Darkwave – atmospheric thrash metal

Darkwave is a one-piece musical project, meaning that all the duties from songwriting through playing the guitar/bass to recording, mixing, mastering and promotion lay on the shoulders of one single person. Although the dream of composing and creating music had already been there for me decades before the rapid evolution and consequent democratization of sound recording and processing technology, I never had the chance to completely fulfill these dreams, exactly because I wanted to walk this path alone, according to my own standards. Therefore, realization of the Darkwave project was somewhat delayed, but inevitable: I see it as the necessary outcome of my life-long wish to create, play, and record music, the appearance of easily accessible DAWs (Digital Audio Workstation) with excellent hardware background and some sort of a social isolation during the Covid-19-lockdown. At certain point these motivations, drives and conditions clogged together, until I started to finally bring into life all those musical ideas that had been evolving in my imagination for so long.

The first demo versions of Hexapla (my first full-lenght album) were recorded during the second half of 2020 in a simple but perfectly suitable home studio. It was a truly amazing time for me – but at the same time I paradoxically felt an awkward urge to constantly question my own abilities and skills to realize such an enormous project. Despite the fact that I spent way too much time with bringing my musical ideas into life, I felt too overwhelmed with the complexity of the task to compose, play, record, mix, master, and promote an album to the point that I finally became rather uncertain, whether I want to publish the result of my efforts at all. But as I consider music one of the most powerful and yet intimate ways of interpersonal communication, I was extremely intrigued to hear the feedback and reflections of others. While I eagerly confess both my constant struggles to perfectly fulfill all those multifaceted duties and my desire to learn and develop in order to walk towards the (otherwise never achievable…) artistic perfection, I wanted to know, whether my music resonated in my listeners at all. Therefore I finally decided to release Hexapla on the 3^rd of August 2021.

Hexapla intends to be a small, but determined step towards some kind of a synthesis between various sub-genres rooted in the rich legacy of past and contemporary thrash metal standard-bearers, spiced up with outlooks to sometimes highly different musical genres. Being an instrumental album (similarly to all my other musical creations…), it clearly indicates my intention to synthesize various musical inputs into one massive metal experiment to express my feelings and thoughts without words. Without the intention to repeat what I already wrote on the birth of Hexapla elsewhere, I must emphasize that selection of Hexapla’s song titles and the cover image was also part of this approach: while the song titles were intended to reflect unity in diversity, the gloomy and beautiful cover art was photographed and generously provided by a long time friend and talented photo artist, Dávid Ujhelyi. Click hear to read more about and listen to “Hexapla”!

Being an independent artist, I had (and still have) extremely limited possibilites to promote my music. Still, to my greatest surprise, Hexapla reached quite a lot of listeners and received extremely flattering reviews from both friends and strangers – it even appeared at one of the RepostExchange charts by SoundCloud, Pop/Rock Top40. However, as everything is subjected to continuous changes, so are the original manifestations of a person’s past artistic ideas. The continuous experimentation with the original sound of Hexapla resulted in an inner need to re-record and polish certain parts of my debut material – and in general, remix and remaster the whole album. I therefore started working on an updated version of Hexapla, which was released under the title “Hexapla – The Remasters” half a year later, on the 31^st of March 2022 with a thicker and more mature sound. Similarly to its predecessor, the remastered album was also well received: it appeared again on the RepostExchange Pop/Rock Top40 and was even featured in the “New and Notable” section of Bandcamp’s homepage on the 4^th of April. Click here to read more about and listen to “Hexapla – The Remasters”!

Meanwhile, I felt an irresistible urge to go on, and by the time of the release of the remix album I was already busy with the recording of my second full-lenght album Missa Innominata. The songwriting process already started right after the initial publication of Hexapla, and despite all my remixing and remastering activities (not to mention my professional duties, and in general, my everyday life…), I always considered it as top priority. For me, it was a time of constant experimentation and search for new ways to expand the previously established musical directions to the point that I even considered adding vocals to this album (I finally gave up that idea, because the results on the demo recordings sounded somewhat unnatural and artificial). Following months of fine-tuning, Missa Innominata was finally released on the 1^st of June 2022 with the dual intention to proceed further on the path of developing my very own version of experimental metal music and to add personal and fresh shades to something that is otherwise considered very traditional and monolithic. My novel and very personal interpretation of the Roman Catholic mass is my own spiritual journey to express the various intellectual and emotional aspects evoked by the diverse liturgical elements via instrumental metal music – a genre that is otherwise considered by many to be profane or even unholy. Missa Innominata was even more warmly received than the previous albums: one of its songs was making waves not only in the ReEx Pop/Rock Top 40, but also in the overall Re-Ex Top 40 chart, a cumulative chart for all SoudCloud users belonging to various musical genres. Click here to read more about and listen to “Missa Innominata”!

And what’s going on right now? First of all, I’m extremely grateful for all the support and feedback I got during these years. My mind is full of anticipation and plans: I’m really looking forward the future. To cut a long story short, I already recorded several guitar and bass tracks for my upcoming album – but before digging myself deeper into programming of the instrumental tracks, I wanted to change and fine-tune many things both on the hardware and software side. On the gear side, I bought a bass and upgraded my main instrument, a Les Paul-shaped LTD singlecut guitar. Also, I upgraded the virtual instruments i use in my DAW and started systematically learning mixing and mastering to improve the sound quality of my future recordings.