Cult Never Dies, the U.K. metal publishing house founded by renowned author Dayal Patterson, has just unveiled their latest extreme music tome. Dark Dungeon Music: The Unlikely Story of Dungeon Synth is an exhaustive new hardcover book on the dungeon synth genre, written by Jordan Whiteman, of celebrated dungeon synth record label Ancient Meadow records. Today Decibel presents an exclusive excerpt from this 400-page, 200,000-word behemoth. Read below and then order a copy exclusively from Cult Never Dies.
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To the author, it seems wrong to assert that all art—especially entire modes of art—must belong to an ideology or concentrated discourse that exists independently from the body of art itself. Often, such assertions are used to manipulate the meaning of a piece of art or misinterpret the artist’s intent (or lack thereof), often with malicious or self-serving intent. Ideally, all art, especially music, would be permitted to assert itself into one modality or other, or not be at all aligned with any philosophy or message, totally removed from the generalizations of the public. Interestingly, it seems that the more popular a genre becomes, and thus the wider its appeal, the less likely it is to be subjected to any one specific label, ideology, or set of prescriptions—while the inverse is true for more condensed genres with smaller fanbases. Just as black metal has embraced its characterization as an elitist, extreme, misanthropic, Satanic, and contrarian genre, so too has dungeon synth adopted certain beliefs which—eventually—would come to concretize the disposition of the genre.
Of course, to suggest that a genre of music has a set of ‘beliefs’ is tricky. Typically, a genre’s utilitarian nature is predictable from a musicological perspective: listeners rely on taxonomic categorization to simplify the process of consuming music—or, indeed, any other media. If a listener likes a particular set of musical traits, it’s likely that a genre exists to serve that specific combination of qualities. Yet, this is not always true—especially not in genres which share a lot of common ancestry or ‘musicological DNA’ with other niche genres. Dungeon synth is, perhaps, one of the most precise examples. ‘Genetically’, dungeon synth as a genre has more cousins than a hobbit. As discussed earlier, dungeon synth—in the technical sense—is akin to several industrial subgenres such as dark ambient or neoclassical darkwave, but also employs musical scales, chord shapes, and patterns found heavily used in new age, neofolk, and neomedieval music. Aside from borrowing the occasional technical trait, however, dungeon synth has developed a loose philosophy which shares some overlap with the aforementioned genres: an affinity for anachronism, reverence for nature, interest in medieval history, et cetera.
Dungeon synth is music that inherently rejects modernity—no piece of dungeon synth that takes itself seriously can ever be cast in the light of modern modalities and concepts. There are no dungeon synth albums about colonizing space, modern warfare, modern political discourse, or any other facet of the human experience that can feasibly be demonstrated to exist ‘from our time’. Naturally, plenty will assert that music cannot or should not be considered in this limiting perspective. First, as I have already suggested, the entire point of a genre is to be predictable for the listener, so if being predictable in both a musical and visual sense is encouraged, then so too is making similar deductions based on verbal, contextual, or visual implications of a given piece of music defined otherwise as dungeon synth. In fact, with dungeon synth sharing so much of that musicological DNA with all of its many cousins, it is absolutely necessary to consider the inspirations, context, descriptive, and conceptual matter of a piece of music to determine its veracity when it is called dungeon synth by either the artist or the crowd at large.
Dungeon synth, as suggested by Werdna—and Mortiis, of course—must be music that is suggestive of a ‘dark dungeon,’ or at least the romanticized western reflection of a dungeon; that eerie, medieval/Dark Ages construct typical of old stories, fantasy novels, and films. As also asserted by Werdna, dungeon synth must be inspired by black metal, or else it is something other than dungeon synth. Of course, he qualified that notion with a convenient caveat about the genealogical, or linear, nature of inspiration: a musician who made an album that looks or sounds nothing like black metal but claims to be inspired by black metal is, arguably, ‘inspired by black metal’ all the same. It’s the same as a film writer or director including that equivocal and suspect ‘Based on True Events’ in the opening credits of a film to instill in the viewers the idea that it is mired in reality, when the events of the film are massive exaggerations of often benign or much less dramatic truths. Still, the presence of romanticized Dark Age motifs inherent to dungeon synth remains, regardless of where the trope originated. A likely vector is through black metal, which has a well-documented connection with dark age romanticism, medieval fantasy, reverence for nature and the like, but genres such as new age, neomedieval, or neofolk are equally as probable origins for these characteristics in dungeon synth, though it’s ultimately moot.
Further, it is not enough to say, “dungeon synth is music that rejects modernity.” One must go beyond and understand dungeon synth as being characteristic, exclusively, of a world, a time, and a place totally incongruent with the present day—no matter when that may be. So much dungeon synth music is mired in the themes of idealised Dark Age romanticism, dark fantasy, and the occult because all of these motifs and themes had already long been the pillars of escapism in other modes of art from which the earliest dungeon synth albums drew upon—whether consciously or not. As has been alluded to elsewhere several times already, dungeon synth is music that seeks to put the listener someplace other than the reality which they presently occupy in that moment. To illustrate this tendency with a bit more finesse, I will rely on three obscure, specific words that encapsulate the concept. Dungeon synth is characterized by three paradoxically modern terms which perfectly describe the escapist nature of the music: saudade, anemoia, and sehnsucht.
Saudade is a word from Portuguese and Brazilian culture which has been extrapolated to mean, according to Wikipedia, “a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for something or someone that one cares for and/or loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never be had again.” To this end, dungeon synth as a unique sound is one that invokes melancholy and longing for something which the listener is not currently experiencing or no longer possesses and, whether cognizant or not, will never experience again. Perhaps a fading memory of hiking through a gargantuan forest untouched by the modern world, or the feeling of leaving one clearly defined ‘era’ of one’s life and entering into a ‘whole new chapter,’ as we say in English. Dungeon synth as music is the invocation of this deeply winsome emotional state.
Amenoia is a very new word created by John Koenig of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, to fulfill the modern lexical demand to describe the sensation of “nostalgia for a time you’ve never known.” While a new word, the emotion, or perhaps it can even be considered a phenomenon, is one that has surely existed for some meaningful portion of written history—or at least once humans began educating subsequent generations about the history of their culture and their geographical part of the planet. In my part of the world, we often characterize this sensation as the ‘Good Old Days’ syndrome, with the implicit notion that the nostalgia is totally romanticized. Of course, anyone listening to dungeon synth most likely would not prefer to live during the Middle Ages, given the litany of abhorrent conditions which comprise the harsh realities of human existence during that time. The longing felt is a yearning for the simplicity of life before the world as we know it—and the naïveté implicit in day-to-day life in a time before the frenetic and complicated world we occupy in the present. Medieval peasants lived and died never once knowing the despair of an office job, never idling in traffic, arguing on the internet, or any other modern-day, first-world grievance.
Sehnsucht is a bit more common than the previous two words; it’s a German noun that is used in many everyday contexts and is translated as ‘longing,’ ‘desire,’ ‘yearning’ or ‘craving.’ If dungeon synth is inherently nostalgic or escapist, and if listeners find themselves yearning to exist in a past they have never and can never experience, then sehnsucht is the fundamental, deep-seated impetus of those emotions in an expressly psychological sense. Sehnsucht is the emotional state of feeling incomplete and imperfect relative to one’s life and being conjointly aware of the linear nature of time (past, present, future), bearing ambivalent emotions and self-reflection. Relative to dungeon synth, the emotion or state of sehnsucht can be said to be the underlying emotional state that drives a musician to create an entire album that sounds like a brooding electronic ode to dark medieval times. Sehnsucht is the inspirational motivation for the musician to focus on an idealized version of the past as a means of coping with, understanding, or escaping the profoundly incongruent and stressful nature of modern human life.
Now, of course, the presence of all or either of these three traits does not alone suffice to distinguish a piece of music as an example of dungeon synth. In fact, these three specific concepts can be applied to countless modes of art, not just music, and certainly not just one specific genre. Their meanings are highly relevant to the ulterior function of dungeon synth, and they’re indispensable when creating a vocabulary to discuss and better understand dungeon synth as a concrete genre, but they are by no means exclusive to dungeon synth. Further, their absence also does not preclude a piece of music as dungeon synth. These emotional tendencies or states of sentiment are entirely subjective. Two people can hear a piece of music that the artist intends to be transportive and both can (and most likely will) imagine themselves in entirely different settings. To that end, dungeon synth is experiential. The artist may not have intended to invoke any of these three briefly discussed concepts, but the listener may find themselves experiencing them nonetheless. This is a rare example of the subjective nature of dungeon synth; 100 artists may agree to make dungeon synth music with the express intention to transport the listener to some faraway world for an experience taking place long, long ago, and the entire body of listeners may have an entirely different experience when hearing the music.
In this way, the artist’s intention relative to these emotions and concepts is just as significant as the listener’s experience. In fact, this could be considered crucial of all dungeon synth music: the artist’s intentions and inspirations are equally as important in the final product as the subject matter and content, the listener’s subjective experience, the artwork/visual experience, and the musical composition itself. In a lot of music, there’s this notion that once a song is published, it no longer ‘belongs’ to the artist, but now belongs ‘to the world’—the public. In dungeon synth, it’s quite the opposite—dungeon synth as a genre manages to retain a demand for inquiry rather than resigned accessibility; listening to dungeon synth, which, as we already know, is often without vocals or lyrics (though not always), encourages the listener to contemplate the artist’s emotions or intentions—or total lack thereof—when they created a given piece of music. Conversely, this often results in the work of a given musician being misinterpreted or incorrectly associated with the genre. Simply because an artist set out to intending to make a dungeon synth record does not itself codify the music they make as dungeon synth, but that’s something we’ll discuss in greater detail later.
Beyond an explicit affinity with antiquity and a penchant for stirring despondent emotions and nostalgia, dungeon synth is also a genre that demands to be taken seriously. Anyone who has followed the music after the first decade of the 21st century will attest to the reality that comedy, parody, and irony have no legitimate place in the music—and have even managed to be irrevocably destructive to the genre at large. Despite several attempts to legitimize themes and gimmicks which have plagued other electronic genres (looking at you, vaporwave), the inclusion of intentionally tedious concepts or attempts to undermine the stark austerity of dungeon synth are almost always met with hostility and derision—and that’s more than fair. There are myriad examples of these kinds of efforts to lampoon the genre—whether maliciously or not—but to give any of them any voice here would be a step towards their legitimization, and so you won’t find any further emphasis on them here, unless to denounce their existence or relevance further. Given the inherently escapist nature of dungeon synth, it’s essential to recognise and respect the gruesome realities that fans and artists seek to escape—and why they benefit from the efficacy of dungeon synth as a vehicle for turning away from the world we occupy. The tendency to shatter those illusions with trite attempts at humor, needless differentiation (“This is prehistoric dungeon synth”), reckless adjoining (“This is dungeon rap, dungeon synth hip hop!”) or unabashed absurdism (“This is dungeon synth about a pizza parlor!”) is an inherently malicious and hostile endeavor that is contrary to the entire ethos of the genre. Never mind that these cheap tricks rarely result in art that is earnest or genuinely innovative or, even less often, both.
Dark Dungeon Music: The Unlikely Story of Dungeon Synth is now available exclusively from Cult Never Dies.
