Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Dave Petersen. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Dave, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

I started making flyers for metal shows in and around the Philadelphia area in late 2014/early 2015. There was one show coming together in my hometown in South Jersey – a place that had a vibrant music scene at the time but didn’t really do any metal shows. I thought it was awesome that a metal show was finally happening, and I wanted to help in whatever way I could to make it happen. I asked around and eventually got in touch with the person who was putting it together, and asked if I could help by making the flyer for it. After everything was locked in, I was eventually able to do so. And once it started making the rounds, I had a few people get in touch asking me to make flyers for their shows. Which then led to more and more people and more opportunities, and I still get to do that stuff to this day.

Those first few were especially meaningful because I was just a kid who wasn’t very confident in anything but wanted to be a part of something in some way. I think those flyers look like shit now, but it means the world to me that multiple people were willing to take a chance on someone who didn’t really know what he was doing yet.

Dave, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My name is Dave, I’m 29 years old, I live in Philadelphia, and I have a lot going on. I have 3 “music” projects: Hallucinogenic Bulb, a noise/drone/ambient project driven primarily by software running out of the Unity game engine where just about anything goes. Listless Spirit, an ambient music project. And a third more metal-leaning thing in the very early stages where I plan to scream my head off about all the medical shit I’ve been through. I’m also a freelance graphic designer and I’ve been doing show flyers/album artwork/CD/vinyl/cassette layouts for about a decade. I’m also the in-house graphic designer and an every-once-in-a-great-while part-time curator for Orb Tapes, a small label that does cassette releases for experimental, fringe, and extreme music.

I have Polycystic Kidney Disease (PKD), which is a genetic disease that causes cysts to form on your kidneys, sometimes bursting very painfully, eventually causing your kidneys to decline and eventually fail. I’ve been on dialysis since July 10, 2023, and I had my kidneys removed on January 19th of this year. Pretty much everyone on my dad’s side of the family has/had PKD, including my dad, aunt, and granddad. Dialysis completely blew my life to shit. I have to get hooked up to a machine to clean my blood 3 days a week, and usually I’m so exhausted after that I’m out of commission for the rest of the day. My job told me to go fuck myself because of it, I’ve been in and out of the hospital 5 times since starting dialysis (only one of which was planned), and my mental health hit rock bottom several times. For about a year, everything that could go wrong physically and mentally did exactly that. But recently, my life finally stabilized to the point where I can do the creative things that keep me sane again. That said, I need a kidney transplant in order to not die on a dialysis machine and have anything resembling a worthwhile life again, so if you have a spare kidney, please contact me.

The first creative world I got myself into was game modding – mainly for the PC version of 1999 R/C racing game Re-Volt (which still has an active community to this day!). It came with an in-game track creator, which was pretty limited and janky, but that didn’t stop me from spending hundreds of hours in it. You could also download custom cars and tracks that others made and add them to your copy of the game – from new paintjobs for the game’s default cars or tracks build from scratch that match (and in some cases exceed) the quality of the ones that came with the game. And it had a really easy starting point – you could just copy a folder, change a few things in a text file and do some work in MS Paint and you’d have a brand new car. I started uploading my own creations to the internet when I was about 11 or 12. I spent a lot of my time as a teenager making new tracks for Re-Volt, trying new ideas and making things that I thought were cool and wanted to play in. And some messes too. Most of them weren’t good. But a few of them still hold up today and I’m proud of that.

In 2013, I graduated high school, and left my shitty home situation for Drexel University. I originally wanted to be a level designer for video games, so I did my 4 years in Drexel’s digital media program, primarily focusing on the art side of things – 3D modeling, Photoshop, game design concepts, working in-engine, and so on. During college, I realized that the games industry was not a place I wanted to be (nor did I have any real shot at getting in fresh out of college), so I pivoted to working in IT while doing show flyers/artwork/layouts on my own terms. Through doing show flyers/artwork/layouts, I’ve been able to work with some of my favorite bands and artists, which is super cool.

In 2016, my 3rd year at Drexel, a good friend and I were in a web design class where, for some reason, we had a project where we had to make a thing in Flash where you punched in a date and it made some text pop up and played some music. My friend’s broke in such a way that, every single frame, it started playing a new copy of Built to Grind by Agoraphobic Nosebleed every single frame (so about 60 per second) on top of the existing ones, eventually turning into a tone on the computer lab’s Mac Pro tower speakers. I thought it’d be funny if I could recreate the mess in the Unity game engine, which most of my school projects used. I built a prototype that never quite got there, but had encouragement from some friends to put together some kind of album from it.

So on a day during summer break, I started from scratch, coded an entirely new noise machine in Unity, and then used it to improvise and record a whole album, and then released it under the name Hallucinogenic Bulb. At the time, it was a joke, meant to be as ridiculous and over-the-top as possible, and I had no plans to return to it. I didn’t think anyone would give a shit but people were actually really encouraging! A few months later, I got kind of curious what would happen if I made an album from sample recordings I took out in the wild rather than using random metal songs. And that became the 2nd Hallucinogenic Bulb album. About a year later, I started playing live shows with just a laptop and a glowing Xbox controller. Somewhere along the line, it stopped being a joke and started being a real outlet and real catharsis for me. Since then, I’ve played shows all over the Northeast, getting to meet all sorts of cool people and seeing places I wouldn’t have a chance to see otherwise. I’ve also been consistently releasing new music, even through the pandemic and being sick. I have a new album with Toadofsky, Distortion of a Perfect World, coming out November 29th on Virtua94 Records. And there’s more new stuff coming after that.

In 2020, I started releasing lighter, synth-driven ambient music under the name Listless Spirit. After a few short releases during the height of the pandemic, I put it on the backburner for a few years. In April of this past year, the project’s first full-length album, maybe one day i will finally know peace, came out. There’ll be more where that came from at some point.

I still work on these creative projects as much as I can – at least as much as my physical and mental health will allow me to.

Have you ever had to pivot?

When I first went to college, I wanted to be a level designer for video games. I wanted to build the places where the action happens. The sheer amount of work that goes into any game project is insane – and I spent most of my early college days working on something every waking moment I had (along with plenty of all-nighters). And as my time in college went on and the focus went more to group projects, things got messy – sometimes we bit off more than we could chew, sometimes we had different visions for a project, and sometimes you just get some group members who suck at everything or don’t contribute.

I was also working at my school’s print center at the time. When my work study funding ran out, I was brought on board by my school’s IT department to be both a print center attendant and a sort of first-line IT support person. I took easy classroom calls, swapped out cables nad peripherals, helped with setting stuff up, generally doing the grunt work so the full-time folks can focus on bigger projects. As I learned more and took on more at work, I realized that working in IT sucks a lot less than working in the game industry – both from the workload and the being ruthlessly exploited by publishers who only care about how much money they make rather than making something good.

On top of that, I wasn’t really where I needed to be creatively – and having several projects bomb through no fault of mine didn’t help. The game development scene in Philadelphia at the time was entirely independent creators – no bigger studios in the area to speak of. I didn’t have the safety net most of my classmates did, and I didn’t have the means to move out of Philadelphia (not that I really wanted to anyway). So I pivoted to working in IT, because a dude’s got rent and bills to pay. Not having my creative work attached to my livelihood allows me all sorts of freedom in what I get to do, who I get to work with, and how much or little I work in a given week to make room for other things.

Long story short, the only thing I use my very expensive and hard-earned degree for is to make music most people will hate.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Well, see above – I’m not dead yet.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://linktr.ee/hallucinogenicbulb
• Instagram: hallucinogenicbulb
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@hallucinogenicbulb
• Other: https://hallucinogenicbulb.bandcamp.com/
  https://listlessxspirit.bandcamp.com/
  [email protected]

Image Credits

Photo of me by Mary
Frail Vessel CD photo by Samuel Goff
Kevin Sims – Yarrow Canon CD photo by James Searfoss

All other photos/images by me