What is Dungeon Synth? By FlynnFlyTaggart
Made for my friend @the-gl0rious-evolution („• ᴗ •„)
Modern music genres, my favorite anime. Do you like fantasy? I think I've already asked that question, and I believe the answer is self-evident. The atmosphere of good fantasy has always been created not only by visuals and plot, but also, not least, by music. Music sometimes just hits so right that it can almost carry the atmosphere single-handedly. That's precisely why thematic genres of performers emerge, which exist quite self-sufficiently. One of them, which started being discussed very recently but appeared super long ago, is dungeon synth.
By the way, at the end of the video there will be a fucking awesome thematic track from the author of the original soundtrack for INTERNET NIGHTMARES, so be sure to watch the video till the end. Dungeon Synth is not close to neoclassical, which requires great skill in composition, nor to epic orchestral music, but is rather a primitive atmospheric soundtrack, evoking associations not with knightly battles and duels, but with travels in darkness amidst mountains, caves, forests, and dungeons.
Moreover, this feeling is even closer to the real, to real nature, for example, and we can feel this even more strongly together; after all, the beauty of the Russian forest doesn't yield for a second to the Norwegian one, here we are on the same wavelength with them. Or nostalgic feelings for old fairy-tale universes from childhood and adolescence, when playing MMOs for the first time, we were interested in exploring those shitty flat, low-poly worlds, just for the feeling of adventure and travel.
Dungeon synth evolved from black metal and pagan metal, which themselves were initially folkloric and fantasy-oriented in their thematic genres, but darker than, say, power metal.
Shittiness, cheapness, low quality, and primitiveness are the distinctive features and even the pluses of old Norwegian "trve" metal, which carried over into dungeon synth, with the use of vintage synthesizers, muffled toy drums from a drum machine at the level of DOS processors, monotony, and 15-minute tracks. Old black metal guys were, after all, ideological musicians, so atmosphere in the music played a significant role, which is why they often indulged in ambient tracks diluting the metal albums.
These were supposed to serve merely as supplements to the main content, but some listeners and even performers considered such works worthy of more attention. In every album by various Gorgoroths and Immortals, there was an intro or intermediate instrumental track in an epic or terrifying vein, but black metal guys mostly had nothing much besides guitars, drums, and synths.
No pipes, no bagpipes, no choirs, no clashing swords, so they had to synthesize a plastic and low-tech sound on their knees, very rarely with vocals and live instruments, to further emphasize and embellish the low budget—hence, it's dungeon synth. Modern performers obviously use emulations of synthesizers right on the computer. Dungeon synth is a lo-fi genre, low-tech. Of course, one could cite the 1996 album by Depressive Silence as a counterexample, which sounds so clean it could fit right into any modern movie, but that's more of an exception.
Usually, the sound of dungeon synth tracks is deliberately toy-like and tinkly, and obviously made without a metronome, as if played by a child on a battery-powered toy piano. But even without using a looper, as if some dude in corpsepaint and a leather doublet with some runic doodads just sat there and hammered out his track on the keys for 10 minutes personally. The Northern "true Nordic forest black" metal, which more often resonated with mysticism and mythology, or the beauty of nature, than with the satanism it's usually associated with, incorporated atmospheric passages within the songs themselves.
Take, for example, the band Trollich—the name sounds like it's in the language of the Rafflans, but it's actually Czech. They have a simply piss-awesome clip in the shade of old oaks. But the track itself is trve, and its final 20 seconds really hook you with that magical atmosphere of old fantasy, unrefined rawness, and some feeling like you've visited a history museum or something, but something you can't get from modern epic fantasy.
It's more like you launched Hexen on DOS. And the sound is the same.
According to info from authoritative sources, the creator of the genre is considered to be the former bassist of the famous band Emperor, Håvard "Mortiis" Ellefsen, who organized his solo project Mortiis. He started as far back as 1993 when he was 18. In later years, though, he started recording something like Merlin Manson. Although three years before him, the album "Where Shadows Lie" by Jim Kirkwood came out. This is probably the very first official album in the genre, not counting just some similar ambient that came out from other bands earlier.
A more Tolkien-esque variant was released by the pagan metal band Summoning in '95. The album called "Minas Morgul," the tracks from which sounded in a more positive, not gloomy, key. But, of course, any minimally knowledgeable guys in heavy music should have first thought of Burzum, Mr. Varg, and his albums like "Hliðskjálf," recorded in prison, or the recent "Thulêan Mysteries." The idea of recording entire instrumental albums in this style, not just intros and outros, was also popularized by him.
Everyone knows from the Breivik story how fucking amazing the living conditions are in Norwegian prisons, but still, when Varg was sent to the slammer, from instruments they initially only allowed him to keep a Roland D-50 synthesizer with that characteristic sound of 80s pop, sitcoms, and fashion shows. This same synth, by the way, was used for the first PlayStation startup screen. Being strictly limited in instrumentation but morally unbroken, Burzum recorded two albums right in prison using only this synth.
By the way, perhaps his later, less blackish albums, which he released after getting out of the clink, influenced the growth of interest in the genre, although they are considered strictly acquired taste, and many of his tracks are often classified as dark ambient, which is basically incorrect. Sometimes the whole genre is called dark ambient. Fuck, in 100 out of 100 cases, they call something dark ambient that is absolutely not what it is. Let me explain.
It often sounds gloomy, sure, but the word "dark" here, in my opinion, signifies not "dark," but "fuck knows what kind." Even regular ambient can be gloomy but not be dark ambient from a technical standpoint. What makes ambient "dark" is not gloomy or scary sound, but absolute non-compliance with musical laws and canons. In principle, Dark Ambient shouldn't even be perceived as music for listening, but rather as a set of sounds and samples that can't even have any rhythmics
besides their own, natural one, because the natural environment of Dark Ambient is industrial enterprises, factories, fucking drilling machines, and other elements of industrial existence, and the rhythm here is just the rhythm of a hammer's blows or the gears of Thomas the Tank Engine, which makes the genre closer to noise for its anti-musicality, or industrial (it's obvious from the name). There is, of course, a project like Old Moss Woman, well, was, where a dude recorded sounds of nature, babbling brooks, and singing birds, but you still can't do without a synthesizer here.
But you can do without measures and durations. The pseudo-medieval motifs of dungeon synth follow, though often quite primitive, still a musical structure and measuredness. Today there are a fuckton of performers imitating classic dungeon synth. You can get acquainted with their work, for example, on the channel The Dungeon Synth Archives.
There's plenty of old and new stuff there, however, I would note the one who is NOT the closest to this style but is super popular — Adrian von Ziegler, who gained traction thanks to YouTube, recording fantasy Celtic music. Some of his tracks can indeed be classified as Dungeon Synth, but rather his main merit is that he again raised people's interest in medieval music outside the framework of soundtracks for various games and anime. There were years when Alestorm and Corvus Corax were hyped, but now mostly only fans or listeners in their home countries remember them. The term Dungeon Synth was coined by blogger Andrew "Vordr" Verdna back in 2011 on his music review website, where he collected such compositions.
Of course, Dungeon Synth started being talked about extensively only 2-3 years ago, although, for example, our domestic YouTuber on linguistics, Mikitko, already discussed and demonstrated it as far back as 2015. A person rarely invents something new themselves, and with modern musical pseudo-genres, it often happens that the name appears later than the genre itself. Because, essentially, retro-wave is the same synth-wave and synth-pop with some improvements. Soviet-wave is synth-pop on old Soviet synthesizers.
Lo-fi hip-hop. No one even thought about this term before when listening to J Dilla's beats until the girl in headphones appeared. The only thing that unites these genres is that each of them is exaggerated to some extent. And if it is an ideological continuation of some already old style or the legacy of a specific musician, then its performers put a huge emphasis, outright abusing its distinctive techniques, presets, and instruments, forming such a, you know, musical caricature.
Like with that still quite trendy phonk, which is a successor or even a parody of Memphis rap, an old subgenre of hip-hop from the nineties, but concentrated and multiplied several times, in which essentially nothing remains of the old horror rap, only endless pounding with the Roland TR-808 kick drum, as the most signature micro-sample, at a billion BPM, and the antics of those who in 2021 watch Dota streams, for fuck's sake. That's real horror because it's scary to even believe such bullshit exists. So, dungeon synth is a modern collection of old compositions that came out 20, 30, many years ago.
Where did the black metal guys from the early '90s even get inspiration for such mythologically oriented creativity? After all, one must understand that back then there were no such computers with games, and "Lord of the Rings" was only from Ralph Bakshi, and essentially in book form; similar entertainments were only board games, LARPing with fencing, and Dungeons & Dragons — in principle, enough to form a fantasy image, but where could they get the corresponding visuals besides black-and-white illustrations for The Hobbit, and where could they listen to typical fantasy soundtracks besides Conan the Barbarian, Red Sonja, and Excalibur?
You know, there's a category of forty-year-old LARPers and role-players who constantly wander around various festivals, gatherings, and conventions in bandanas and shitty outfits, some fucking elderly hippies; to some, it might seem comical, but still, you sympathize with them precisely because in their youngest years, they didn't have as much awesome stuff as we have and had. However, inspiration for their orthodox fantasy-magical music could also come from various local "Golden Ring" neopagan Rodnovers with wooden dicks and authentic performances of folk art.
So, there was an interest in truly ancient, unrefined art among people in their time. Perhaps precisely because there was little of everything, creative imagination developed more vigorously, and works were closer to folklore, folk tales, and myths, which any fantasy originally relies on. There's its own special magic and charm in that.
It's precisely such a personal, individual perception of pagan, mythological, fuck-knows-what art and the Tolkien universe through the lens of not being oversaturated with content that formed the truly unique and distinctive stylistics of dungeon synth. This genre is still closer in sound simply to medieval music than to epic soundtracks or ambient. Essentially, in medieval Europe, music was divided into two types — church and secular.
Church music laid the foundations of sound and polyphony, when the combination of low and high male voices reflected off the walls of the temple and formed awesome, rich choral sound, but the melodies were very slow, monotonous, without clear meter, and practically random. However, in the name of God! The Gregorian chant, from which so much was ripped off by classical composers and show-offs. But the minstrels and jesters, as representatives of folk art, formed rhythmic music with versification on free themes, about love, adventure, nature, and simple joys, reaching their apogee in the 12th century with the appearance of the troubadour school in France.
The clergy initially got on their high horses, since music was supposed to carry only the word of God, but later one began to influence the other, and we got the idea of this abstract medieval semi-magical sound. Actually, truly medieval and especially NON-church music wasn't particularly epic and in many ways even sounded somewhat shitty; after all, musicians back then didn't have years of experience and a large database, but our
modern perception differs a bit, precisely thanks to various soundtracks and peplums in cinema, and also thanks to Celtic music, which is just super fucking awesome and beautiful and organically fits into any fantasy-adjacent work, even anime. Generally, the longer you listen to Dungeon Synth playlists, the more you understand that almost any modern music on medieval themes but without a pompous hue falls under this comb. By the way, I also decided to add that from Dungeon Synth came such a micro-genre as Dungeon Rap, where the beats are based on the same black metal ambient but with even lower quality.
Overall, it didn't really catch on, but it's always interesting to look at the combination of two incompatible things. Awesome composers for films like Narnia, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, for games like Elder Scrolls, WoW, holy fucking shit Heroes of Might and Magic, and generally all sorts of fancy Ennio Morricones and Hans Zimmers, they are all professionals in their field, and when creating orchestral
music, they always turned to real classics, modernizing them for us, while classical composers of the Renaissance and Baroque themselves turned to medieval folk songs, implementing them in their compositions. Nevertheless, for the average listener, simple sound synthesis can be worth more than the melody structure itself, so essentially, Dungeon Synth performers might have never heard real medieval music, and might not even pay due attention to classical music.
However, using ideas from professional composers, they chew them up and endlessly generate new albums in the genre. Although… Nothing ever restricts you from diversifying a track and allowing it to develop in various ways, carrying its own fairy-tale plot through diverse instrumental parts, which the listener should feel. Good creativity shouldn't be limited by strict stylistic frames and feigned "trveness," so today I've again invited the great band Cold Nordic Nipples, who wrote
the original soundtrack for Internet Nightmares, and who with their track demonstrate that music can be diverse and interesting regardless of the genre it's written in, even in such a primitive one as Dungeon Synth. Let's listen to what they came up with, shall we?
