Month: May 2023

It’s Missa Innominata’s first birthday!

31.05.2023

It’s always hard to start writing these kind of posts – not because I don’t know, what to share with you, but rather because there are too many things at the same time on my mind. So, instead of trying to “find my voice”, let me jump immediately into the middle of things: Missa Innominata, my second full-lenght album became one year old today!

Missa Innominata represents an important milestone for me. Not just because of its concept and multicolored musical approaches (back then I was in a mood for heavily experimenting with various tonal and emotional elements) but also its sound and way of production. I don’t say that it turned out to be perfect in this regard (not at all!), but I do say that it was created with the intention to reach the best achievable quality both on the songwriting and music production side. I always used to say that composing and making music is a constant journey towards an ideal, never-achievable musical perfection: and Missa Innominata is definitely a significant step for me in this continuous learning process. While I internalized the basics of music making and sound production during the recording, mixing and mastering of my first album, here I already had at least a general idea on how to do these things better than before. Compared to the rawness of Hexapla, Missa Innominata turned out to be a less brutal, but more sophisticated and multilayered album with various emotional aspects and faces.

Let me tell you that I’m extremely proud of this album. I really poured my heart into these six tracks, trying to condensate multiple feelings and thoughts in the shape of a wide range of musical approaches. Besides the joy of creating (hopefully quality) music, however, I learned a couple of lessons too, while creating this album. The most important lesson was that I realized that I need professional help to further refine my recording, mixing and mastering skills. There is always a point where one has to realize his own limitations – and my most obvious limitation was my instinctive way of mixing and mastering my own music. I needed guidance on how to evolve. Hopefully the sound quality of the next album will witness those enormous efforts that I put into learning how to mix music.

Anyway, it’s almost midnight here, and I just wanted to share my joy with you guys before the day ends: happy birthday to the second Darkwave album!

The new album is almost ready!

11.05.2023

This is the post that should have already been written weeks ago. I should have shared my joy with you guys earlier: the recording and mixing of the new album is finally finished!

The whole process is not 100% complete yet, though. I still have to spend a couple of days with mastering and fine-tuning the tracks. Also, I must upload the result somewhere to distribute the new album on the main streaming platforms, and it will probably take an additional couple of weeks. But first I must put aside everything for one or two weeks, in order to have a chance to re-listen to the new songs with “fresh ears”. My brain and auditory system are already saturated with the constant sound-overload: I must double-check the tracks again from a certain “distance”, to identify any possible weak points.

What to expect from these new songs? First of all, I think I succeeded to work out a significantly improved, clearer and more robust sound. Although it’s not easy for a home studio to compete with “real” studios quality-wise, I think this time I managed to do a quite decent job. The new songs sound fatter, darker and more compact than the previous ones (someone whose opinion I rely on so much even said to me the other day that the new material “sounds very confident”). Also, I tried to keep the new songs in a more compact shape than I did in the lengthy and multifaceted compositions of Missa Innominata, while maintaining the raw and uncontrolled energy that was characteristic to Hexapla. Furthermore, I applied either classical or sometimes even more experimental harmonies that seemed to me to represent many of my feelings and thoughts that were inside my heart and head while working on these tracks. Therefore, the new songs intentionally incorporate a wide variety of emotions ranging from distraction, sadness and bitterness to joy, grandeur and hope. I really can’t wait to show you the result of almost one year’s hard work and I do hope that you will like these songs!

Also, let me share with you the title and tracklist of the new album. The album will be entitled “Thanatology”, which is “the scientific study of death and the losses brought about as a result” (quote from Wikipedia). I have been meditating a lot about the “big questions” of human existence lately, and many of the books I read was somewhat concerned about the ultimate meaning of life and death, too. That really made a deep impact on the way of my thinking, and this is what you can see represented in the tracklist, too:

  1. The Last Wasted Dawn
  2. Stepping Through The Shadow Line
  3. Necronym
  4. Legacy Of The Worthless
  5. All Shall Perish
  6. Farewell Before Sunset

Stay tuned friends, because more news are about to come!