dungeon synth

In the early 2010s I went through a phase of collecting all the old Mortiis dungeon synth records. Due to their insane resale value, I never ended up buying most of them, and Blood And Thunder was included on that list. Its recently been repressed, so I figured at the very least I should hunt this down and give it a listen. This is the perfect entry-level release for anyone who wants to try their…

Ah yes, the original Emperor Of Dimensions Unknown! The recent Spirit Of Rebellion sessions had me going back to these stunning early Mortiis long-form compositions (Ok, Ok, its just several songs glued together, I get it!) and I even shared a few with LIW contributor Burra, who will hopefully be joining me to see Mortiis along with Mayhem in Bristol, providing this COVID situation improves drastically. Anyways, about the record. If you are even remotely…

Thangorodrim is amongst the more well known dungeon synth artists of modern day, and rightly so; the project took Mortiis worship to a whole new level on the first debut album (not a bad thing in these circles) but on Prologue, Thangorodrim strikes out into territory I would comfortably call entirely it’s own. To my knowledge, Prologue combines a few of the older tape releases together onto one collection. Prologue is not a short record…

This ancient relic of 90s dungeon synth has quite a sad story, as its composer is no longer with us. This does add some morbid weight to the already sombre atmospheres, but let’s not define this artist’s life by his untimely death. Secret Stairways is, for me, an incredibly introspective record. It had a much more suspended, ambient vibe to its morose, glacial compositions than your average dungeon synth record; possessing instead of bombast or…

Fantastic, moody, old school style dungeon synthesizer music. My one complaint is that there is some sort of effect added that makes the recording sound like its come off an old cassette tape, which clashes badly with some of the busier compositions. This results in a few messy, confusing moments. For the most part however, Nameless King channels some great vibes and ideas, and I would recommend this record to other fans of the dungeon…

One of my favourite dungeon synth releases of the last few years. Granted, I’m not as deep into the genre as some, but unearthing gems like this is what makes this particular world of music so rewarding. What I love about this kind of thing is the unique worlds and visions that just listening alone is enough to conjure. Truly, it’s an art form and very evocative. Expect heavy winter based themes and vibes of…

A spooky, unhinged entry into the Cernunnos discography. The synth work is spot on as always; a bizarre, kooky whirl of tones that remind me more of German expressionist cinema (of all things) rather than deep dark woods and dungeons. My gripe with this release lies with the vocal performances, which are too loud and if anything, detract from the synth work below them.

Beautiful, gorgeous, stunning compositions in the dungeon synth style. Expect to get lost in deep woods, misty moors and dripping wet caves (oo er). Also, it has the ever fantastic bonus of soothing my baby to sleep so seems to be the perfect addition. This record is 21 years old at the time of writing, but really, stuff like this, when done so well, is absolutely timeless. Kauan koskematon by Jääportit

Uumenissa is an incredibly dense and atmospheric journey through richly woven worlds of ice and unknowing scale. The record is adorned with fairly abstract watercolour paintings which help you envisage the scapes being conjured by the music. I wouldn’t say it was strictly “dungeon synth” but shares a lot of similarities with the genre, if you are a fan of such things. Uumenissa by Jääportit

Turning point is the only real full length from Secret Stairways (unless you count his first release – I guess that could be an album too, for some reason though I just don’t see it that way) and marks a slight departure from the heavier fantasy themes from before. Sure, they are still there (just look at the cover art) but the introspective, pensive and droning synth work seems to be the order of the…

If you think dungeon synth is cheesy then walk away now, because this early side project from dungeon master Mortiis is just that. A far cry from the endless unfolding single-track monstrosities which birthed his synthesizer career, Fata Morgana is instead more wondrous, more celestial, and dipped in a healthy coating of a sticky, melted yellow substance that you would usually find on burgers and hotdogs. That said, this is a stunning record, and the…

If you wander the path of dungeon synth then you shall of course know the name Old Sorcery. I recently got through a bunch of records when up late playing Morrowind, unable to sleep alongside my girlfriend as I had been working nights. Old Sorcery, and in particular the Strange And Eternal record, helped massively in that regard. A fantastic record, sometimes the compositions hark back to more legendary synthesizer composers such as Jean-Michel Jarre…

After being drawn in by the lush album art and the slowly building intro, I am unfortunately having to report that I found this Forest Of Yore record to be incredibly disappointing. Why, you ask? The synths, if not a little slow (which is usually fine, if building such a dense and incredible atmosphere), are jarring horribly alongside sounds of nature. I can’t tell if its sampled or looped or genuine bird song, but Jesus…

This album is so good that I ripped it and imported it into my game files for TES III: Morrowind. Hliðskjálf builds on the gloomy MIDI-keyboard fantasy realms of Dauði Baldrs, sprawling into more moody and atmospheric keyboard work, which all at once conjure memories of very early Cradle Of Filth, fantasy table-top roleplaying, of course the misty mysteries of Morrowind, and even something altogether more Angelo Badalamenti. I consider the two Burzum prison albums…

I recently did a post where I said I was sad that Burzum hadn’t released anything for a while, and BOOM out of the murky waters comes this absolute gem of a double album! Dodgy Thule shit aside (make of that what you will) Burzum conjures the most unique and beautiful of dungeon synth atmospheres. He has his detractors, of course, but I am not in league with them. This could just be a tired…

This dropped a few months before the new Burzum record. I listened to them back to back, so I may be getting my head wrapped incorrectly around things, but the two records definitely share a number of tracks. It seems that this is a prototype for the album that eventually came, which was longer and with a different layout and track list. If Thulean Mysteries never came, then Thule would be an intriguing listen. Today…

Glorious, glorious, fucking glorious dungeon synth music. Immediately you will notice the classic video game bent to this, not only in the artwork but in the tone and style of the synth patches used. Kobold conjures memories of old school RPG’ing. If I close my eyes I am in the deepest, darkest dungeons. Absolutely fucking beautiful. HDK 02 † The cave of the lost talisman by KOBOLD

And here we have the scratchy beginnings of one of the most entertaining dungeon synth projects of all time. Local Portal is a local demo for local wizards, and yes, whilst the scale of production is much humbler here so it’s the overall tone and sense of daring adventure.

This Hedge Wizard record is probably one of my favourite dungeon synth records of recent times. It’s not necessarily the tunes themselves, as there are many projects out there producing quality compositions of varying intricacy, but Hedge Wizard has that special magic ingredient in spades: atmosphere. From the minute I press play, to the completion of the run time, I am cast back into a world of 90s DOS role playing games and hokey high…

It seems a lot of people think that this is a bit of a bummer for Burzum to go out on. I’ve only listened to it a couple of times since it was released and whilst it is an easy listen, my first impressions – which have stuck with me until now – were that it was a cheap imitation of the earlier synth work from the same project. Sure, he’d upgraded from horrendous analogue…

The latest (at the time of writing) numbered EP / whathaveyou from the beautiful Fief, bringing all of the magical dungeon synth tunes that you could possibly what. Can this even be called dungeon synth? It’s more like straight-up olde worlde fantasy music, something you’d get whilst walking through Skyrim or something. It is lush and gorgeous, and does not seem to rely on synths, at least not the obvious electronic sounds. Amazing stuff.

I find that dungeon synth is often my muse, and mostly accompanies me on my writing. I must extend my thanks then, to artists such as Cernunnos Woods, for providing us with such splendours as Tears Of The Weeping Willow, the magic ambient tapestries of which have accompanied into long introspective forays as I reach that place, that well from which ideas flow. Beautiful stuff.

It has been a good while since a record has instilled such a physical level of claustrophobic distress within me. Sitting, writing, in a fucking Asda cafe of all places (I was waiting for my car to be MOT’ed), Dark Ages’ ominous journeys through a plague-riddled world crept up and wrapped me in a blanket of suffocating dread. Yeah. Sounds a bit much, but it was fucking great. By the time I decided to get…

Man, I absolutely fucking love dungeon synth. If anything makes me wanna re-download TES:III plus a fuckton of custom mods, or start writing a 220,000 word fantasy epic, then one suspects that this is the exact record. Fief is particularly magic, employing a range of instruments that seem authentic to the olde worlde. Yeah, it might be VSTs (or maybe not, I dunno haha), but it sounds absolutely fantastic. There is so much dungeon synth…

Bizarre yet massive-sounding dungeon synth that invokes mixed memories of all manner of fantasy PC games, Mortal Kombat 3, and those interludes off earlier Cradle Of Filth albums. I can imagine battling Kangaxx to this shit. 10/10.

Absolutely gorgeous dungeon synth music! You’d never know that this was made only in the last year or so; Thangorodrim captures the vibe of 90s dungeon music to a tee, and then improves on it tenfold. I love mirky, hiss-filled lost recordings of old, but Taur-nu-Fuin is a high fidelity performance that takes the sounds of Era 1 Mortiis to whole new realms of imagination. Taur-nu-Fuin [REMASTER] by Thangorodrim

Forgotten Pathways play really retro-sounding ambient / medieval “dungeon music” in the vein of early Mortiis or some shitty video game soundtrack. What makes it more akin to a game soundtrack or something like that is the often-appearing drum machine, something which is absent in a lot of this type of music. It makes actually quite a lot of difference; instead sounding like some cheap classical music, Shrouded In Mystery sounds like a lo-fi journey…

This is probably one of the more bizarre things that I have bought recently. Cintecele Diavolui is an old alias / side project that was used by Mortiis in the mid/late 90s when he was deep into making mainly dark ambient synth and keyboard based music, or as he called it – Dark Dungeon Music. Cintecele Diavolui is a pretty cool name in my opinion. The phrase means “The Devil’s Songs” in Romanian, which is…

Out of all the early Mortiis ambient keyboard pieces, The Song Of A Long Forgotten Ghost is probably the one that I am least familiar with, which is a crying shame because it’s a truly beautiful piece of music. Sometimes I wish I had the patience to put something like this together but I have to accept that I just can’t play the piano, organ, synth or what-have-you without any practice or training haha Early…

I know this doesn’t exactly rank high amongst the playlists of many black metal enthusiasts, but I am a huge fan of the prison-Burzum era. I think we need to reflect on what the man was simply left to work with; any country that allows you make an album whilst serving prison time for murder is pretty unusual in my opinion, and to be fair, considering Varg was supposedly only allowed to use a synthesizer,…