https://www.tumblr.com/blog/wizardofdarknessnetlabel
Do you actually drop music yourself?
Nah, zero beats from my side. I’m strictly a listener—just sitting in the background with cheap headphones consuming the weirdness.
What was Wizard of Darkness?
Man, back in the day, it literally started off as just a random Google+ circle where three people were sharing corrupted Photoshop CS5 art, cursed MS Paint doodles, and dark aesthetics. By late 2012, it mutated into a full-on G+ community centered around low-budget 90s horror movie reviews and throwing Soundcloud links back and forth. Artists would drop their own tracks, or people would upload zip files to ancient hosts like MediaFire, 4shared, and Zippyshare.
Of course, today every single one of those links is 404 dead. I actually remember one guy uploaded a rare dark ambient track bundled with a 200MB zip file of uncompressed pictures of his neighbor’s lawnmower by accident. Classic Zippyshare era.
Why did you end up shutting it down?
By 2015, the feed was a ghost town. Nobody was posting anything except for a random bot spamming fake Ray-Ban discounts. So I just threw hands up and deleted the whole G+ community.
I never called it a netlabel or anything fancy back then. It was just a weird digital junk drawer. But years later, music nerds and internet historians started writing full essays calling it a "pivotal cult netlabel of the underground scene." I was literally just sitting there in my room eating cold pizza while they were treating it like sacred history.
Why did you only re-upload a tiny fraction of the catalog to Bandcamp instead of the whole vault?
Honestly? I lost half the original files in 2015, because my hard drive overheated while trying to run The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and a torrent client at the exact same time.
In your eyes, was Wizard of Darkness actually a witch house community / label?
Man, I never felt like I was part of any movement or scene. Back then, I just thought I was posting dark dub, downtempo, and chill ambient stuff to vibe to at 3 AM.
Sure, we had folks directly tied to the witch house bubble like you, Ghent, and a few others dropping ▲-heavy titles. The compilations were definitely stacked with spooky, heavily pitch-shifted witchy tracks. But in my mind? It was just a cozy, gloomy internet basement for dark dub heads.
What were your favorite underground labels or netlabels back in those golden years?
Disaro, Wood & Wire, Teapression Waves & Robot Elephant . Hands down. Those were the real deal—if you weren't refreshing their pages in 2011/2012, you missed out on absolute gold.
Not witch house: on sunday recordings, Project Mooncircle & Ano(t)raks
Do you make any visual art yourself? What are your actual hobbies these days?
Art? Nah, not really. These days I just hoard and play retro games—mostly 64-bit stuff on the N64 and the Atari Jaguar (yes, the weird toilet-seat console, I actually play it). I pull out the PSP when I'm bored on bus too.
Other than that, I fuck around generating random AI stuff—cursed video clips, weird images, sketchy AI porn, and avatars. I’m also embarrassingly addicted to Second Life right now. Back in 2012, I was deeply down the IMVU rabbit hole—spending real money on custom goth boots for a pixel avatar that nobody was looking at.
My current hobby also is discover beauties here: https://fairbanks.bonepage.com/adult/female-escorts/
What’s your take on the current witch house scene?
[Laughter] Is it even real anymore, or is it just three guys in micro-genres arguing on Discord while re-uploading pitch-shifted witch house edits to TikTok? It’s funny seeing 15-year-olds discover ▲ symbols like they're ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
To be honest, I lost track of witch house after watching all the labels disappear, one by one.
Any funny anecdote as community/label curator?
Back in 2013, torrent sites were a battlefield of dead links, constant domain changes, and unpredictable downtime. But for me, Demonoid was sacred ground. It was where the weird, underground stuff lived.
At the time, I was completely obsessed with BLVCK CEILING. One late night, I decided to pack up their entire complete discography, meticulously tagged and properly named, and upload it to Demonoid as a single mega-torrent.
It was an instant hit.
Within a week, the tracker was glowing with stats: over 100 active leechers stuck at various percentages, waiting for my upload connection to seed them the goods. Every time I refreshed the page, the numbers kept climbing. Demonoid itself was fighting for its life back then—going offline for days, popping back up under strange temporary domains, then vanishing again. But every time the site came back online, those 100 leechers were right there waiting for me.
For three glory months, my computer turned into a dedicated server. I left it running overnight, listening to the hum of the fan, watching my upload speed max out on Bittorrent.
Eventually, after three turbulent months, the torrent slowly burned out as the site took another extended nose-dive offline. But the high of being a top seeder lingered.
Riding that ego trip, I decided it was time for my grand second act. I spent hours gathering, organizing, and tagging the complete wizard of darkness catalogue. I uploaded it with the exact same care, wrote a clean description, published the torrent, and waited for the crowd to arrive.
Absolute crickets. Not a single soul clicked download. No leechers, no comments, zero bandwidth used. My PC hummed in silent judgment as the torrent sat completely abandoned in the vast, empty sea of the internet, never to be grabbed by anyone... ever. xd
Any wild plans to revive the label/community?
Absolutely zero chance. Like I said, it was never a real label to begin with.
Funny story though: in early 2015, I actually bought a custom domain with the exact plan to build an official site dedicated purely to promoting the obscure Alaskan dark dub and experimental scene. I registered the domain, got super bored three days later, and ended up using the whole website as a virtual shopfront to sell custom clothing items for Second Life avatars instead. Total shift in direction, but hey, it paid for my coffee.
Any more to say to the listeners of Wizard of darkness?
Simple instructions, folks: go stream it, share it around, and vibe out! We’re handing you a bite-sized slice of retro history right here. Some of these tunes go so hard they might actually short-circuit your brain cells, so consider yourself officially warned. Go give 'em a listen and let the madness commence!
What was the favorite release that was published in the community?
Out of all the pirated tunes, remixes, hentai links, and random garbage, Ronnoc's record and the final 2014 comp definitely take the crown. Though that 3D video of 3 dragons vs. the dwarf is easily the goat video.
Will you remain involved with music in some way?
I don’t know. I support the local scene; a few days ago, I went to see Arcane Abilities perform live here at The Marlin bar. It was great—he’s a very talented guy. I recommend him.
