She died of an overdose after I cut off the friendship. I had hooked up with her and then ended things abruptly. The timeline is not complicated. The guilt is.
There is some guilt that I will probably never get over. That is a factual statement, not a therapeutic confession. The dark music project — all of it — traces back to this moment in ways that I did not fully understand until years later.
The connection
I started my music journey right after a friend died of an overdose. Part of dark culture is making light of the morbid. That is not nihilism. It is the only honest response when the alternative is pretending everything is fine while people around you are dying.
I think she would have been alive if she had not been so deep in the punk scene. The rave scene is generally a bit more wholesome. That is not a universal truth — it is my truth, earned through a specific loss. The belief that rave culture has redemptive potential over punk culture is rooted in this death. Not abstract philosophy. Lived consequence.
The logic runs like this: maybe by growing the dark music scene with my own values, I will be able to make a difference in someone’s life by letting them meet more wholesome influences. That is the founding thesis of SLIST stated in the rawest possible terms. Not a business model. A partial redemption arc for one dead friend.
The naming
The Relapse party concept is autobiographical. It is not edgy branding chosen from a brainstorm list. It references something specific that happened to a specific person. I have been talking about relapsing myself as someone who struggles with various addictions. The name carries the weight of the thing it references.
Every time someone walks into a Relapse event, they are walking into a space named after someone who did not make it out of the scene alive. They do not know that. The room knows it.
The pattern
This was not the last loss. A goth girl I had been seeing died of an overdose years later. The tweaker and ketamine scene in NYC is not an abstract concern — it is an operational hazard. People you share dance floors with are at risk, and the losses are real and recurring.
The response to each loss is the same: build something that makes the space marginally safer without turning it into a sanitized corporate experience. Narcan at every event. Harm reduction as operational standard, not marketing language. Curation that filters for community, not just ticket sales.
There is a version of this story that sounds like a redemption arc. Founder loses friend, builds something meaningful in her memory, finds peace. That version is a lie. The guilt does not resolve. The project does not replace the person. What happens instead is that the guilt becomes structural — embedded in the DNA of every decision about how the space operates, who gets invited, what the values actually mean when tested.
She started it all, and she will never know. That is the cost of building something from a wound instead of a plan. The wound stays open. The building keeps going.