dungeon synth

DRA SAD III (Beneath the Uplands of Doom) is an album released in April 23, by a Spanish dungeon synth artist known by the alias of Elffor. A graciously effective work, that definitely conceives some of the best harmonies that the genre has ever testified from the beginning, this is a strongly genuine, effective, cohesive and profoundly creative album, whose aggrandizing, dense and epic harmonies insinuates its medieval atmosphere of love, honor and ancient hereditary monarchies, throughout the hyperbolic winds of a gracefully glorious and optimistic existence.   

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Forty-seven minutes long, the album has four extensive tracks: 1) The song of the ancient wisdom; 2) Monarch of the shadows; 3) Old cryptic howls; 4) Heralds of cruelty; with gracefully poetic cantilenas, filled by symphonies lost in a convoluted diagram of desperation forgotten in the winds of time, the overall melodies – exceedingly enchanting and vigorous –, underlined by a cosmogony of furious and tempestuous dissonances of rhythmic nostalgia, unveil a beautiful and sincere, but melancholic glory, that is hidden in the heart of a brave mythology, whose inheritance will bring prosperity, equity, justice and peace to all kingdoms known to men.

With a powerfully resonant atmosphere that conceives – and indeed gravitates perfectly – towards the colorful mosaic of medieval glory upon which the artist’s musical style is based on, Beneath the Uplands of Doom reveals itself a very pleasant and marvelous work, both artistically and technically. With a sensational and ardently inspirational evaluation of the most inherently aggrandizing virtues of the genre, Elffor creates a parallel world of sagacity and fantastic innocence, that makes the heart and the spirit travel to a time where everything was possible. The epic vivacity of the harmonies capitulates the beauty of relatively simple compositions, whose soul are filled by a consistent and relentless musical splendor. 

A gracefully conceived and dense work of majestic artistry, the symphonic grandiosity and the dimensional sensibilities exposed all the way through delightful anthems of monumental chivalry and serene resignation definitely delivers to the audience one of the best medieval ambient music albums ever created. Elffor has such a creative strength and lucidity, that his spectacular level of authenticity unquestionably reunites all the necessary qualities to make history in the underground scene. Sincerely, Beneath the Uplands of Doom is an epic coalition of anthems to be exceedingly appreciated and celebrated. 


Wagner

dungeon synth / ambient

Westward is an album released in January, by Serbian medieval black dungeon synth project Stronghold Guardian. Almost forty minutes long, the record has eleven tracks: 1)At the Citadel; 2)Horsemen's Folk; 3)Nighthold; 4)Westward; 5)Grey Mountains; 6)The Lands Across the Sea; 7)Winterealm; 8)Hero of the Ages; 9)The Hidden Kingdom; 10)Anthem of Valor; 11)East is Where Our Hearts Are; with glorious, passionate and sensational melodies, that breathes and exhales the perfect convergence between fantasy and history in all tonalities of its formidable and iridescent harmonies, Westward reveals itself to be a splendorous album from the beginning, delivering all the correct elements expected from the genre, with such strength, mordacity and authenticity, that you literally cannot believe in the grandiosity of the work that you are contemplating.  

With a dispersive and salutary style that navigates between the spaces of nostalgia and rapture – reminiscent of the noble chivalries full of bravery and honor from crowns and monarchies long gone –, the perfect balance between soft cantilenas and more dispersive graceful liturgies situates the creative deliverance of this work in the placid cosmogonies of a sensible perception of artistry, that interweaves the lyrical and epic elements of the music in a sequence of poetic and elegant rhapsodies, which definitely rescues the past and brings it back to life, in such a graceful consistence, that its impossible to measure precisely the scale of the artist’s splendorous audacity and technical competence. 

Although the background harmonies are simple, the evocative and beautiful melodies framed by the sensibilities of the work displays a vigorous essence that seems inherent to the nature of the genre. With delightful harmonious possibilities that engraves in the twilight of its stylistic proclivities the technical ordinances of the artist’s most preponderant qualities, even in its apparently ordinary passages, Westward delivers a graceful, pungent and cohesive body of work, that captures in the arduous fragrances of its wonderful symphonies the everlasting brilliance of a truly original and splendid creativity.   

With the reflexive grace of a lucid and expansive glory, sidelined by the renitent auspices of a solitary, but heroic gloom perpetually adorned by the omniscient shadow of melancholic and growling black metal vocals, the general anatomy of the music – as well as everything that you hear in this majestic album – departs from a mosaic of inspirational possibilities, that rapidly evolves to become a powerful demonstration of inventive and lucid originality. With its genuine strength and splendor, Westward consecrates itself as a magnificent rhapsody of vivacious tenderness and discreet, marvelously dilapidated symphonies, sometimes delivered in a quasi-minimalist fragmentary scale. Definitely, Stronghold Guardian has conceived this album as one of the most formidable and quintessential works in the history of medieval ambient music. 


Wagner

dungeon synth / folk / ambient

Inheritor is an album released on December 1, by a dungeon synth artist, known only by the alias of Urrnil. A very concise album – only half an hour long –, Inheritor has ten tracks: 1) Thunder Howls; 2) Silver Paths; 3) The Ravenous Might; 4) Estë; 5) Born of Stone; 6) Worthy Inheritor; 7) (Wrath) Brought Upon; 8) Blood Written Oaths; 9) A Forest Where Time is no Lord (Remastered); 10) Hidden, Forgotten, Sequestered (Seamless Mix). With a great and profusely dense medieval soundscape, this album displays a very dynamic, diluted and epic style, that definitely establishes more ambitious and personal standards for the genre. Discreetly, but passionately consecrating its lurid and expansive musical layout as an audacious exemplar of an expressively more modernist and authorial quest for stylistic features, Inheritor emerges as an interesting work of art, whose sound is abundant in innovative and authentic elements, vigorously injecting a vivacious outlook into a genre that is in constant need of reshaping itself. 

With a natural, vigorous and creative splendor, the music of Urrnil is an esoteric voyage to the outer limits of time; to glorious periods of hereditary dynasties, distant realms, equestrian nobilities and majestic kings. A place where a sensible, grandiloquent and tender reality do exist, all elements of chivalry are brought back to the present, in a deeply surreal sonorous journey of lucid and invariable conquests, where the essence and the integrity of life are rescued by the genuine benevolence of noble spirits. 

Formidably capturing the imperative essence of a time full of splendorous cosmogonies and codes of honor, Inheritor definitely propitiates to its audience an undeniable return to a glorious past. With a consistent, restless and expansive, but gracefully imaginative and captivating sound, Urrnil delivers on this album a veraciously relevant and genuine collection of medieval symphonies, that strikes the spirit with the beauty of lost centuries, and the simplicity of an ephemeral moment of sincere human exhilaration.    

Definitely one of the best dungeon synth albums that I have heard, Inheritor doesn’t display the limitations and the stagnant dispositions usually so prevalent in the genre. With a more dynamic, sober and vivacious style, this is a very enjoyable album, whose sound is a pleasure to hear, all the way through. With versatile qualities and a very sensible intuitive timing, its harmonies are simple, but graciously aggrandizing, and its virtuous melodic polyphonies are beautifully extended into an everlasting universe of salutary serenities, that becomes more and more cohesive, as the music gradually unfolds its own singular, infinite and altruistic essence. 

 

Wagner

dungeon synth

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A beautiful album, with symmetric and protuberating melodic lines, Tome of the Crystal Wizard is a masterful creation on elemental harmonies and intuitive allegorical majesty. With splendorous melancholic grievances and a formidable conscious simplicity, the style of the artist is a marvelous altruistic dissonance dwelling in a realm of colossal sonorous consistence, compelled by a symbiosis of dream-like flavored sensitivity and a delightful cohesion of dark despondency.

While the music in general is simple, the profound attention to detail is magnificently vast, the harmonies are full of densities and the gracious glory that is delivered throughout its elegant waves of dehydrated splendor are maximized through the vicinities of its expansive sonorous possibilities, though in a very modest layout. With six tracks – Blood Passage, The Crystal Wizard, Hagsbane, Chasm of Light, Through the Darkness and Winter's Crest – this work is a simple, but wonderful expression of sensational creative artistry. With organic virtues that condensates its continuous elemental ordinations, Tome of the Crystal Wizard is a very poetic, elusive and graceful work, whose harmonies deliver a fragrant universe of unexpected sensibility, liberated by a dispersive soul that correlates the exercise of its proverbial tenacity with its extraordinary sense of musical infinity.    

The beauty of the album comes entirely from the exponential deliverance of a very uncompromised simplicity, that strikes and appeals to your conscience from the beginning, while – on the other hand – seems willingly eager to explore the sentimental qualities of the genre, in a very individualistic comprehension of reality. With somewhat dilated, but concomitantly concentrated horizontal harmonies slowly inclined to fade over the horizon of its own diluted tonalities, the abstract serenity that rises above the sovereignty of your existence is pragmatically eroded, to accept the delusional somnolence of an everlasting sound that gravitates around its own subtle and suggestive universe of ambivalent tranquility and disturbance.    

Tome of the Crystal Wizard is a splendorous album, with exceedingly vivacious and post-classical qualities, despite its objectivity. Oblique and sometimes peripheral – but wonderfully audacious and original –, Iagon displays a lugubrious and lucid style on this brilliant work, that definitely projects dungeon synth as a curious, instigating and sagaciously singular form of artistry. 


Wagner

dungeon synth / medieval ambient / folk  

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IV is an album released on November 20, by a Salt Lake City based medieval ambient sound artist, known only by the alias of Fief. Its fourth work, hence the title, IV is a very concise album – little less than half an hour long –, consisting of seven tracks: The Daydreaming Sentry, Evening Market, Wayfarer's Wind, 'Neath the Gently Swaying Boughs, Medieval Skies, Faire and The Waiting Hearth. A magnificently beautiful record, whose poetic lines rise above its own horizon of distinctive grace, the style of the artist is simple; nevertheless, definitely achieves a level of sensational majesty, harvested by wonderful dream-like harmonies, that are fully encircled in a splendorous creative context, that captures vividly the honorific sensibility of a graciously personal parallel world, underlined subtlety by the distinctive sonorous traces of medieval Japanese culture.

The artist definitely knows how to display a perfect equilibrium, never exceeding the simplicity that is the basic principle of its cohesive formula. Over a modest structure, harmonies dance in a very linear, but flexible placidity, that creatively revolves around an axis of splendorous, but coherent possibilities. Way more grounded in perennial suggestive feelings of wonder and serenity than lugubrious melancholy and consternation, IV is a transcendental journey through the creative vastness of a genuine talent, more preoccupied with the lucid disposition of its harmonies than the technical grievances of its musical anatomy. 

The album is simple, direct and very objective, and extracts beauty from the magnificent and dynamic organic virtues of its fantastic melodic devices, without hyperbolic or dehydrated artifices. The fifth track – Medieval Skies – resumes beautifully the gracious and vivaciously natural beauty of the artist’s music. This song is a wonderful wave of salutary and splendorous majesty, that exceptionally projects your soul to the vastness of a perfectly poetic alignment, fulfilled by the grace of a genuine sensibility, touched by the spectacular availability of life that is hidden beyond its ordinary elements.    

Fief proves with this gloriously magnificent album that beauty is closely associated with simplicity. Utilizing wonderfully this amazing quality as the preponderant element of his music, he proves unequivocally that creativity, genuine inspiration and true sensibility – 
working altogether – are extraordinary components, way more important than any artificial technicalities available. In fact, these virtues are everything an artist of his formidable grandiosity needs, to make a fantastic state of the art album. 


Wagner

dark ambient / dungeon synth

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Yūrei no hi is an album released on October 10, by a French ambient music artist, known by the alias Aokigahara. Fifty minutes long, the record has fifteen tracks: I'm sorry..., Dust & memories of a bygone era, Fullness in death, Quiet demon inside, Yūrei no hi, Your shadow haunt me, Shiki, Broked inside, Pray, Razor blade on your skin, Untitled depressed song, Beyond pain, Until ended life, Blood all around your cold body and Epitaph. With a very characteristic and peculiar sound, Yūrei no hi is an interesting, quasi-minimalist ambient music work, that heavily concentrates on the sonorous dilapidation of gracious and symbolic atmospheres, that are more inventive, inquisitive and restless, than melancholic, sorrowful or degradedly empty. Touching the correct notes in precise periods, in a lucid panorama of poetic and evocative disturbances, the album certainly can be considered a good work, that inhales versatile influences, like Japanese post-classical harmonies, delivering to its audience a salutary and dense horizon of colorful sound distinctions, that easily ordains the skills and the subtle traces of its own atmosphere.  

Very audacious and deeply authorial by any perspective, the work presents harmonies that are driven by a lucid and sensible creative conscience, that marvelously exposes the consistence of its infallible diagram of artistry. Despite the fact that the songs are somewhat concise – which is something unusual for the genre –, they express a great volatility of consonantal flavors, mostly diluted at the vastness of its own sonorous tapestry of evocative, but lugubrious serenity; the record evolves, and the harmonies evolve altogether, in a convergence of patterns that makes the strength of the sound to gracefully contrast with its everlasting horizon of invisible tranquility. A marvelous liturgy of somnolent allegories become trapped in the fragile oceans of a conscience that never sleeps, but quietly waits for the world to dilute.  

With a consistent serenity built all the way up to its frontal axis of silent glory, the music of Aokigahara is simple, but vehemently captures a rapturous stream of life at the insight of its fantastic conception of an introspective universe of timeless despondency. Despite the extension of the album, the profoundness of the work really incorporates and disperses elements of transcendental mordacity, that elevates its creative splendor to a more peculiar degree of latent sensibilities. 

With a great degree of experimentalism on minimalist symphonies, Yūrei no hi is definitely a very competent musical statement, that showcases in the strength of its delightful drama placid, but expansive pieces of surreal majesty, that, at the same time, recognizes the efficient and composite structural boundaries, that never allow the harmonies to be too dispersive nor overtly dimensional. The album has its deficiencies, though, as sometimes seems too vague and drastically diffuse; nevertheless, represents the genre of folk ambient music with a very original premise, and laborious skills that knows how to introduce precise elements into it, without sounding artificial nor generic. Yūrei no hi is definitely a very good album, with gracefully lucid compositions, perfectly aware of its abilities and dispositions. 


Wagner

ambient / drone

Back in January I published a review for '7' by American ambient act Interface Type Seven (read). Back then it was winter. The streets and parks were covered with a thin layer of snow. I wrote "This is a perfect album for these cold winter evenings" and I mentioned a burning fireplace.

Today a heatwave is crushing Europe. A huge part of the continent now IS a burning fireplace. The sun is blistering. It hasn't rained in days, weeks even. So I was wondering if another dose of IT7 ambient would cool me off. In short: it didn't, but that doesn't say anything about the quality of this new album. 

As per usual, Interface Type Seven explores the regions of "slowism", somewhere between ambient, classical music, downtempo electronics and post rock. This time, the focus seems to lay on dramatic piano, nicely illustrated by opener 'Imminent'. Carefully, IT7 steps into the footsteps of Olafur Arnalds. The Boards Of Canada references from his previous album slowly disappear as title track 'Nonlinear' takes the piano towards something more playful. 

Yet, not to worry, fans of lingering drones and meandering soundscapes have plenty to look forward to. 'Aberrations' delivers those goodies in an immersive manner. 'Silence' attempts something similar, but on a church organ, so it seems. 'Fault' then drags us into the dark and mysterious shamanistic drones of ritual dark ambient. Talking about a varied album. The latter is probably my favorite track here, and comes highly recommended for droners of all ages.

So it seems that the album gradually descends into darkness. 'Labyrinthine' might sound like a friendly and somewhat rhythmic ambient tune at first but there is something impending, something useasy about it. In the end, the music nudges towards dungeon synth before 'Static' pushes the listener into ever droning quicksand. Perhaps it is cool enough down there. Nonetheless, 'Nonlinear' definitely is a varied and vivacious follow up to '7', one which comes highly recommended.


​Serge

dungeon synth / ambient / folk

A beautiful, sensible, amazingly poetic record, Ghosts of boscus cavus is the work of a French medieval folk ambient artist known as ElixiR, released on July 1st. With delicate and serene harmonies, that wonders throughout a sonorous conflagration of sincere devotional artistry, the general layout of the work is simple and elementary conscious of its monumental placidity, but splendidly sensational and beautiful, to say the least. With twelve tracks – Boscavium, Boscavum, Monastic ruins, Deus vult, A procession to war, Ghosts of boscus cavus, The holy glory, Une présence près des bois, Misericordiae, L'ordre du temple, Le grand maître, De Molay, Nearer my god to thee and Shelob - Shelob - Fantôme du passé – that are uncommonly more concise than what the genre usually presents, the level of artistic grace and sentiment present on Ghosts of boscus cavus is primordially relevant, formidably  created and exceptionally executed. For sure, reveals a talent that certainly knows how to display confidently a decent degree of competence, pragmatism and authenticity.  

With a dense parameter of harmonious expression, the volatile expansion by which the anatomy of the sound dilates itself is genuinely organic, although there is an inherent simplicity in the work that makes it abundantly profound and original. With a captivating style, that reunites at the epicenter of its serenity the wonderful sentence of a timeless dream, Ghosts of boscus cavus is an aggrandizing state of the art work, that filters, elevates and condensates at the axis of its marvelous extemporal innocence the sincere grace of existence, which unwittingly transmits a spiritual relevance that absorbs the grandiosity of the human nature. 

As I wrote some lines above, the general layers of the music present on the album are simple, but the conflagration of sincere elements, conglomerated at the center of calm and philosophic – sometimes delusional – harmonies, disperses among the dust of invisible planets the groundbreaking allegories upon which the music is created. And the impeccable feeling it generates evokes beyond the lucidity of reason the wonderful artistry that are concentrated behind the work.     

A splendid and sensational album, certainly one of the best of the genre released this year, Ghosts of boscus cavus is the infinite anthem played over and over again in the evening of a displaced and solitary cathedral lost in time. In the voracious ruins of a night that never ends, but recalls the savage sorrow of its bitterness, the music of ElixiR is a discreet blessing, that fantastically revolves around the world in a cloak of surreptitiously serene harmonies, displayed over and over again at the pure densities of the soul.   


Wagner

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