A hush settles over the plains as a cold moon rises, casting long shadows as you notice the ruins in the distance. Your bones ache from the day’s tribulations, and your heart skips a beat at the thought of a place to rest until dawn.
However, you grow weary as you draw near. Moonlight seeps through crumbling stones, and wind whistles through ancient passages. There is something dark awaiting you in this place, the stuff of nightmares and whispered legends told by folk in the village late in the evening.
Sighing, you pass through what once was a grand wooden door, and set up camp in the corner of what was once some sort of great hall. As soon as you find yourself settled in, the hair on the back of your neck rises, as you hear the sounds of some mournful, cultish ritual from the depths of some poorly lit chamber that you’re sure holds your inevitable doom.
Now, dear readers, I’m sure you’re just itching to know what happens next, as you sit from the comfort of your home, skimming from your device of choice. Unfortunately for you I don’t have the coordinates of any haunted, blood-soaked ruins, but what I do have is a primer to the sort of music that’ll make you feel like you’re right there with our protagonist, none other than the world of dungeon synth.
A microgenre found at the mysterious intersection of old-school electronic music, synthesizer-based movie and video game soundtracks, and second-wave black metal, dungeon synth is quite a strange place to be. Melancholy, lo-fidelity, synthesizer albums recorded by artists like Mortiis, Depressive Silence, and Lamentation in the 1990s set the template for the genre, but never really circulated that far out of the black metal underground world. More recently, dungeon synth has made quite the comeback on platforms like Bandcamp, lurking in the weirder corners of the digital realm, and you should be listening. This is the official B-Side dungeon synth starter pack.
Classics/Starters/The Like:
Mortiis – Ånden Som Gjorde Opprør (1994)
http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LHAt8Qtmyk
You really can’t talk about classic dungeon synth without talking about the Era 1 Mortiis albums (aka his output from 1993 to 1999), and this is a prime example. Although you can argue that Burzum birthed dungeon synth with his prison synthesizer albums, we all know that Mortiis really set the groundwork for the genre as we know it today. After quitting second-wave black metal stalwarts Emperor, Mortiis sort of fell off the face of the earth, started dressing like a goblin, and made a bunch of spooky synthesizer albums largely informed by the aesthetics of black metal. And guess what? They kick ass. “Ånden Som Gjorde Opprør” manifests itself in two long-form tracks (each clocking in around 20 minutes), that just reek of medieval, sword and sorcery atmosphere. Put on the goblin nose and get freaky.
Depressive Silence – Depressive Silence II (1996)
http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxgVmpAk538&t=347s
Technically this is a demo, but nonetheless, it’s one of those releases that you have to bring up if you ever get yourself into a conversation about classic dungeon synth albums. Depressive Silence craft cold, mysterious music that feels like it should soundtrack lonesome excursions into the depths of unexplored landscapes, staying away from more overt fantasy tropes. This album is also fantastic with its work in dynamics, never content to stick with one atmosphere or volume for too long, all with fairly lo-fi string and synth patches on what I can’t imagine is an at all expensive keyboard. Essential listening.
Modern Essentials:
Hedge Wizard – More True Than Time Thought (2014)
http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne8fzMxX2Ps&t=1078s
You could bring up anything about this album and I would rant about it for days. Everything from the hand-drawn cover art to the off-time drum hits works together to envelop the listener in a strange pocket world in which wizards get high off of the smell of rain and sit around consulting forgotten spell books. Patient and complex part-writing on the composer’s behalf keeps the album moving at an intriguing but never unnerving pace, maintaining a level of mystery and otherworldliness that is truly hard to find in most dungeon synth releases.
Chaucerian Myth – The Canterbury Tales (2016)
It’s tough to say anything about this album that hasn’t been said already. Yes, it is three and a half hours long. Yes, it devotes a song to each tale of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, from which both the artist and album take their name. Yes, it delves deep into neo-classical territory to create what I would seriously call a masterpiece. Layers upon layers of synthesized instruments play off of one another to create moving compositions that subtly evoke Chaucer’s tales, without falling into the drones and ceaseless repetition that albums of this length tend to.
It wasn’t easy for me to pick just one Ranseur release to put on this list, but Goblin Music (2018) really just does it for me. Now, the music on this album is vastly different from all of the releases above it on this list, but that is by no means a problem. The sounds that Justin Mank conjures up in his music are angular, sometimes geometric, often noisy, and always weird. Listening to Ranseur feels like listening to what the stones at Devil’s Postpile would sound like if they made dungeon synth about goblins and strange, lowbrow sorcery. It doesn’t get much better than this. (unfortunately for you, this album only exists on Bandcamp, so the song above is from a different album. Goblin Music is linked up above.)
Spectral Kingdom – I (2016)
http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptLgOdpiSCg
Spectral Kingdom is slow, haunting, and somber dungeon synth, heavy on the string patches, what you would imagine hearing as you wade through the dead of night after a great battle has been fought. Pure synth, no gimmicks, just melancholy melodies that move like molasses and slow down your heart rate. I love the album artwork on this debut release as well; the raw, stark black and white minimalism compliments the music perfectly, and feels like some arcane thing you would dig out of the back closet of an abandoned record store in Norway, full of dark secrets and whatnot.
Article by Kieran Zimmer