Begotten: The Hushwave Mystery

The strange story of an anonymous, world-weary – and possibly non-existent – vaporwave producer

As a long-time fan of vaporwave, the music and background story of the anonymous producer Begotten (stylized in true vapor fashion as b e g o t t e n 自杀) has been fascinating me recently.¹

The key figure of this saga is Dennis Mikula, the lead singer of the U.S. black metal band Ghost Bath. He’s an avid collector of vaporwave tapes, and the founder of Geometric Lullaby, an independent cassette label quite well-known in the community. The story I’m trying to summarize below was told by him in the liner notes to the Begotten albums released on his label between 2018 and 2025.

It all started, Mikula writes, when he posted a forum thread looking for demos from new acts for his recently founded tape label in 2017. One of the many answers he received clearly stood out – an email from the producer Begotten, who claimed to be from Baku, Azerbaijan.

The email didn’t even address Mikula personally. It contained large blocks of Chinese text, as well as a download link to six finished albums of dark ambient music, each complete with spooky lo-fi artwork, music videos and a bunch of poems.

These poems had a world-weary, at times suicidal tone to them, and the music sounded similarly bleak and nihilistic. Though each of the albums bore a distinctive character, all of them felt like the work of an isolated, despaired, deeply depressed personality.

The music was quite varied in style though, drawing from vaporwave subgenres like slushwave and vaportrap. Layers of distorted, ghostly, unintelligible vocal samples floated over syrupy synths and (sometimes) programmed, cavernous drums. One of the albums was called hushwave – Mikula would later use this tag for all Begotten releases on Bandcamp, essentially creating a new subgenre for the artist’s music.

Dennis Mikula, still from the Ghost Bath video “Rose Thorn Necklace” (2025)

Mikula really loved these dark, depressive albums and absolutely wanted to release them on Geometric Lullaby. Answering to the anonymous email, he received just a short note which basically gave him permission to go ahead. The mysterious producer asked for a postal address, but nothing else.

Over the next months, Mikula couldn’t establish any form of further contact to Begotten, even though he apparently got sent a bunch of signed cassette inlays to go along with the releases. One day, he received an envelope – not from Azerbaijan, but from an address in central Georgia. It contained another envelope holding a card saying “You’re invited!” and listing another address, also in Georgia. It was signed by Begotten with a blood red fingerprint.

Via Google Maps, Mikula found out that the address on the outer envelope belonged to an old, run-down building which apparently housed a psychiatric hospital. The second address, the one on the invitation card, appeared to be empty, but when he checked Google Earth, it looked like a small graveyard. The whole thing started to feel really strange and alarming, but he was intrigued to find out more.

As he lived in a different state quite far away, he asked a friend from Georgia if he could potentially check out the second address, the one he got ‘invited’ to. The friend agreed and in fact found a deserted graveyard there. He was facetiming Dennis while walking down the grave aisles, but found nothing special.

Just when the friend walked back to his car, Dennis briefly saw the silhouette of another black car which hadn’t been there before, parked right behind the vehicle that his friend arrived with. It had tinted windows, so he asked his friend to check if someone was sitting in there, but the friend suddenly appeared very frightened, and then, weirdly enough, the cellphone connection broke up.

After that, Dennis couldn’t reach his friend for days. He’d apparently even deleted his Facebook account. Deeply worried, Dennis initiated a police search but then, all of a sudden, his friend reached back out to him, pretending nothing strange had happened, playing it all down and saying he’d just been very busy lately. When Dennis asked him if he could check out the other address for him too, the friend declined. That was also the last time Dennis ever heard from him.

Meanwhile, Begotten’s dark ambient music and the twisted stories attached to the releases on Geometric Lullaby attracted many listeners in the vaporwave community. Dennis released all six albums, which he’d allegedly received in a single email, throughout 2018 and 2019.

Dennis’ relationship to the shadowy figure behind the music continued to be unsteady. After a long time of silence, he finally received another email from the address that sent him the original music. It was just a brief note saying that Begotten was alive and “okay for now”, thanking him for releasing their music. Dennis says the note made him happy, even though he couldn’t shake the feeling he wasn’t actually talking to Begotten, but that someone was speaking on their behalf.

He also remembers that at a later point, a short conversation unspun in which Begotten got into a bit more detail about the mental disorder they were living with. But when Dennis asked them who they were, and if they were actually Begotten or just someone speaking for them, they ended the exchange with a message in Chinese characters, which translated to a graphic suicide threat.

The whole saga culminated around the time of the sixth release and another email conversation, in which Begotten asked Dennis if he really wanted to know who they were – and Dennis questioning in that very moment whether he would view the music any differently if he actually did. After a short while, he simply answered no, he didn’t need to know anymore. To him, the music he loved so much was just the work of Begotten, and that was all that felt important to him.

Now it should have become clear that it’s obviously totally unclear whether any of this actually happened – or if it’s just a fantastic story that Dennis Mikula made up for artistic and/or promotional purposes.

It has to be said that Mikula has a history of creating confusion around the releases he’s involved with. Even his own band, Ghost Bath, originally claimed to be a black metal band from Chongqing, China, releasing their debut album through a Chinese underground label, though Mikula and the group members actually hailed from the small town of Minot, North Dakota.

In this recent Bandcamp Daily piece by Ted Davis about the Geometric Lullaby catalogue, he’s also quoted: “Since vaporwave’s an internet genre, it’s easy to be an anonymous artist. You can be anything if you make an alias. I enjoy artists who do that.”

But whether Begotten is actually just an alias of Mikula himself, as many in the vaporwave community assume, doesn’t really matter all that much. As he says, the very nature of the genre enables artists to detach their work from aspects of identity and biography, allowing them, to borrow the words of Swiss writer Max Frisch, “to try on stories like clothes.”

This one’s quite a poetic, beautiful story, I think, one where an anonymous, vaporous entity uses the experimental techniques and aesthetic tropes of the vaporwave genre to express very human aspects of sadness, longing, melancholy, loneliness and depression – and yes, even suicidal thoughts. For some reason, this music has even more impact when you don’t know who’s behind it.

But the story wasn’t finished after the original run of six albums. Since 2019, two more Begotten albums have been released. In the liner notes to Death Cycle (2023), Dennis recounts that after all those years, when he’d almost forgotten about the whole story, the actual human behind the Begotten alias had finally approached him outside of the venue after a Ghost Bath gig in Georgia.

In their brief talk, Begotten repeatedly mentioned a music collective they currently felt drawn to, which seemed to assert a strange power over them. Saying goodbye, they handed Dennis a crumpled piece of paper. Back inside the venue, he saw that the hand-written note just said “Help me.”

But when he went outside again to look for them, they were already gone.

The latest Begotten album, their eighth in total, is called Dented, Chipped, Gap-toothed and was just released in October 2025. Its liner notes confirm that Begotten has indeed joined that mysterious musical collective they were talking about previously, called the Nightmare Disciples.

The collective website and releases on Geometric Lullaby create an entire new universe – I haven’t taken the time to fully dive in yet, but that time will come.

The good news is that Begotten still seems to be alive and well for now, even if they’ve apparently become part of some occult sect.²

“I will let you take from that what you will”, Dennis writes in the most recent liner notes. “Begotten has promised me a meeting face-to-face again in 2026.”

1. Aside from Dennis Mikula’s original liner notes, a three-part video series by the YouTuber Pad Chennington (which he also turned into a written story on the Vapor95 site) was the main source for this article.

2. If you want to embark on the full Begotten journey, start with the first album and then go through the project’s Bandcamp page. They’re all name-your-price downloads.