I was asking myself why I liked dark music, and the answer surprised me. It was not about genre or aesthetic or being different. It was about all the deaths.
Personal loss has a gravitational pull. It does not ask what genre you prefer. It drags you toward sounds that match the weight you are carrying. Dark music is not a style choice. It is processing.
The basement was home
Before COVID, there was a place I went to every Friday. The main floor had 80s and 90s disco. The basement had death metal and grunge. The basement was home. Not because I was performing darkness or cultivating an aesthetic identity. Because when you are carrying something, the basement makes more sense than the dance floor upstairs.
Dark music makes me feel nostalgic and cathartic. I enjoy those feelings. That is the root. Not complicated. Not mysterious. Grief and catharsis, set to 140 BPM.
The catharsis architecture
When I DJ, I like going from sad hard techno to angry techno. I think it feels cathartic to go through those emotions via music. The emotional arc is deliberate — sadness into anger into release. This is not aesthetic. It is psychological function.
The first track is meant to reflect loss and the possibility of hope. The first transition is a statement. Every track in a minor key. The mix might suggest closure, moving on, peace. Do not be fooled. The seven stages of grief simplified to three, then two — suffering and hope — then one. Life. Unexpected, messy, bizarre.
I like ambient music that makes me feel uneasy. Not sure if it is the actual musicality or the novelty of something artificial making me evoke a primal feeling. The unease is the point. Artificial sounds triggering primal responses. That gap between the synthetic and the instinctual is where the most interesting music lives.
The cost
A friend died of an overdose. I started my music journey right after. Part of dark culture is making light of the morbid. That sounds clinical until you are the one making light of something that destroyed you.
I told Leonardo once that I need therapy, that I have only been listening to dark stuff for a while. But I am worried therapy will take away all my creative energy and angst. The darkness is explicitly understood as fuel — not just aesthetic preference but a functional emotional engine. Healing might cost the edge. That is a terrifying trade to consider when the edge is the only thing that makes the work honest.
The rave is not just a business. It is a container for processing darkness. That is why the aesthetic demands are non-negotiable. It cannot be watered down because it is doing real psychological work for real people carrying real weight.
Only thing guarding my heel from the razor. That was the first draft of what I was trying to say. The correction came after — the only thing that fills the void. Both versions are true. The first is darker than I meant to admit. The second is the one I can live with publicly.
No wrong directions when you are in the void. Dark music saved my life by giving the void a soundtrack instead of a solution. The friend it killed never got to hear how the sound evolved. That asymmetry is the engine behind everything I build.