From Moscow screamo basements to shipped games & plugins.

Before plugins, there was TOLUCA — a screamo / post-black band out of Moscow. From 2012 to 2020 I played guitar in it: four records and a split, no label, no agent. We wrote, recorded, and released everything ourselves — right up to SORAS, the final album, in 2019 — and learned that if you want something to exist, you build it yourself.

Along the way we shared bills with bands we loved — The Black Heart Rebellion from Belgium, Heaven in Her Arms from Japan, Rosetta from the US, Harakiri for the Sky from Austria, Hexis from Denmark, Esazlesa from the Czech Republic. But it was that scene, more than any course or manual, where my ear was built.

The pivot started before the pandemic. In 2018 I began releasing neoclassical, ambient music under the alias VHEISSU — a deliberate step away from the wall of guitars. The debut, Bloom & Wither, came out that August; the Automation EP and a film score followed in 2020.

That quiet music did something unexpected: it pointed me toward sound for picture. Compositions got licensed to television, I scored a short film, and advertising and music-video work followed. When the venues did close in 2020, I already knew what came next.

That stretch taught the professional discipline the underground couldn't: deadlines, revisions, delivering on brief. Turned out you can be both a punk and a professional.

The full-time gig: sound design for Tempest Rising, the classic-style RTS from Slipgate Ironworks — the spiritual successor to Command & Conquer, with a soundtrack by Frank Klepacki himself. Every report of artillery, every unit response, every UI tick: designed, tested, shipped.

Game audio at that scale is a pipeline discipline — thousands of assets, strict budgets, zero room for preciousness. It's the craft of making sound that holds up under pressure.