Category: Blog

Old Friends, Old Dreams

19.10.2025

Last night I met up with some of my old classmates.
Some of them I hadn’t seen in decades, others I’ve stayed in touch with here and there… and then there was my oldest friend — the one I started making music with when we were just kids.

I still remember those early days: we were maybe ten years old, learning to play guitar together, dreaming about forming our first band. We spent countless hours practicing, listening, planning. And even when life later took us to different places — me to Munich, him to London — the friendship never faded. The music kept us connected through it all.

We played in many projects together over the years, explored all kinds of genres, and it was actually him who first introduced me to music recording and production. We even joined a local talent show once — what memories! Our musical tastes still overlap a lot, and every now and then we bump into each other at concerts of the bands we both love.

Now, decades later, sitting together again over a fine Irish whiskey, that same old vibe was still there. I tried his freshly bought instruments, we talked for hours, and at some point we both realized: the dreams we once had as kids… we actually made them come true.
He makes a living from music — teaching guitar, playing in bands — and my own life also revolves around music, in my own way. Different paths, same passion, and both of us happy with where we ended up.

And best of all: after all these years, we’re planning new things together again.
Music, of course. Always music.

Thank you, my friend — for everything, Laci.

Chains of Faith, Echoes of Doubt

22.09.2025

There’s a reason why religious themes appear so often in my music. It’s not just an artistic choice — it’s something that has profoundly shaped me. I was strongly socialized into this world, and for a long time it defined the way I thought and felt. But at some point, I began to look at it critically.

Not just at the institution of the Church, but at the crushing, deterministic pressure of a system that tries to mold your entire mindset from childhood through guilt and fear. That kind of socialization leaves a mark. Even if, later in life, you start to see the contradictions and recognize the dissonance, the feelings don’t simply disappear. The weight of shame and anxiety remains, and it chains you to something you never chose freely.

I want to be clear: I’m not here to make dogmatic statements about whether Christianity is “true” or “false.” What I’m trying to explore in my lyrics is the lived reality of this trauma. I’m convinced that this was never the intention of the founder — but religion, as it is so often practiced, has the power to wound deeply. And some of those scars never fully heal.

Five Years of Darkwave: From a $150 Guitar to Grand Visions

17.09.2025

In 2020, I decided to do something that had been haunting me for decades: to finally record the music inside my head. The truth is, I had no clue what I was doing. My “studio” was just a desk in a corner, Cubase was a mystery box I bought only because a friend used it, and my main weapon was a $150 guitar. There wasn’t even a bass – just a keyboard pretending to be one.

I pressed “record” and stumbled my way into Hexapla. Listening back now, it sounds like a wall held together with duct tape – raw, harsh, sometimes unbearable. I knew so little about mixing or mastering that I had to redo it, twice. And yet, that crooked little album meant the world to me. It was the sound of someone finally daring to begin.

What surprised me most was that people actually listened. Not thousands, not millions – but enough to make me feel that maybe I wasn’t screaming into the void. That spark carried me into the next record, Missa Innominata. I was fascinated by the idea of a modern mass, not in churches but in distortion. I wrote vocal lines, only to erase them later and let the guitars sing in their place. I had a better guitar by then, but with pickups so bad they turned everything to mud. No matter how many remixes I tried, it never became as heavy as I dreamed. But again – people cared. And that was enough to keep going.

By the time I reached Thanatology, something had shifted. I had taken mixing courses, learned to tame the chaos of sound, started to think in structures rather than pure impulse. I invested in new gear, released a CD, even dipped my toes into proper promotion. For the first time, I felt I wasn’t just throwing stones into the dark, but building something – however fragile – that might last.

And now it’s 2025, the year of the release of my latest album, Horror Sacri. Five years gone since that first shaky upload. Five years in which the clumsy attempt of a man with no idea what he was doing has grown into Darkwave – not perfect, not polished, but alive. Along the way, I found a small circle of people who believe in this as much as I do, and their voices have been louder than any algorithm could ever be.

If you had told me back in 2020 that I would make it here, I would have laughed – and then probably gone back to struggling with a guitar tone that refused to cooperate. But here I am. Not finished. Not done. Just at another beginning.

The next step? I can’t say much yet. But I promise you this: it will be grand.

Of Fireballs and First Steps

15.09.2025

54 years ago today, Deep Purple released Fireball. An album that, even after half a century, still carries the raw spark of something untamed and alive.

It feels strangely fitting to say that my very first recording was born out of this record. Not a song of my own, but an instrumental cover of Fools. By then I had already been playing guitar for decades, but I had never once tried to capture it. I knew nothing about recording, mixing, or even the simplest tricks to make things sound “right.”

And it shows. The result is rough, clumsy, painfully naïve in terms of production. But it’s also something else: a marker. A point in time where, without knowing, I took my very first step toward what would later become Darkwave.

Listening back now, I hear a strange blend—Deep Purple filtered through something darker, almost Sabbath-like. It’s awkward, but it’s also honest. And that honesty matters more to me than any polish could.

So here it is. A fragment of history. If you care to listen, do so with kind ears, and don’t judge it too harshly. This is where it all began.

Listen to the recording here: https://on.soundcloud.com/l89j2jB23StvppJZwb

Of Failures and Small Victories

14.09.2025

Failure in music doesn’t always mean writing something unworthy. More often, it feels like silence. Not the silence between notes, but the silence after you’ve shared them with the world.

When I first started posting on Threads, my words reached thousands of eyes each day. Now, they reach only a few dozen. What changed? Perhaps the platform, perhaps the algorithms – or perhaps nothing at all. The truth is, musicians rarely know who is really listening. Numbers and impressions don’t tell you whether someone has carried your song into their night, or let it slip past without a thought.

And so, the hardest part isn’t rejection – it’s uncertainty. You play into the void, and the void offers no answer.

Yet, in that same void, I’ve found a strange kind of growth. Without clear echoes from outside, I turned inward. I worked on my craft: learning to mix and master, to shape sound with precision rather than abandon. My early music was raw, thrash-driven, born of instinct and fire. Over time, instinct gradually gave way to intent, and fury became some sort of architecture.

No one claps when you refine the decay of a single note, or when you learn how silence can weigh heavier than distortion. These are invisible victories – but they are victories nonetheless.

Silence, then, is not always a fall. Sometimes it’s a teacher, stripping away the illusion of control, reminding you that recognition is never guaranteed. And in that emptiness, it leaves you free to create.

I cannot know how many of you truly hear me. But I know I hear myself more clearly now than I once did. And perhaps that is the quiet gift hidden inside the failures.

Earlier, I reflected on this in another post—The Art of Authenticity: Rethinking Success in Music. You can find it here.

Why I Write About Darkness

12.09.2025

Maybe I write about darkness because there, the faintest spark of light becomes a revelation.

People sometimes ask why my words, my lyrics, my poetry, so often turn toward shadows. The truth is, I never chose the darkness—it chose me, and it has walked beside me for as long as I can remember.

I was fourteen when I wrote my first poem. It was about death and the Last Judgment. My grandmother wept when she read it. I couldn’t understand why; to me it wasn’t even a good poem. Yet somehow it reached into her heart, uncovering something I had never meant to expose. That was the first time I realized that words can wound and heal in the same breath.

During my university years, I began shaping the language that would later find a home in Darkwave. One of those early poems became Soul Hunt on the Horror Sacri album. Already my voice was steeped in sacred imagery, in the language of faith and mystery. I wasn’t merely writing about religion—I was dreaming in its symbols, breathing its archetypes into the fabric of my verses.

Then came exile, in a sense—a few years abroad. Distance carved new patterns into me. In unfamiliar streets, in a culture not my own, I found that my words began to carry the weight of estrangement. I discovered how sacred images can be turned inside out, made paradoxical, unsettling, luminous and terrifying all at once.

And when a deep friendship later shattered, its absence became a new kind of presence. Out of that silence rose the realization that human bonds are as fragile as glass, and just as easily broken. This fracture still echoes in me, and I have only begun to translate it into sound and verse for the music yet to come.

Why, then, do I always return to darkness?
Because it is there, in the stillness of the night, that the soul dares to speak its truth. Because death and faith are mirrors—darkened, cracked, but still reflecting our questions back at us. And because in the abyss, even the smallest light is enough to change everything.

Listen to my new album here: https://darkwave-metal.bandcamp.com/album/horror-sacri

Against the Odds

10.09.2025

The hardest part of being an independent musician is not the composing, not even the recording—it is facing the odds.

Numbers are brutally honest. Out of a few thousand views, perhaps one or two turn into clicks or likes, and only a fraction of those become actual listeners. Sometimes it takes ten thousand (or even more) plays for a single person to finish a track. On my latest release, at a specific point of time there were eighty-five track plays, sixty-five of which were partial. That is not unusual—it is the rule.

If I were to translate this into practical terms, it would mean that to reach real engagement, I would need hundreds of thousands of views. But for an independent musician, this is little more than an illusion. To generate those kinds of numbers, you would have to pour in enormous amounts of time, energy, and resources—time that for many of us is already consumed by work, family, or simply the desire to preserve some semblance of life outside music.

This is the paradox: to be heard, you must market yourself endlessly, but the more you do so, the less time remains to create. I have written before about the dangers of approaching music as a mechanical process (“The Art of Authenticity: Rethinking Success in Music”) or the feeling of hitting a glass ceiling despite relentless effort (“Lost in the Noise: The Struggle of Independent Musicians“). What I feel now is a continuation of those same themes: that music cannot and should not be reduced to numbers, strategies, and promotional metrics.

And yet, here I am, counting the odds.

It is disheartening, but not defeating. Because in the end, music is a two-way street and it’s not just about being heard—it is also about the act of expression itself, the need to give shape to something that would otherwise remain unspoken. Even if the odds are against us, the music still exists. And perhaps, that is enough.

For those interested in exploring these thoughts further, you can find my earlier reflections here:
– Lost in the Noise: The Struggle of Independent Musicians
– The Art of Authenticity: Rethinking Success in Music

Inspirations Revisited

08.09.2025

Art never emerges from a vacuum. Every note I write, every riff I shape, carries traces of something larger than myself—echoes of books I have read, music I have loved, questions I have wrestled with, and silences I have endured. Inspiration is not a sudden lightning strike; it is more like sediment slowly settling, layer upon layer, until a form takes shape.

For Darkwave, these layers have always come from places that are both intimate and distant: the weight of philosophy, the shadow of mortality, the lingering voice of hope, and the restless search for meaning that defines our fragile existence. What I compose is not created in isolation, but emerges as a dialogue with these voices, transformed into something uniquely my own.

Some years ago, I wrote a series of reflections on the inspirations behind my music. They explore the threads—literary, musical, spiritual, personal—that weave themselves into the sound and vision of Darkwave. If you wish to go deeper into these stories, you can find them here:

They are fragments of a larger journey, and while my music has evolved since then, the shadows they cast still shape the path I walk today.

The Hardest Ascent Was Letting Go

07.09.2025

Today I made a hard decision: after years of struggling and retrying, I’m leaving rock climbing behind.

Joint problems keep returning whenever I start again, and I can’t risk letting it affect my guitar playing. Climbing has been a longtime passion, but it can’t compare to music. Choosing between two passions wasn’t easy, but the decision is clear. So I let it go, with gratitude for all it gave me.

I’m not writing this to seek sympathy—just to share a chapter that closes today.

Through the Curators’ Ears: The Journey of Ego Mortuus Sum

05.09.2025

I recently submitted Ego Mortuus Sum to a few playlist curators on SubmitHub. The feedback was consistent: they appreciated the progressive feel, sharp riffs, and strong musicianship, but felt the song didn’t quite fit their audiences.

Some wanted more raw aggression, others preferred less atmospheric transitions.

So while the track was recognized as solid and innovative, it simply wasn’t the right match for those particular playlists. I take it as a reminder that my music speaks most to listeners who enjoy a balance of heaviness and atmosphere—rather than pure extremity. 

I feel like I’m on the right track.