What is Gehenna 2035?
The true purpose
I've created this project to fulfill my lifelong dream: creating music in my own style, on my own terms. While developing my own musical works and writing for others, I came to the realization that in our era of Spotify, TikTok and Instagram, my fellow musicians and I face insurmountable competition and market saturation. The fact that someone is an excellent musician is no guarantee they can make a living, or that their carefully crafted musical message will ever reach the masses.
The key here is practicing the Art of Sound: transcending l'art pour l'art and providing people with a good musical product that helps them find self‑reflection and revelation.
I possess no star charisma; I just have my words and my music. And, to be honest, the world doesn’t need my music to thrive… yet. To buy time, I turned toward (very) big tech for salvation, where I am currently employed. Between the struggles, I’ve reflected on my successes as an artist and realized that people require stories more than anything else. Good music grounds good storytelling and makes the landing stick.
Noir, the Shadow and peripheral music
So I looked around—very carefully—at which topics are closest to my heart: topics where I can tell an unconventionally engaging story. Noir emerged as the foundational device for my parables, paired with the peripheral music that suits it best: Alternative Rock, Jazz, Trip‑Hop, Ambient and microtonal experiments, to name a few of my influences.
The Vampire: The Masquerade universe is a longstanding darling of mine. Not merely because of its aesthetics, but because of what it means to me as a deep psychological study.
First and foremost, it encompasses the Jungian Shadow: the dark triad and tetrad traits, the archetypes of human nature seen through the lens of post‑mortalism. It touches major religions and praxeologies of our day. It deals with competence and power, old and novel symbols of importance. There is even room for romance and its counterpart: drama.
The Way of Sound
Music is the emotional carrier wave for all of this. If the concepts, systems and frameworks speak to the masculine—structure, logos, In conversation with the Masqueradedel—then sound is how I address the feminine: mood, atmosphere, the limbic circuitry that decides long before a syllable is parsed. A single modulation or chord change can smuggle in a moral dilemma. A bass line can embody predation, those low frequencies triggering the same gut‑level vigilance as an unseen carnivore in the dark. Drums can feel like devotion, echoing older patterns in West African and Afro‑diasporic traditions where rhythm is prayer, work, trance, community. Timbre, dynamics, the silence between notes: all of it is a way of stirring the parts of you that live in the dark—ancient, pre‑verbal, and uncomfortably effective.
If we think in terms of fishing, the music is the bait; the lyrics are the line and rod that pull you inward. Writing, for me, is both meditation and self‑inspiration: I cast first into my own depths, and only then into yours.
Taken together, psychology, music and writing let me treat Vampire: The Masquerade as a codebase rather than a script. If you’re a journeyman across these domains, you can have a field day decompiling its high‑level code into bare‑bones assembly—daring to disseminate, analyse, then recompile until it becomes a force of nature. Gehenna 2035, for me, is that recompiled code set to essay and music.
Lineages and influences of thought
If you want to understand the lineages I’m drawing from, start with Jung to get the foundations; Dr. Jordan Peterson for a high‑level map of archetypes; and Rollo Tomassi for the evolutionary‑psychology angle on human firmware. Personality‑type frameworks are, at best, a vocabulary builder for this: names, mirrors, shorthand. The latter is important, but overvalued. Be warned though:
As Rollo Tomassi puts it, "Knowledge is like a hand grenade; if you don’t know how to use it, it will blow up in your face."
Lineages and influences of sound
On the musical side, my style draws heavily from British rock, Seattle grunge and, by extension, Japanese rock. These scenes are more connected than they might first appear; taken together they form an avant‑garde feedback loop that keeps feeding itself.
On the British and adjacent axis there are bands like Bush, Queen, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, and Gary Moore (Irish, but spiritually welded to that lineage). On the other side of the Atlantic you find Type O Negative—Brooklyn by geography, but spiritually standing at the crossroads of grunge, doom, UK rock and metal.
Further east, in Japan, the composers who left the deepest imprint on me include Yasushi Ishii, Akira Yamaoka and Hideki Taniuchi, along with bands like The Pillows and Sambomaster. Ishii’s body of work is unrelenting and uncompromising; a kind of engine of rhythm and harmony that never really lets up. Yamaoka is, to me, a master of psychological scoring, a surgeon of pacing and space who can twist an emotion with a single texture. Taniuchi is a rule‑breaker with an impressive alt‑rock vocabulary, a craftsman of tension and release. The Pillows are a post‑grunge case study in how to do things right; Sambomaster are a living example of what truly powerful performance looks and feels like. Despite differences in context and medium, they all draw from the same deep well: blues, hard rock, jazz harmony, church modes and the willingness to bend all of it into something theatrically modern—with Ishii, Yamaoka and Taniuchi doing so explicitly in the language of film and game scoring.
This list is non‑exhaustive, but the through‑line is simple: these artists changed music forever in their respective niches. I stand on the shoulders of giants—unabashed.
Satire and the double‑edged coin
By now it should be clear that my relationship to sound and story is anything but neutral; all of this also shapes the nature of my satire. If history has taught me anything, it is that every warning doubles as a recipe in the wrong hands—a step‑by‑step guide for someone already leaning toward disaster. There is the more light‑hearted category—Johnny Bravo, The Truman Show—and the darker lineage of American Psycho, Vampire: The Masquerade, 1984, Cyberpunk. They were meant as cautions, yet people happily stole their aesthetics and patterns as lifestyle templates. The very scenes that were supposed to unsettle became warped aspirations and startup pitches.
Satire is a double‑edged sword, but so is silence. If I don’t write, I’m not preventing anyone from running those scripts; I’m just refusing to comment on them. Every tool I use—symbol, story, riff, metaphor—cuts both ways.
Ways of writing, sound and machines
The old Japanese dō arts help me think about this.
書道 Shodō is still calligraphy, but also Zen.
茶道 Chadō is still tea and hospitality, but also meditation.
武道 Budō is still combat, but also a way toward peace.
華道 Kadō is still flowers, but also an acceptance of impermanence.
By extension, I like to imagine 文道 Bundō—the Way of Writing—as prose, journaling and world‑building that double as meditation and self‑interrogation.
In the same spirit, I think of 音道 Ondō—the Way of Sound—as music that aims at awakening, and 機道 Kidō—the Way of Machines—as technology that aims at compassion.
My advice is simple: whether you end up loving it or hating it, you are still on the same side of the coin—you care enough to react. That is the only side I am writing for. Somewhere in this world there will be at least one character who lives on that side of the coin: capable of both devotion and contempt, but never apathy. The other side is indifference.
In conversation with the Masquerade
This is the toolkit and mindset I bring to the project. I’m not here to “update” Vampire: The Masquerade so much as to be in conversation with it from where we stand now.
With that in place, it’s worth clarifying what the Masquerade actually is: the principle of anonymity under which the mythical vampires operate. That secrecy is their cornerstone—and my metaphor. It is something we, as mortals, can immediately relate to: hiding in plain sight, curating what others are allowed to see.
Perception is the real battlefield here, and confirmation bias makes it even trickier.
I have to give credit to comedian Ray William Johnson for an insight that stuck with me: even if people saw Jesus walking on water or turning water into wine, many wouldn’t treat it as a miracle anymore, but as a parlour trick or a prank. Hence the quote I display on my page: "People see whatever they want to see whenever they are ready to see it."
Turn that around and ask: even if you saw a vampire, would you recognise them as such—or just assume it was another dude or gal with a good stylist? Perhaps even relate to them? The transition point isn’t announced; it’s a phase change you only notice once enough boxes have been ticked and you finally think, "oh, shit"—all while nothing in the scene has objectively changed.
To quote an acquaintance of mine, Gabriela Vio Vlad: "Open your palm and curl your fingers inwards slowly, then tell me when it became a fist. When did it transition?"
That, to me, is the current situation.
Distant gods and doomsayers: the spectrum
That kind of unseen transition also governs how we treat doomsayers in stories and in life. Prophets usually have a poor reputation in folklore and popular media, and when they do appear they are often one‑off, singular figures—here for a single scene, then gone. Most audiences only ever meet the lowest tier: the street‑level doomsayer. In Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines or Cyberpunk 2077, characters like these are simply homeless figures spouting nonsense—yet the narratively initiated protagonist can confirm they are painfully aware of the metanarrative and lack only the competence or leverage to change it. Even then, their motives can be misread or written off entirely.
Mid‑level doomsaying assumes the same awareness, but adds enough competence to become a catalyst: a cultural challenger, an agent of change whose role is to stress‑test the system and stir still water—an adversarial network. It rarely operates alone and tends to form cells, cults or artistic movements. High‑level doomsaying doesn’t screw around at all: it goes full Book‑of‑Revelation as an organisation and dishes out what it believes to be divine punishment. Father Seed from Far Cry 5 is perhaps the most notable modern example of that archetype.
Where I stand in that spectrum
As far as I am aware, I sit firmly in that mid‑level camp. I write as someone who is narratively initiated enough to spot patterns, but not interested in sainthood or final‑boss status.
A practical example is my track D.D. Night – You Are the Power
The lyrics doomsaying wrapped in a deliberate use of language. The whole point is to choose words and phrases that actually matter—sometimes low-level and conversational, sometimes high-level and abstract—but always loaded. The right words, spoken at the right time, have power on a primal, subconscious level and beyond; they name things as they are and force a decision: act, or consciously accept the consequences. I have no aspiration to move up or down that food chain. It is what it is, and time will tell which parts of these ramblings—if any—were actually pointing at something true in my own metanarrative and, by extension, in real life.
From 90s edge to pre‑digested now
Reading up on VtM—doing my due diligence—I still felt a profound disconnection. The world has changed since the 90s: anonymity has been hollowed out; parts of the internet feel "dead"; our deities, if you like, have gone into torpor—a mythical state of stasis, ready to spring back once humanity or the kindred lose their purpose both functionally and morally. Yet again, metaphor.
What was edgy and often thought‑provoking back then is now frequently played for laughs or aesthetic nostalgia. Contemporary works leverage those once‑transgressive, Tarantino‑esque tragicomic elements almost as pure comedy, or as safe nostalgia, becoming mainstream entertainment—pre‑digested. Very little truly shocks the crowd anymore. It really does speak volumes when the excluded start feeling alienated because the "club" has become far too inclusive.
Rather than creating a period piece, I took what is happening today on the cutting edge of science, tech, politics, psychology, and religion and extrapolated it. The fear and zeitgeist of the Cold War that drove VtM and Cyberpunk universes to success have shifted; the tectonic plates and surface are different, but the core is still the same.
Drilling down to that core still matters, regardless of the heat and pressure it brings.
I am taking my best shot. What happens after is anybody’s guess. Only the message is important, and what’s happening right now. Blink twice and the rest will go to the digital archives.