band became that I struggle with, and I don't necessarily recognize myself in everything associated with Eroticide today.

But I also can't ignore what it was when I was there, the music I helped create, or the enormous role it played in shaping me as a musician.

I can appreciate what we accomplished musically without necessarily endorsing everything that came along with it.

It was a huge part of my life.

Whatever I think about the band now, I have to acknowledge what it meant to me then — and what it helped turn me into.

The guitarist.

The songwriter.

The performer.

The obsession with recording.

The desire to make something that sounds different.

All of that started taking shape here.

Eventually disagreements over the band's direction, material and live show led to me permanently leaving in 2007.

But by then, the damage was done.

I'd already been bitten by the fucking bug.

And more than thirty years later, apparently, I still have it.

Discography

Every release, in order, oldest band at the bottom. Click a record to open the tracklist. *** marks material I wrote; a bare * marks parts I rewrote.

Unbecoming

2026 Whatever releases eventually happen in progress +

Nothing recorded yet — check back.

Gasping

2024 A Dark Place guitar — did not write this material +

1. Frailty
2. Ripe With Failure
3. Spiteful
4. Pins and Needles

Listen on Bandcamp

He Who Binds Himself

2020 He Who Binds Himself guitar · all bass · solo on Alone And Suffering +

1. Our Will The Way
2. This Time She Found Us
3. *** Alone And Suffering (material & lyrics)
4. The Worthless Altar
5. I Am The Dead God
6. *** March Of The Bastards
7. These Eyes See Everything
8. Why I Ate Them

Listen on Bandcamp

Autumn's End

2017 Burn the Earth historical reference — not recorded with me +

1. Burn the Earth
2. Balance of Pain
3. Allegiance
4. Cross You Bear
5. Falter of Man
6. Longest Rain

2012 The Siren's Lament guitar — wrote my parts with Chris +

1. Siren's Song
2. Arise from Slumber
3. Callous
4. Judas
5. Cold Winter of Time
6. Beautiful Lie
7. Release
8. Solemn
9. Ghost Life
10. Of the Damned
11. Force of Habit

Listen on Spotify

2006 Act Of Attrition historical reference — not recorded with me +

1. Intro
2. Eyes of Ignorance
3. Integrity
4. Truth B.C.
5. To Carry the Burden
6. The Raven's Eye
7. Scars from the Candle
8. Give Up the Ghost
9. Hand of Glory
10. Soiled Wings
11. Interlude
12. The Dirge

2004 Autumn's End historical reference — not recorded with me +

1. Elusive
2. Bleed My Name
3. Diligence
4. Darkness of Words
5. Worthless
6. Chaos Within
7. Interlude of Decay
8. Age of Reason
9. Solace
10. Reflection
11. Passion in Hate

Eroticide

2015 If It Bleeds, It Can Be Butchered historical — not recorded with me, but features my material +

1. Intro (I.I.B.I.C.B.B.)
2. Vagina Dentata
3. *** Comatose Lover
4. *** Exit To Widen
5. Below Scum
6. Angels Wear Crotchless Panties
7. *** I Eat Shit
8. *** Bloodsoaked
9. Satan's Porno Preschool
10. *** Destroy Something Beautiful (prev. Hell's Kitchen)
11. *** Die, Bitch, Die
12. Phantasm

2004 Dawn Of Obscenity guitar — *** written, * parts rewritten +

1. Intro D.O.O.
2. *** American Pervert
3. *** Rotten Inside
4. Anyone But U
5. * Prayers for a Dead Emotion
6. Dormant Hate
7. *** Deteriorate
8. *** Cyanide Orgasm
9. Masturbate Me
10. *** Cerebral Bore
11. Erection Dissection
12. *** The Scorching

Listen on Spotify

2000 Kevorkian Coitus historical reference — not recorded with me +

1. Erection Dissection
2. Relationshit
3. Angels Wear Crotchless Panties
4. Ride the Rohypnol

1998 Comatose Lover (Vien Studios, unreleased) guitar +

1. *** Comatose Lover
2. Copulate
3. *** Masterhater (a.k.a. Mordicum)

1997 Legion Of The Scroll 2 compilation — guitar +

1. Kunt Humongous
2. *** I Eat Shit

1996 Demo '96 / Thou Shall Not Bow Down guitar +

1. Dormant Hate
2. *** Exit To Widen
3. Ginger Vitus
4. Kunt Humongous

1993 Glutton for Punishment historical reference — not recorded with me +

1. Rapture Rupture
2. Crusifuxxx
3. Eroticourse

3D Printed Logos

3D Printed Logos is where metal, art and technology collide.

I've spent most of my life making metal music.

Guitars. Amplifiers. Drums. Vocals. Recording equipment. Stages. Rehearsal rooms.

Eventually I started thinking about something else that has always been a huge part of metal:

The logos.

If you've been into metal for any amount of time, you know that a band's logo isn't just a name slapped on a shirt. Some of them are instantly recognizable. Some are works of art. Some are barely fucking readable.

And some of them deserve to exist somewhere other than on a screen.

That's where 3D Printed Logos comes in.

The idea is pretty simple: take the artwork and logos that have lived for years on album covers, shirts, flyers, websites and stickers and turn them into actual physical objects.

Something you can put on a shelf.

Hang on a wall.

Put in a studio.

Or just stare at while wondering why you thought owning a giant three-dimensional death-metal logo was a good idea.

Obviously, I thought it was a great idea.

This project combines a few things I've been interested in for a long time: metal, graphic design, computers, 3D modeling, fabrication and making things myself.

There's something satisfying about taking a flat image and figuring out how to turn it into a physical object. You have to think about shapes, depth, structure, supports, tolerances and all the other wonderfully nerdy details that go into making something that can actually come out of a printer in one piece.

And because this is coming from someone who's spent decades inside the metal scene, I'm approaching the project from the perspective of a fan and musician — not somebody who just discovered that metal bands have cool logos.

I've been looking at these things for decades.

I've worn them on shirts.

I've stared at them on album covers.

I've tried to decipher them.

I've drawn a few of them myself over the years.

Now I'm making some of them in three dimensions.

3D Printed Logos is where metal, art and technology collide.

It's another way of preserving the stuff that made an impression on me throughout the years — and hopefully creating something that other metal fans will think is just as fucking cool.

This is still a work in progress.

There are plenty of logos to model, plenty of ideas to try, and probably an unreasonable number of hours that are going to disappear into a 3D printer.

That's fine.

I've already spent more than thirty years doing things with guitars that most reasonable people would consider excessive.

Why stop now?

3D Printed Logos