I was recently thinking about MySpace and the page I had on there. This was the first place I posted music online that I made completely on my own. I had moved to Southern California in the early 2000’s to go to school for Audio Engineering. I was super jazzed about living in my own place and going to a music school in Los Angeles. I was super into what I was learning and I spent much of my spare time playing around to see what I could create. It was a big spark to my creativity.

I had been in bands before as a drummer and before this had already done some recordings of my own for songs, but I hadn’t put anything out into the world for people to hear. Using a MySpace profile for my music was a fun experiment and just a way to get stuff out.

My random remembering had taken me to the Wayback Machine to see if it had any records of my page and I found that it actually did. There were a couple of instances on there. Looking back at the page I was reminded of how much fun I was having making music and just being creative and weird on the internet.

When I created the page at first I used the name Artaxerxes. Basically I found it on Wikipedia and thought it sounded cool and went with it. Plus, it having biblical connections and me using it to be very weird on the internet made me giggle like a child like I was “being bad” or something.

I made up a whole backstory for this character. The main point was that they were the former theremin player for Steve Miller Band who had to leave the band after a tragic accident which involved getting his head chopped off. So, now as a disembodied head Artaxerxes was making experimental electronic music and posting it on MySpace.

Along with the songs I also wrote blog posts on the profile as Artaxerxes. These were stream of consciousness style posts where I just ranted and raved about whatever came to mind at the time. My intent with them was to be extra weird and to really lean into the story and the character. Sometimes I was complaining about being only a head and how that made it hard to make breakfast and other times I was babbling nonsense for four paragraphs.

I connected with a lot of folks on MySpace about the music I was posting and it was really fun. This was a time on the internet where one could discover stuff randomly and organically pretty easily without it being fed by algorithms. At one point I had someone from a small indie label reach out to me about my music. They had listened to a few tracks and they thought they were pretty cool and wanted to know if I would be interested in releasing something under their label.

This was pretty exciting for me at the time. I looked at their profile page and saw that they got a big amount of plays of their songs and had a pretty large following. They weren’t huge by any means, but they definitely had a much bigger presence online than I did at the time or even have now. Overall, they seemed like a legit account. I replied back to say thank you for checking out my songs and that yes I would be interested in talking more about releasing music with them.

They replied back to let me know that they looked at my profile some more and read through some of the blog posts I had done recently. They were pretty surprised by how odd and generally off the rails the posts were. They told me it was pretty concerning for them and that the content of the posts didn’t align with the vibe of their label and what they were going for. Basically, it was too weird for them and they said they couldn’t work with me after all. I replied back that I understood and thanked them again. I was pretty bummed.

This coincided with some thinking I was doing about the project. I had actually already been thinking about changing things up and maybe even not using the Artaxerxes name any longer. I had been mulling over the name change and doing things with me more present in the content instead of completely anonymously.

So, I rushed to making adjustments to my profile. I changed the name and URL. I changed the profile picture and I even deleted most, if not all, of the blog posts. This is where I landed on the name Attacks the Darkness to make music under which I am still using today, just as attacks th dkrnss now. For some reason, I replied back to them to let them know I changed things and that they should check my page out and maybe did they want to work with me again? I never heard back from them.

That is the part that bugs me the most when I think about all of this. I had been considering changing things, but it was rushing to do it to make this random person happy in hopes they would want to work with me again that wasn’t right. I should have been doing it on my own terms. When I was younger I had all of these dreams about being a rock star and “making it” as a musician. I had all of the wrong motivations for doing it. It wasn’t because of a love of music (although I did love music deeply), but it was to be famous. The idea of working with this small label made me think it would be the starting point to that. Somehow it was going to be the first step in becoming a working musician and making it as an artist.

I have to be honest with myself. I wanted to be a famous rock star more than I wanted to be a musician and this made me focus on all of the wrong things. I didn’t perfect my craft and never got the skills necessary to be a working musician all because I was too busy daydreaming about how once I made it everything was going to be great. I focused too much on the end goal of the lifestyle and never took the time to take steps to actually get there.

Maybe now that is why I like improvisation and doing things in one take so much now. I don’t get caught up in overthinking and losing sight of the goal which is to create something and share it with people.