dungeon synth / dark ambient

bandcamp

Vast Beneath the Skies is a dungeon synth album released by Croatian artist Druad. Fifty-one minutes long, the record has seven tracks: Vast Beneath the Skies, Echo and the Sleeping Sea, A Nymph, Dawning over Their Forts in the Peaks, Last Woodland Warmth, The Great Twilight Wall and Temples Glowing White. With ethereal and cordially abstract symphonies amplified by medieval cosmogonies that evoke a magnificent universe of serene imponderability, the harmonious textures that gracefully comprehends its laborious commonalities are definitely quite simple, but enchantingly proverbial. The overall sound of this album, although can be easily defined as a basic endeavor within the genre, is profound and ardently beautiful. A consistent sonority that persistently evokes the soul of a lost era of untimely principles, the style of Druad, calm and serene, like dungeon synth has to be, is dense, constantly dissipating and gracefully eloquent; cohesive enough to be astoundingly ascendant and expansive, but without ever being monotonous, tiresome nor repetitive.    

A work that is filled with a transcendental calmness that trespasses the most grandiloquent, fertile and feverish intonations of its own harmonious predispositions, Vast Beneath the Skies is true and spiritually gifted old school dungeon synth. A tremendously intense album, its vastly comprehensible, pertinent and sincere melodies revolve around an ancient grace that sees beyond the ordinary elegance of the genre: it circulates above an everlasting sobriety that fluctuates between the splendor of its rhythmical lucidity in a lugubrious structure, and a sophisticated density, that analyzes the intermittent reactions of its own ambivalent magnificence, but always maintaining the simplicity that qualifies its sound as ostensibly beautiful and marvelously peculiar.

Despite the overall simplicity of the album, that untrained ears would easily confuse with amateurism, there is an imposing grace on Druad’s sound, that reveals the modest and contained sense of proportions the artist wonderfully preserves – whether it would be by a conscious acknowledgment of his musical limitations, by lack of decent and more complex equipment, or simply by a deliberate choice for simplicity – that knows how to compose a monumental record with equalized passion, never digressing out of the limits of his sincere and competent sense of artistry.    

A beautiful record that certainly aggregates more beauty, density and atmosphere to the genre, Vast Beneath the Skies is a repertoire of plausible and possible passions, that never lets the pretensions of its extraordinary ambitions to surpass the boundaries of its wonderful and lucid perceptions. A marvelous example of contained and crucially ordained, arranged atmospheres, that has no delusions of grandiosity about its own premises, this record is a declaration of authenticity engraved at the onset of the genre.


Wagner

dungeon synth

Barad-Dûr is a dungeon synth album, a split record between the artists Balrog and The Inquisitor, released in March 16. Thirty nine minutes long, it has eight tracks. The first three, by Balrog – Mount Doom, The Lands of Mordor and Sauron, the Necromancer – and the other five tracks by The Inquisitor: Rule Them All, Brightest of Stars, The Eye, The Strength of Men Failed and A Dangerous Business. The symbiosis of qualities between the two artists functions overall exceedingly well, as their styles have innumerable affinities, although they have unbearable differences as well. 

A great combination of talents, the first part of the album – with Balrog’s music – is characterized by a calm, but tempestuous anxiety, where the extemporal, but sonorous conflagration of harmonies makes the listener feel he is mentally transported to a solitary world of melancholy and despair, perpetually confined to a subtle, but hostile environment of surreal emotional deviations, somewhat eager to take a valuable price on his bravery, for having the outrageous courage of being on such a mordacious and afflictive eternal palace, where sorrow and cruelty are the disputable sovereigns. 

The Inquisitor part, although at first seems to be a continuation of Balrog’s, is a little more dense and sinister; nevertheless, the listener continues to be in a very conspicuous journey throughout a universe of inquisitive agony and tension. With serene and pleasant, but exceedingly fearful harmonies, that inspires the tenacity of underlying and undefined feelings, situated between curiosity and fear, the work done by The Inquisitor on his tracks is a formidable compliment of Balrog’s, although exhibits tenuous differences in texture and rhythm, as both artists possesses arbitrary distinctions in their styles, although they are firmly reconciled in this work, all the way through. The sound of Balrog can be felt being a little more implicit on his unraveling of an ambiguous universe of grace and oblivion, as The Inquisitor, on the other hand, is more explicit on his showcasing of an imponderable galaxy of sensibility and cynicism.  

A great album for dark ambient/dungeon synth enthusiasts, Barad-Dûr is a masterful and highly worthwhile work of art, immensely valuable for each and every second of its music. An enchanted journey through a world of underlying and majestic infinity, the sensible sonorous diagram devised to make the audience dive into an overwhelming universe of obliteration and precious reflection will make you wake up as a different version of yourself, so deeply the sound make you immerse, so distant is the universe created and explored by this marvelous duo, as they reveal themselves incredibly capable and elevated high-ranking artists.   

 
Wagner