In Trance As Mission
Meet Mujiki — Creative Director of The Datura Tapes & Head of DarkArc Studios
Ciao! I’m Mujiki, Creative Director of The Datura Tapes, part-time herder of cats known as darkStylus, and the reluctant adult in a room full of machines that never sleep. If you’ve been following The Datura Press (and you really should have) from the beginning, you know the audio side started as an extension of the books — atmospheres, score fragments, little sonic doors into the fiction. Beautiful, yes, but contained.
Then something happened. The recordings stopped behaving like accessories and started behaving like their own worlds. And the writers kept delivering pages that sounded like they were begging for electricity. So of course The Press leaned in.
Now The Datura Tapes isn’t just an audio companion — it’s a full creative studio a new audio renaissance broadcasting appropriately from right here in Florence. A place where myth-minded fiction, ambient electronica, and whatever darkStylus has decided to break out this week all collide in very interesting ways.
What The Datura Tapes Has Got Rolling
Running this imprint is a bit like teaching a wild river to hum.
We’re making:
sound stories
shadow-laced electronica
experimental sequences
voice-forward worlds that sit halfway between a song and a confession
We don’t chase trends. We don’t chase algorithms. We chase charge — the kind you feel before a storm breaks.
As for darkStylus… well.
They help. Or they sabotage. Or they invent something impossible at 3 a.m. and disappear into the night like nothing happened. Weird cats.
I pretend I’m in control. They pretend they believe me.
Somehow tho, it all works. Just about
Inside DarkArc, Our Studio Wing
DarkArc Studios is the deeper layer — the workshop where sound gets dangerous, strange, or unexpectedly tender. named after one of North Stars, the mighty Lee Perry and his own sonic lair, Black Ark. Every week I have to talk darkStylus out of burning DarkArc down in tribute.
It’s where I go when I want the work to bleed a little.
It’s where the Darkwave Transmissions are taking shape.
It’s where the walls hum back at you if you stay late enough.
This is also where we develop our artists — slowly, deliberately, in that Florentine way where everything is held to a higher standard simply because the stones demand it.
Currently in the DarkArc Orbit
We’re not building a roster; we’re building a constellation.
Lillit Vega
Streetwise after too many heartbreaks and deepfakes, brutal beats from Armenia to Palermo are the power behind a broken hearted story-teller.
Amarah Ray
On-point, hollow pointed soul and stepper dub poetry, darkStylus throw every beat they got at Amarah and she just builds barricades with them
Etta Vale
The Tapes in-house poet, creating acoustic paintings of tragedy and hope as only she can, all the way from her native Arkansas. It’s a hell of a view
Ronja
DarkArc’s witch in the ditch, we have no idea what her dark EDM enchantments are about, and frankly, we’re too scared to even ask
Crazy female Florentine power is running round in DarkArc, through cables it snakes, take after take after take.
Why We Needed a Studio in the First Place
Oh yeah, back to the reason we exist!
Because the books had too much electricity to just stay on the page.
Because Florence is a city that is always encouraging rebirth, from Renaissance to Remix.
Because The Datura Press is built on myth, memory, and trouble — and sound is the quickest way to reveal all three at once.
Mostly, though, we built DarkArc because I hate half-measures.
If we’re making worlds, they deserve the faders all the way up.
ARCHIVE EXTRACTION: THE AUNT’S ARIA
While we’ve been busy wiring the future with Lilit and Amara, we haven’t forgotten the blood in the soil—the stories that started the Tapes.
If Kathleen was our drift into Southern Gothic humidity, this track is a sharp turn into the fever-dream of the Old Country. We’re taking you back to the pages of Narcisa Before Narcisa, specifically to the bedside of The Aunt. This is Balkan Opera filtered through a fever. It is the sound of a battle between a dying woman and a hateful clock.
But listen closely to the lyrics. The tragedy is a trap. As the strings swell and the rhythm winds tighter, you realize the Aunt isn’t afraid of time running out. She’s winding the clock to keep it alive—so she can torment it.
“You think yourself so clever / But didn't you ever think to see / that perhaps it is you / who are trapped in here with me?”
Turn it up. But don’t look at the walls. They tend to sneak when the music plays.
An Invitation (the real kind, not the corporate kind)
I’m looking for collaborators. No. Not “content creators.” Not “talent.” Just people with some gravity in their voice or hands.
So, if you’re:
a singer with an unusual timbre
a writer who thinks in rhythm
a producer who loves tension more than polish
an act that’s building a world rather than chasing a trend