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.
