Fight The Enemy Profile

Born with the full name Wardhana Aulia Rizaldi AKA Rizal. He was raised in the east side of Bandung, in the same neighborhood where he met Erick, the current drummer of Fight The Enemy. He grew up as a common kid with huge interest in toys especially racing cars. Until somehow he found a toy piano near his house and then got excited by its sound. He started to emulate the notes that people sang or by listening to a records, with that tiny toy piano. His mother later realized that he had a musical talent. She bought him a small electric keyboard. It was Yamaha PortaSound. His family moved out to Kalimantan just after he finished elementary school. His father then told him to form a band. The first band he ever joined was actually formed by his father colleagues’s children who concerned about the musical talents of their kids. He finally had a real piano teacher later on. The first song he learned was The Beatles’ Let It Be, because of its super simple chord progression. At the third grade of junior high, he moved back to Bandung. He met his old friend Erick, that had already joined a band. They formed various bands ever since. The bands were mainly playing hard rock songs.

At the high school Rizal began to concentrate more on jazz and classical music, and attended a music course as well as studied in a jazz school. He joined the school choir as the piano player and stayed there for few years even when he went to college. He got along really well the choir conductor and vocal coach that eventually the school trusted him to be the music director for the choir. Meanwhile, the supporting ensemble musicians for the choir decided to form a band. Later known as Bulletproof. He called Erick to join the army. They played acid jazz at first but then gradually changed to “mainstream” music.

One day he bought Metal Edge magazine that had Marilyn Manson as the cover story. He started to listen some heavier stuff, both metal and industrial. Until he decided to quit the jazz school after he listened to Marilyn Manson’s Antichrist Superstar. He even joined a Nine Inch Nails cover band with some of his former high school friends. He began to learn guitar as well.

At the age of 19, he had a car accident that broke his right arm. The doctor told him not to play any instruments for at least 2 months. He ignored the doctor. The band even played on a festival just few weeks after the accident. The show went on as usual.

This phase was actually the time he switched to guitar gradually. Several songs he played keyboards, others on guitar. A year later he was the only guitar player left, with nothing but a strat and some stompboxes (including Boss OS-2, that he mentioned as “the best overdrive pedal I’ve ever owned”).

Bulletproof then improved their music and sound to be more complicated than ever. They refused to write radio-friendly songs and chose to go their own way to write the music that most common people didn’t even understand.

Got sick and tired of his main band, he and Erick jammed together in studio wrote some even more heavier and aggressive music. Then both agreed to release the demos under the new name, Fight the Enemy. In March 2006, the first EP, Hopes and Dreams was released. The record was initially intended for personal collection, until people started to like it.

He was also seen onstage with some other bands during the Fight The Enemy years. One of them is a band called Anti Fake God that later Rizal himself denied as follows:

“I was NOT really in that band. Their guitar player left the band for some lame reasons, they asked me to do some gigs, and I was just on the stage kicking some ass, and had fun. No offense, but I think they’re not really a band. Just a bunch of ****** getting ***** and play. But I really enjoyed getting along with them not as bandmates, just buddies”

He appeared on a single CD, some live shows, including one for local TV.

Currently, he still lives in Bandung working with his father and running his own web design workshop, Mindsanity Dotcom . He sometimes does remixes for other bands.