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definitely worth a listen
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Holy shit this thread is TWO YEARS OLD??
Welp
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This is some good necromancy.
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This is the best dungeon synth Iāve ever heard (Iāve listened to a fair amount) and was just released on March 7. Itās got live drums and bass and is giving me big Goblin vibes.
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iām drawn to dungeon synth as an idea but it really sucks that a lot of dudes who make it are also racist metal nerds or straight up neo-nazis (like old tower)
hole dweller sounds cool, tho! hopefully they are not nazis!
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I understand your concern and appreciate your input. Itās important effort you make. The way I look for music feels like a minefield sometimes. The actual output of the artist is always a clue I use as to the heart of the music. This is a long post but hopefully it can help illustrate the care of curation I strive for when making media recommendations.
Some clarification before I attempt to examine the moral worth of what I find to be a beautiful record: Iāve been a gigging musician and record producer for 23 years. Both my parents work as keyboard players. Iām not saying Iām a special super music person but I do listen to music in a particular way.
When I was a kid I liked romantic and modern classicist composers a lot. Older folks were like, check out Wagner. I did and was like, naw. Years later I found out the dude was a Nazi. Dude wrote an opera that takes days to perform - super expensive.
Playing in punk bands in college I could tell which skinhead groups were naziās and which were fashion skin weirdos. The Nazi groupās drummer had the sexy piccolo snare and like 5 cymbals, their guitarists had Mesa Boogie Triple Rectifiers and their bassists had something resembling an amplifier on top of a fridge full of speakers. Also their records sounded shiny.
I grudgingly listened to one note of that horrible group from the article you linked. It was just some sort of layered gong sample with scary cinematic reverbs and an ominous low drone.
What I heard was formulaic overproduction. Shiny ādungeon synthā?
Nazis are generally known to be very good at organizing around wealth while following a chain of command towards a psychotic goal of mass produced garbage culture to support their racial beliefs. Their musicians and artists are in it for money and status among their tasteless millue. Being prolific and/or bombastic is confused for being talented and while the output may become interesting artifacts (see Wagnerās āTristanā chord) they lack what I would call heart. Current Black Metal and its variants share this quality.
While the majority of the links Iāve shared on this thread are at least acquaintances of mine, this one was not. I canāt find anything with search engines about Hole Dweller, the solo project of Tim Rowland, other than they hale from Athens, GA and his record label has a bunch of stuff Iāve listened to and enjoyed and it seems like they work for their artists. The music is under-produced, the only way I like dungeon synth, and oozes heart. I usually listen to DS to work on programming as I like the calming effect it has on me, bu this record made my jump up and run to my partner demanding she come back and rock out with me. Iām 99% sure this is not at all Nazi related and 75% confident this is left wing DS (mostly based on the Athens thing)
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thatās such a nice, considered response! i donāt know, maybe iām just used to people being very hard-line about the political tendencies of subgenres like black metal, power electronics, or dungeon synthāone way or the other. itās interesting to examine whatever set of tools we might have when it comes to gauging the politics and personality of the individual(s) behind music. myself, iām not sureā¦ iāve spent a lot of time wading through music made by fascists because iām drawn to weird, abrasive, transgressive music and art (less so these days by far). while i think thereās a lot of truth to your sentiments about āheartā, iāve heard a fair portion of music made by really awful people which i felt contained plenty of āheartā, coming off far differently from the vacant aesthetic productions you describe. (a few examples would be drudkh, luror, nokturnal mortum, even some burzum.)
my point being, i guess, i havenāt always found it so easy to tell without putting in some research. but i do for sure think youāre onto something, especially when you look at the way imo nazi-fetish music steals from the punk ethos of selling limited runs of music and merchandise (vinyl, tapes, perhaps t-shirts) in order to amplify its own appeal. i might even go as far as saying that when music āoozes heartā i donāt easily trust that heart until i know more. i mean, when considering certain subgenres, at least.
that said, iād absolutely love to hear more good dungeon synth which is not made by nazi creeps!
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My only frame of reference for black metal is some antifa writer-activists I follow who make a point of trying to kick the nazis out of the scene, keep lists of lefty black metal bands, etc. They emphasize black metal as a force for progressive revolution.
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kim kelly et al?
Exactly, yeah.
Thanks for the replies.
I Checked out the label Dungeon Deep Records face book on my partnerās account and it seems really normal small label stuff. They accept submissions and the artists get to keep their own bandcamp up while they put it on theirās too. Then they make merch. Iāve heard a lot of good stuff on their bandcamp before. For example:
Prehistoric dungeon synth. Lots of cool animal sounds.
Hereās some unrelated stuff.
I guess this was recorded on a boat. Synthy chill. From last July.
Portuguese classical guitar. A whole album of really nicely recorded and performed original pieces. Couple of years old.
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Wound up buying this, cheers for sharing it
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iām disappointed to see metal label profound lore selling records by nazi dungeon synth artist old tower. since weāve discussed this itt, however, i figured iād share an alternative: some explicitly anti-fash dungeon synth.
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Thanks for the good dungeon synth.
This is some really good chill-pop from Seattle for pandemic charity. I really dig the whole record a lot.
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This reminds me a little of something I have been listening to lately, a group called Men I Trust. I guess their latest album is a few months old now, but I think itās very good.
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Like Mikey, I also purchased the Hole Dweller album. I donāt know what I expected from the term ādungeon synth,ā but not something light and upbeat like this. Maybe some dungeons are friendly places and they just have a bad reputation because of the unpleasant ones.
Wait, Wikipedia says that Summoning is also dungeon synth. Aside from having Tolkien themes in common, thatās quite a contrast. @Bee introduced me to Summoning years ago and I mostly just listen to this one song by them:
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