This article was written for Glaive Magazine #1 . You can read a digital version of the article with photographs on the Hothead Collective site or purchase a physical copy with even more design and layouts by CJ Somavia here. What follows is the text for the article. Please support your local zine distributors.
I
It seems like every few years I feel the need to write a new primer / introduction to dungeon synth. At one point I wrote primers for new people but now it seems like there are enough videos and guides I don’t have to do it anymore. Thus I will share my time with dungeon synth and why it has been so special for me. It has been nearly 10 years since I first encountered Erang’s Within The Land Of My Imagination I Am The Only God. At the time, I was writing for my personal blog, Tape Wyrm, and specifically looking for underground black and death metal. There was something alluring about this really cool music style that only three people had heard about. This was around the time that I developed my reviewing philosophy of always being positive about the music I talked about, since I could easily find ten things I liked and had no need to ever leave a negative review. This is usually how I operate in all aspects of my life. Most of my mornings consisted of searching through Bandcamp based on tags and sorting new releases by most intriguing art. While you can’t get all information based on art, a band who takes time for their artwork will probably have the same care extended in their music. Most of the time. Within The Land Of My Imagination I Am The Only God, the seventh album from French artist Erang, showed a black and white illustration of a cloaked figure riding on a dragon. This figure, which called to me as if in a dream, looked upon a valley with an undefined town or city in the distance. I longed for things which offered immersion and visual escapism. If you are ever looking to catch my attention, throw in some generic sort of fantasy element and I’ll wander over eventually.
Around the time I found this album, I had just wrapped up my first RPG campaign before moving away from my game group and finding myself back in the city. Before this, my wife was getting her Masters in fisheries science so we found ourselves in a remote area with a devastating lack of things to do outside of outdoor sports and hunting. Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, and other tabletop games began as an interest out of the sheer lack of anything else to do. I was teaching at a middle school and found a colleague that was also into fantasy and science fiction. This led to game night and eventually to a multi-year RPG campaign cobbled together by first edition Pathfinder, house rules, and a binder full of hand drawn maps. I spent most of my time keeping notes in a campaign book and could be found in my car waiting to pick up my wife, writing lore notes in a notebook I took from my job. When we were finally back in the city, I still longed for the type of social immersion one would get when engaging in a shared gameplay in remote areas. Erang’s album came, perhaps, at a time when I was longing for more fantasy and also friends to talk with about similar interests. The Erang album I found was not the black metal I was used to and compared to the raw / noise releases I would usually write about, the music made itself unique among the rest. When I heard the opening melodies of “The Erangers” along with the first few songs, I was both excited and confused. Surely this wasn’t it, right? What was a “dungeon synth”?” Was this just Dungeons & Dragons music with a metal aesthetic? Most of my RPG playlists consisted of movie soundtracks and video game scores. Why was I seeing places selling tapes? Did anyone else know about this? Was there more? Could you have this on while playing RPGs? I was so entranced by this person on the internet who had PDFs of worlds they had created. I wondered if I could just email them and talk about imaginary worlds.
II
What I heard in 2014 was called “dungeon synth”. Dungeon synth is the re-creation of a style, which was born out of the grim times of 1990’s black metal. Black metal musicians, who would often create atmospheric intros, outros, and interludes, began making long form synth records without vocals, or guitar, or anything that would normally be played in a metal record, opting instead for the soundscapes of the synthesizer. These sort of solo synth records made sense for an intensely DIY and cathartic music style often channeling their despondency into bleak magical landscapes. Guided by fantasy tropes and using mythology and popular tabletop gaming material, these ambient records would be sold alongside their metal records in the same store and trading circles often as “side projects” for the band. At this point, the genre did not have a name, rather it was referred to in various circles as “dark dungeon music”, “dark ambient”, “neoclassical” or “medieval music”. Almost every release from this time looked like a black metal record often with the same black and white at-home copier aesthetic. Dark dungeon music has a rich and lengthy history. Jordan’s Whiteman’s new book “Dark Dungeon Music: The Unlikely Story Of Dungeon Synth” provides more details than I could express here. Dungeon synth has many histories, both past and present, and a thorough read into the music of the 1990s is crucial to its understanding. This “genre” would have some interest for people but, for the most part, faded into obscurity. That is, until it was rediscovered in the early 2000s.
Andrew Werdna was a college student who, while living with his parents, had aspirations of being a fiction writer. Werdna’s interest in dark dungeon music had been developing since 2005 when he discovered Crypt of the Wizard and became especially captivated by the song “En Sirkel av Kosmisk Kaos” by Norwegian musician and one time Emperor bassist, Mortiis. This track, despite having a standard fantasy flair, delves into otherworldly realms with alien voices and dissonance. This was fantasy instrumentals but unlike any background music heard before. It was living fantasy music, something that felt like it was created in another world. Werdna started to track down other obscure releases by contemporaries of Mortiis, aided by the help of MP3 blogs like Asmodian Coven. This musical quest and the immersion into this hyper specific sound inspired a fantasy novel called The Tower of Ahmin. The title, much like the music, evoked a dark fantasy aesthetic that could be the title of a Dungeons & Dragons module in the early 1980’s. This novel would not make it past fragments and ideas, but Werdna’s passion for the music grew beyond casting it in fiction. On Thursday, March 17, 2011; the college student and aspiring writer made the first post on a new interest blog hosted on Blogspot, devoted to music he had grown to love. The first post on “dungeonsynth.blogspot.com” read:
“Dungeon synth is the sound of the ancient crypt. The breath of the tomb, that can only be properly conveyed in music that is primitive, necro, lo-fi, forgotten, obscure, and ignored by all of mainstream society. When you listen to dungeon synth you are making a conscious choice to spend your time in a graveyard, to stare, by candle-light, into an obscure tome that holds subtle secrets about places that all sane men avoid.”
This blog was important for many reasons even outside of giving the genre a name we still use today. It was primarily a place that people went to seek this same thing but perhaps more importantly, it was a place for people to discover. I feel my experience in 2014, listening to Erang, was the same that Werdna experienced when first hearing Mortiis. Despite both of us hearing different material, there was a sense that we uncovered something not known to many. It was not the obscurity which was intriguing, but rather this sense of magic that despite living in the age of the internet, we were participating in something small and intimate. In the age when things are pushed upon you, the act of discovery is intoxicating and gives one a sense they had just started upon a quest. This quest would not only bring me to a new group of friends, but into a genre that has reshaped my understanding of music. It also led me to grow my collection of cassette tapes to absurd horizons, much to my wife’s chagrin.
III
Music history has always fascinated me as a study of how people interact when creating art as a group. Waves, schisms, and evolutions exist as natural phenomena in an ecosystem of shared creativity. Dungeon synth, in its revival era, existed through the internet. Because of this, the speed and rate at which something could be created, absorbed, and responded to was much quicker. Dungeon synth, like many microgenres, existed for an audience who have an almost endless appetite for new music and the capability to talk about it to strangers online. While synth is at the very name of this genre, dungeon synth didn’t even require an actual hardware instrument and could be made on the computer through Virtual Studio Technology (VST). For the revival era, the process of discovering, participating, creating, and being celebrated in the genre could happen in quick succession. Since the bar for being a dungeon synth musician was so low, dungeon synth attracted all kinds of artists, becoming an online underground where there were little rules, a supportive audience, and enough distance from the mainstream that you could pretend you were living in an abandoned castle.
For most of the 2000s, the remnants of dark dungeon music existed on MP3 blogs and through file sharing. This is where Werdna started to discover the genre, which was fragmented across blogs and internet sages that held this secret knowledge. Though Bandcamp was founded in 2007, the music hosting site in the 2010s proved to be integral for musicians to host their music on a legitimate looking site. Bandcamp’s model of allowing anyone to participate in the music creation process and act as a storefront for physical media accelerated dungeon synth for many startup labels. You didn’t need a brick and mortar store or even a large roster of artists. You could be a label and just release your own music. Cassette tapes offered both an aesthetically alluring product that was inexpensive to produce and offered the ability to do short runs. The era of ordering 1000 CDs from a company, only to sit in boxes, was a part of the past. Now for a reasonable price you could order (or make) 30 tapes and sell them from your home. This era saw many musicians operating an imaginary empire from the comforts of their home and it would be many years before any of us saw each other in person.
A lo-fi fantasy ambient style of music that only existed on the internet drew an expected crowd. Though there are many jokes about the type of person who would choose to spend a large time of their lives engaged with this type of community, one thing can be said about all dungeon synth fans and creators — that they are passionate nerds about music. Though fantasy is an easy landing for jokes and affiliations, a generation of people used the internet to find new music and most certainly developed relationships with other internet users around a shared interest. In the mid 2010s, dungeon synth communities existed on Facebook and user run message forums. The number of these were sparse, so dungeon synth as a genre and community could be found in only a few chosen spaces with a thin but active community. To be honest, when I think about dungeon synth at its height of the bedroom era, I would guess that the genre was carried on by less than a hundred active participants. The space between artist and fan was small, if non-existent, and approaching “celebrities” in the genre was as easy as sending a personal message. This era was similar to the communities of punk or other underground spaces where there was little status between artist and fan.
IV
After moving away from my gaming group and the rural locale, I started to write for an online heavy metal / fantasy magazine. HollywoodMetal.com: based out of Hollywood, California: was created as a way to showcase more obscure and thematic forms of heavy metal by combining it with reviews and content around more mainstream fantasy fare. I initially started with album reviews but quickly added film (particularly 1980s fantasy) as well as comic books, fantasy art, and tabletop and RPG games to my weekly output. When I approached our team about a monthly column called Dungeon Synth Digest, focusing on new but unheard of artists in a hyper specific genre, there was no resistance to the idea. It was a natural fit given the obvious connections between dungeon synth and the broader fantasy world. I mean, “dungeon” was in the name. This monthly digest, which ran for over two years, allowed me to form relationships with many artists who were willing to talk about their releases. I’m sure for most of them the ability to talk about and be interviewed even by a small website was special. While I can’t speak for them, for me it was the chance to pretend I was a journalist, something I had always wanted to do, and to archive for the future a genre of music that I loved..
I have always enjoyed when people talk about things they are passionate about. There is a joy that comes when people are invested so strongly in something and want to talk about it at length. There is a sense of freedom when you decide to ignore the question of “is this really important” and start following the interesting paths instead. Artists are passionate about their work and even if they are not the best at communicating it in words, their musical energy is more than enough to engage audiences. I decided that this music was important for this small community of people and wanted to document it, at least for them. Most of my early articles and digests were just me being excited about a release and talking with the artist through email or direct message. Interviews were a structured back and forth of questions and having the artist talk about their work. There was no need to be critical or act as some sort of arbiter of taste, rather the act of seeking out and finding new artists that were making cool things was enough. There was also less need for me to make a brand for myself, as the artists were more than happy to share my articles and blurbs, which worked out wonderfully since I am terrible at actively promoting my work.
Erang was the first dungeon synth artist I contacted. Looking back through my correspondence, I think I emailed him about whether or not he was going to be making tapes, as I wanted the records in cassette form. It was a little bit later that we decided to do an interview — which was mainly just my questions I had about his worldbuilding as well as the artist’s tenth record, Tome X. Erang proved to be one of the most approachable and exuberant people to talk to. There was always a sense of passion but also performance as he presented this magical world like a tour guide. Dungeon synth, for me, became a musical expression of the RPG worlds I had filled notebooks with. It existed well before I had discovered it and would have continued existing even if I hadn’t chance encountered Erang’s record while writing about metal. It exists in some realm of the unreal, as a menagerie for its creators to make stories and then silently wait for others to watch.There was something comforting about the idea of fantasy as escape and also cultivation of imaginary worlds. No matter how hard life got, there was always a kingdom to think about or a character to name and develop a tragic backstory for. Fantasy novels, comics, gaming, and dungeon synth became this vehicle for a reprieve from the real, but also the creation in the realm of the unreal. These artists who were spending so much time crafting worlds were drawing music from it as if bringing back tokens from another world. Dungeon synth became, for me, a tangible communication with this realm and, though fantasy was an easy pitch, it was the conversation with the unreal which was most fascinating.
V
The pandemic changed a lot of things that we knew about the world and how to operate in it. This time period shifted everyone into a new direction. Many people, like myself, found ourselves inside looking for projects and things to fill free time. Dungeon synth, unlike other music genres with a live in-person aspect, was unaffected during this time and proved to be a fully operational genre for people to suddenly embrace and discover. The algorithm, which had been slowly being refined for years, suddenly connected people with slight interest in synth. Many people who discovered dungeon synth at this time also realized how accessible entry was and began making music and participating in its communities. These people were full of creative energy and could discover and create from home. Some people, like myself, found a renewed interest in the genre since there were so many new people and labels. A few years before the pandemic, live dungeon synth was being spearheaded by the the artists behind Sombre Arcane. These dungeon sieges started out as small get-togethers of local synth musicians around Worcester, Massachusetts but soon grew into multi-day festivals with an international lineup. The Northeast Dungeon Siege (NEDS), which began in 2018, would soon be the beginning of a new post-pandemic era for a genre that, for the better part of its history, never left the bedroom. I met Erang at the NEDS 2024 after almost ten years of just talking online. I was surprised how different he looked in person from an image I had in my mind. I don’t know what I was expecting but a tall handsome French guy stylishly dressed and looking like he just hopped off a motorcycle was not the image I had. Perhaps I was being too judgmental for a genre of online bedroom musicians. Perhaps we are all pretty. Erang was here at NEDS not performing but to be a part of the experience along with photographer Peter Beste. The NEDS show was one focal point for Beste, Erang, and a host of DS musicians to have their image cast in a photo series for an upcoming book. For a style that began in near secrecy that could have been forgotten, it is sheer absurdity to see how far it has traveled and, more amazing, how important it had become.
In The Realms of the Unreal is the name of a 15,000 page story written and illustrated by visionary visual artist Henry Darger. Darger, a janitor by day, would spend 40 years in a Chicago apartment amassing a novel illustrated by collage and watercolor detailing a biblical narrative around a group known as the Vivian Girls. The existence and sheer size of the project wouldn’t be known by most until his death in 1973. Darger, like many visionary artists, wouldn’t be appreciated in their lifetime or even seen by most of the public until later. I have often thought of dungeon synth as a form of visionary art, where people who may not have been musicians in the traditional sense soon found themselves called to create something from another world. Unburdened by questions of “should I do this” or “is this important”, some people are just called to create as if guided by commands from somewhere distant. Darger was largely unappreciated in his lifetime and, for the most part, the history of dungeon synth was relegated to the same fate. However, it seems as though now the media attention and artistic importance are finally in sync, with many voices in the room telling all types of stories — each one of them a fascinating view of a different world unlike our own. Dungeon synth has given me an opportunity to not only see visionary art operating in real time but also to be connected to a group of artists who are called to create. It got me to write about things, take pictures, and even try out music for the first time. It removed the segmented compartments of musical experience so that you could be a fan, critic, artist, and label all at the same time. Dungeon synth refined my understanding of what music could be and, more importantly, how it should exist. It also led me to various connected styles, including new age, noise, early electronic, and the cosmic sounds of the 1970s. It helped me understand how we communicate and the things we can collectively imagine. It showed me a group of people from various backgrounds and experiences all living in a communal daydream — as if all listening to some distant radio station broadcast from the realms of the unreal.