VICTORY MOON. That’s the loose translation of Jay Som, San Francisco musician Melina Duterte’s baby name generator-inspired band name. Since 2012, Duterte (who also plays in Bay Area band Summer Peaks) has quietly shared songs online under the Jay Som moniker.
Shortly after moving from her hometown of Brentwood, California, to San Francisco last November, Duterte released Turn Into, nine “finished and unfinished” guitar-driven lo-fi pop songs that she wrote, recorded, and mixed herself while learning to play drums. “I accumulated a bunch of instruments and equipment throughout time, and I took classes for audio engineering,” she says. “I did everything by myself.
“[Turn Into] was weirdly random, it was spur of the moment,” Duterte continues, “I was just at home one night and I remember thinking, 'I don’t have any release out.’ I used to do this thing where every few months I’d release, like, one song, and I’d put it on Bandcamp or my SoundCloud. Those would usually be demos that I’d record. But I ended up looking through a bunch of my songs on this hard drive and I picked out nine of them, and I just decided to put them all together without thinking about the track listing, I didn’t really think about making them sound better.