Hey all!
Welcome to the new Venaht site. The intent for this site is to obviously focus on releases under my main project, Venaht, but it may also eventually include some stuff from my more light-hearted project called Catgazer as well. Hell, there may even be a section for YouTube videos at some point because I've always fancied the idea of making video essays on a variety of subjects. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
If you're unfamiliar with what Venaht is, it is intended to be my catchall project for darker music. At the time of writing, the main entry in my catalog is Immerens, which is an exploration of goth music as a whole. I had always liked gothic music (Chelsea Wolfe, Birthday Massacre, Demen, Lacuna Coil, Drab Majesty, Katatonia, etc.), but I hadn't really dived into what the the gatekeepers would refer to as true goth music—the scene born from post-punk around the 1970s.
And I suppose maybe it's not surprising that that particular era of music never gripped me because I've always leaned more towards metal rather than punk, but I'm always up for expanding my horizons. So I started digging in and started to get familiar with many of the subgenres. But there were two in particular that I really gravitated towards early in that journey: Etherealwave and Darkwave.
The aesthetic of covering music in reverb to create lush and dreamlike textures was always a thing I liked doing with my own music to the point that I started to worry it was a crutch—but then the discovery of the subgenre in the goth scene made me feel validated again. I'd say the bands I listened to the most were Lycia, Cocteau Twins, and Trance to the Sun. Those three bands alone covered so much ground for creative inspiration. Basslines were prominent as melodic instruments saturated with effects. The guitars were more often used as atmospheric instruments, which was a change of pace for me away from the complexity of progressive metal. Electronic elements were often present in the music since a lot of these bands were often just a couple of people and needed to make use of drum machines and synths to propagate a full sound in performances. The cherry on top of things too was learning that Lycia, which is considered one of the founding bands of Etherealwave, started right here in Arizona! Not exactly the place you'd think of for goth music, but darkness can be found in the desert.
Anyways, my exploration of this music took place during a Weeklybeats year. Weeklybeats is an online community event where you write, record, produce, and release a new song every week for the entirety of a year. It only happens on even-numbered years to give participants a break. I completed my first 52-week sprint in 2020, and it was about the fourth quarter of 2022 when I started really diving into goth music. Two songs in particular, “Lost in the Passage of Time” and “Aubadoir”, spurred me to want to create an entire album of that kind of music. Those two songs just resonated with me in a way that my prog metal tunes hadn't, especially because the subject matter in the lyrics was pretty raw and directly about my experiences with anxiety.
So over the next couple of years, the album slowly coalesced. Not quite in the way that I had imagined, as the musical influences were a lot more varied and outside the scope of the goth music I was initially inspired by. David Lynch and Twin Peaks were really gripping me during that time, and influences from games like Lunacid and Killer 7 slipped in there as well. But the vibe remained true. It was dark, it was dreamy, and it was 100% me. I've never been more proud of something I created.
However, the post-release experience has been a bit disheartening at times. The initial praise I received from friends and family lit me up, as I was super happy to hear it resonated with them. Even recently, my best friend told me he was going for a walk through the desert on an overcast day before a storm would roll in. He was listening to the album, and said it was the perfect mood music. But with all that said, the album still languishes in relative obscurity. It never really reached the intended audience. It's not surprising that's the case, though. I didn't exactly tap on the shoulders of music journalists prior to releasing the album in hopes that someone would review it. All I really did was try sharing the album on forums on Reddit and social media sites like Bluesky, hoping that someone might become a superfan and help spread awareness of its existence. There was one moment when a Russian painter named Denis Forkas Kostromitin had listed my album as one of the best albums of 2024 on Instagram, which blew my mind. What especially felt like kismet, since I hadn't heard of him before that moment, was that his art style is exactly the vibe I'm going for on one of my future albums. I haven't asked him yet to commission any work, but when that particular album gets closer to completion, I'm really hoping he'll do it. But yeah, being on someone's albums of the year list definitely made my day. Thanks, Denis.
All that said, it's time to wrap up this first journal entry. I just wanted to greet anyone visiting the site and explain the history behind my debut album. The next album was intended to be a companion piece to Immerens under the working title “Vividarium”, but lately I've been wanting to finish up this conceptual prog metal album I've had sitting on the back burner for a while called “Fell Omens of Ultima Thule” (subject to change). All of the material was composed between 2020 and 2022, which would have technically made it the first Venaht release if I had finished it up back then. Instead, it's going to be sandwiched between two vibes-based albums that are companion pieces, which would've made more chronological sense in the release order, but whatever. It's music that I think is cool and needs to be released into the world, and I'm tired of sitting on this back catalog of music, so that's what's next. I'll deliver more details on the album in due time.