You know when you put on some horrendously violent metal album, and it starts with a bit of creepy ambient music before the ‘proper’ songs begin? If you record a whole album of those spooky intros, without any guitars or other difficult-to-master instruments, you’ll have made a dungeon synth album.
It’s a great title for a genre of music, for several reasons. First, you could make the music with a real-life keyboard synthesiser if you wanted to, but you actually only need a computer and a bog-standard soft-synth program to compose and play the stuff, so that’s what most people do. Next, the vibe is definitely dungeon-y, all unnerving textures, whispers and wails: the point is to be understated rather than epic, so don’t expect Middle-Earth-sized choirs. Instead, imagine yourself running around an 8-bit computer game in 1986, poking goblins with a big old sword and battling zombies in graveyards. Who doesn’t love all that comforting adolescent nonsense?
It’s interesting to note that the roots of this music lie in Norwegian black metal, itself a heavily fantasy-based genre of music. The artist names and album sleeve art from both styles of music are similar, populated by crumbling castle battlements, throne rooms, evocative forest landscapes and so on and so forth. There aren’t really many prominent dungeon synth artists, partly because the music isn’t really suited for live performance, and partly because there’s zero money in it. The genre probably won’t grow much bigger, and in fact it might even vanish, but so what? Once on YouTube, always on YouTube. Here’s five great examples for you to enjoy on your commute.
Mortiis – ’The Song Of A Long Forgotten Ghost Part 1’
Håvard Ellefsen played bass in the Norwegian black metal geezers Emperor before strapping on a goblin mask, renaming himself Mortiis and recording this amazing 1993 demo, an hour of him twiddling around on a $99 Roland keyboard. Some of the melodies are a bit parpy and cheap, but if tinny, crap-sounding instruments put you off, I’d suggest that dungeon synth is not for you.
Cernunnos Woods – ‘Cad Goddeu (The Battle Of The Trees)’