Lord Lovidicus - Windbuchen (2009)

You have no home.  You are a ghoul, condemned to wander the dreary night and occasional fog-shrouded day, making the graveyards your township and the catacombs your abode, with only the crows to keep you company.  It is not so bad though.  Few are granted such deep introspection.  You are not burdened by the obligations of living amongst others of your kind.  There is no earning or spending money, no festivals, no friends, no family, nothing in the cemetery but you and the gloom.  And that is fine because it is still beautiful.  It is more beautiful.  Free from all distraction you can recognize the same life and essence that permeates the entirety of existence, even in the cracks of that forgotten crumbling gravestone.  The essence is more visible when contrasted against the bleak isolation of these surroundings.  Perhaps you might even one day return to that place you once called home, amongst the living, knowing that if the pain and fear ever become too great, the comforting sadness of the necropolis will always be there for you, a guiding light reminding you that the beauty always remains underlying it all, even when your vision is so clouded that you cannot recognize it.  You could return tonight, or tomorrow, or some day, or perhaps you’ll never rejoin the fray and instead forever fade into the mist of forlorn serenity. 

Windbuchen is Lord Lovidicus’ first album, and certainly one of my favorites.  He released seven albums in a short span of just one year, starting with Windbuchen in December 2009, when dungeon synth seemed long dead.  After the release of Arcane in November 2010 he then took a year-long break and returned with an evolved and more sophisticated sound that continued to develop over time, resulting in many beloved albums and making him one of the most important artists in modern dungeon synth.  But for me Windbuchen and Trolldom still remain the albums closest to my heart.  I still find myself often revisiting these two albums.  They are much more simplistic and primitive than the rest of Lord Lovidicus’ catalogue, and a bit different even from the rest of that initial batch of 2010 albums, much more somber and slow-paced, very atmospherically focused. 

Windbuchen, like all the Lord Lovidicus albums of this period, has an interesting lofi production quality.  He said in an interview that these albums were recorded with a headset microphone rather than direct input from his keyboard, which is certainly out of the ordinary, but I think might give it a sort of unique authentic room reverb that adds a lot to the atmosphere.  I even often hear this nice quiet clicking sound in the background, which I think might be a metronome.  I love that and am not sure why barely-audible clicking would also contribute to the atmosphere but it definitely does.  All that said however, there is a glaring flaw with the recording quality that must be stated: a really nasty high-frequency noise, mainly in tracks 2, 3, and 4.  It basically just sounds like tinnitus, so much so that for a long time I couldn't tell whether it was actually present in the audio.  It bothered me so much I loaded up the tracks in my DAW with a frequency analyzer plugin and saw that these sounds were specifically at 11.5 kHz and 9.75kHz.  Fortunately there were no other sounds in that range for those problematic tracks, so I was able to squash those exact frequencies with an EQ and not lose anything, making the overall listening experience much better, allowing me to fully appreciate the album without the distraction of feeling like there’s something going wrong with my hearing. 

I read an interview where LL described the keyboard he used in this time period as simply being “a Casio,” and I think he uses it to good effect and quite conservatively.  It has a pleasant lofi charm without seeming like a cheesy toy, a very synthesized sound but still vaguely orchestral.  Mainly it’s just strings, pianos, crystals, raw synth lead/pad type sounds, and some very dry subdued percussion, which suggests there were just a handful of useful presets available on this keyboard, but I honestly haven’t really noticed how limited the timbral palette is until just now.  I guess this is one of those cases where limitations inspire creativity and put greater focus on the actual composition.  The composition seems very simple on the surface: few layers, slow-paced, short melodies, and familiar scales.  However I’m not sure it’s as simple as it might initially appear.  There’s still a fair amount going on as far as things consistently changing and evolving within that minimalistic framework.  I think even for such an early output these were still conscious decisions, intentionally holding back, understanding the special atmospheric power of such an approach, but with an awareness of how to keep it interesting and engaging.  Also I really like how much attention is given to the stereo effect, lots of different things going on in the left and right channels to the extent that it risks becoming completely unbalanced, but somehow the contrast always works and never gets distracting.

This album, alongside Trolldom, is one-of-a-kind.  I’ve never heard anything that conjures up the same particular feelings of relaxed melancholic wonder, and doubt if I ever will again.  I feel like this was a very transitory mental state for LL, and even he could not recreate it if he tried.  Of course there are now countless albums made with this level of compositional minimalism, these same sort of keyboard presets, similar lofi production, even often seemingly greater levels of effort within the same sort of framework.  It feels like this album was just thrown together in a couple of weeks as a casual hobby.  And yet for me this is still a totally unique introspective experience that I treasure.  Perhaps it is just personal nostalgia of discovering it a decade ago when nearly all dungeon synth was so rare and elusive, and I wonder how Windbuchen and Trolldom would affect me if they were released today by an unknown artist, but I would rather believe they really are inherently imbued with some mysterious supernatural essence.  Either way, this is the kind of thing that interests me most about dungeon synth, when words fail and I simply cannot explain or understand why certain unassuming recordings are so inexplicably transcendent to my ears.  

 

https://lordlovidicus.bandcamp.com/album/windbuchen

Soporific Sorcery - Sarcophagus Symphony II (2010)

There is a valley in a distant land, and standing far below those drifting sands, a dead forgotten pharaoh dreams in endless slumber.  Surrounding the sarcophagus sits an assortment of funerary paraphernalia, all the appropriate magical talismans and treasured artifacts from his life lived so many centuries ago, and it is through that ancient magic and those undisturbed burial rites that this king remains conscious in his physical mortification, a ghoul forever wandering the sprawling halls and cluttered chambers of his monumental tomb, a seat fit for a living god, and continuing to honor that divinity in death.  It is only as you stumble through with your torch that the sacred stillness is finally broken and you find yourself face-to-face with the being itself, dead but still permeated with some powerful alien force fully lost to the knowledge of man.  With not a single spell of protection having been placed on your vulnerable spirit, you find yourself immediately succumbing to the curse, and you are possessed.  You are no more the humble archeologist, but now become the living god-king of the last undiscovered tomb, and there you remain for further untold centuries in a state of eldritch lichdom, content to gaze endlessly at the unlit stones by which you are buried, seeing all that was or ever will be, at one in sacred undeath.

Coming out in 2010 and being dubbed “torture chamber music,” it seems that with this album Soporific Sorcery was deliberate in his attempt to faithfully raise the ghost of “dark dungeon music,” and had even conceived of it as a distinct genre a year before the term “dungeon synth” was even introduced.  I think that connection is quite obvious because there is no other reason to refer to this music as a “torture chamber” except as a reference to “dungeon,” and in fact I would say it is more light and whimsical than most dungeon synth that had been released up until that point, by no means tortorous.  To my ears it borrows most of its sound from Crypt of the Wizard, sharing the same sort of rubbery synth timbre, whimsical moods, bouncy pizzicatos, and short, circular melodies.  The actual song structures however seem to pull more from the two Mortiis albums prior to that one, with 10+ minute tracks that build slowly and repetitively, putting the listener into a trancelike state as they proceed through the epic journey.  So I’d say for anyone who is a fan of Ånden som Gjorde Opprør, Keiser av en Dimensjon Ukjent, and especially Crypt of the Wizard, this album is definitely worth a spin.

The sheer length of the album might be a bit challenging.  Clocking it at nearly an hour and a half, and being fairly static in its mood, I generally find my attention wandering at some point with every focused listen, and rarely am able to listen to the whole album in one sitting.  I think it probably would have been better as two separate 45 minute albums, but it works perfectly as background music or by taking a break at some point halfway through and returning where you left off at some later time.

My guess would be that these notes are programmed via midi rather than actually performed, because I never once noticed a mistake or off-timing, but my ear is not the best for that sort of thing and I would not be surprised to learn this artist is simply a perfectionist in that regard, because there is still a genuine organic feeling of life in these orchestrations that is not typically shared by albums that forego any keyboard performance in the recording process.  Despite the minimalism and repetitiveness, the composition is always developing, never stuck on the same riff for more than a handful of repetitions without a melody changing or a layer being added or removed. 

I cannot tell whether this is a synth, keyboard, or even a soundfont, but these are classic textures that I always enjoy.  It sounds like a standard sort of PCM rompler, though I don’t feel like I’ve heard these versions of the “General Midi” template before.  These types of sounds are the heart of traditional DS in my mind and for me they never get old. 

It should be noted, all Soporific Sorcery’s albums have been free from the beginning, not even name-your-price, just straight-up free.  I respect this a lot, a clear-cut statement by the artist that they’re not doing it for the money in any way.  What’s even more interesting, I don’t think this artist cares much at all about people even listening to his music.  I don’t remember ever seeing him going around promoting his albums, and I’m pretty sure when albums are free rather than NYP on Bandcamp they don’t even appear under new releases for the genre tag (and this one isn't even on Bandcamp).  I hardly ever see Soporific Sorcery mentioned, and yet he’s continued on to release four more excellent albums since this one, the most recent being 2018 as of this review.  I love that.  That makes it fully-known that these albums are made purely for the love of the music, not for money or even reaching an audience, whether that be just for the pleasure of making it, or perhaps the artist craves this particular sound so much that the only way he can hear more of it is by making it himself.  Either way this is the sort of radical creative individualism that I’ve always wanted to think of DS as embodying.  But of course the predictable downside of that approach is that such material is difficult to discover and rarely receives the appreciation it deserves, so make sure to check it out.

 

http://hauntedklinik.eu5.net/hkn007.2.htm

Mortiis - Født til å Herske (1994)

Fog drifts over rolling hills on a grey cloudy day.  There are too few trees and too few mountains.  The only form to break through the mist is a black rotting tower in the distance.  Even from so far away you can see its decay, its moss-covered bricks, its black hole windows, consuming every poor soul that wanders too close, condensing those souls into a pinpoint of spirit effervescence, locked away deep in its dark dungeons.  But out in the landscape the ghosts are free to wander, lost adrift but not trapped, content to hope that the clouds might break over some distant horizon, an ever-fought denial of the gloom. 

I’ve been listening to Født til å Herske for about fifteen years now.  I’ve always loved it, but I also feel like I’ve never fully cracked it.  It’s cold, monotonous, mysterious, and wearingly solemn.  It’s like the dungeon synth equivalent of plainchant, a dim ray of light within the darkness, only able to illuminate an enveloping void.  But somehow the light is never fully consumed by the hungry shadows.  I remember reading a Mortiis interview from this time period where he described his music as being even darker than black metal, which I think is inaccurate.  It faces the darkness rather than embracing it.  It’s a bit bleak, but it gives me a feeling of stoic determination, an inner drive to continue pushing forward even in the face of utter ennui.

Beneath the static gloom-wandering there’s a subtle feeling of excitement, a sense of wonder at a world of the mind manifesting through the keys.  Before this (and The Song of a Long Forgotten Ghost demo) the only real dungeon synth was short individual tracks featured on black metal albums, so I can only imagine that Mortiis would have taken great pleasure from seeing such a novel concept come together so successfully.  The idea was to take the listener on a journey into another world in the same way as the old space ambient pioneers, except instead of taking the listener into space, taking them into the mystical medieval lands suggested by black metal’s most atmospheric moments.  This had never been done before, and yet just immediately fell into place and had the power to transport a listener to somewhere they’ve never been.  It must’ve been an electrifying experience to produce this album, a real magic spell.

But that sense of creative satisfaction seems to be masked and restrained by an attitude of strict solemnity.  This album is very serious, despite some of the cheap sounds, and of course despite the campy original cover art of Mortiis with the prosthetics and medieval garb, pompously pointing his finger.  But the earnestness of that serious tone overpowers the naive surface cheese for those willing to allow it.  I think it was meant to cater to a black metal audience first and foremost, and with that, especially back then, is a very bizarre worldview, humorless and narrowly-focused, only concerned with the biggest life-or-death questions man faces, rejecting all frivolous things, societal, aesthetic, and emotional.  This self-serious attitude might make it seem even more campy to outsiders, and I think Født til å Herske can even be appreciated on that level as an exotic curiosity.  But for those who wish to experience it as intended, I believe an effective method would be to suspend one’s disbelief and attempt to think with a black metal attitude:

We live in desperate times, torn from our state of nature by a cruel historic fate.  The soul of humanity is at stake and steadily collapses into a pit of decadence and despair.  The only way out of that certain doom is complete societal destruction, to rebuild anew in some distant future.  So we are in a place of nihilistic despair, and all we can do is howl to the moon with our piercing shrieks and screeching tremolos.  We know too much and are unable to laugh anymore at the tragic truth.  But upon tiring and returning to the cave we can dream, of what once was and what could be, but only after we’ve forgotten this corruption as we finally drift off into slumber.

Something like that.  I don’t think it’s a healthy way to look at the world in daily life, with such intensity at all times, and I’d imagine that’s why most of the old black metallers eventually grew out of such complete commitment to that way of thinking.  But I believe to understand where this album is really coming from it’s necessary to at least temporarily don some kind of mental mask and try to put oneself in a mindset of that perception being true and these fragments of beauty being an oasis in a spiritual desert, and of seeing it less as a piece of entertainment to be consumed and more as an unrefined shamanic ritual spontaneously manifesting from the void, recognizing that the effectiveness of such magic is reliant upon participatory imagination. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o83uriMyqw8

Neptunell - Empires (2003)

The sun shines brightly overhead on a warm summer morning, but you still find yourself chilled as you wander through the ancient ruins of a city, now fully overgrown deep in the forest.  This place is forbidden, the entire forest said to be cursed.  You know nothing of who might’ve once lived in this sprawling stone metropolis, but your imagination soars as you gaze around at the marble pillars shrouded by foliage, the moss-covered mosaic cobble streets, and the majestic fragmentary statues which remain so lifelike as to seem as if they were once the citizens themselves.  It’s no wonder that this place is feared.  It must’ve been like a city of the gods, except that it was always inevitably doomed.  It’s a familiar story, man challenges the gods, and in his hubris, for a brief moment, convinces himself that those gods have been defeated and replaced, forgetting that it is not the gods who prevent us from entering their domain, but instead simply the passage of time, the curse of mortality.

The production here is very cold and digital.  It sounds as if the composition is programmed rather than performed, everything very rigidly quantized, and the instrumentation is raw General Midi sort of fare.  In fact this sounds a bit like straight-up midi music, like .mid files rather than mp3s.  That’s not meant as a criticism.  I actually think there is something quite cool about that, a pure focus on composition to create an original expression within the shared language of GM sounds.  Of course there’s nothing especially unique about this approach to DS, even back in 2003, but one interesting deviation is the extensive use of a distorted tremolo guitar sound, which I’m pretty sure is not an actual guitar but rather another sample-based sound.  This has the interesting effect of making the album still seem to be pure DS despite the addition of the metal timbre, just because it still sounds so much like a keyboard.

The composition is fairly sophisticated.  There is a good deal of contrast between long and short riffs, and always new elements being introduced.  This is one that can benefit from a focused listen I think, rather than just relegating it to the background.  And structurally there seems to be a journey in mind. Rarely are previously-heard riffs repeated, to the extent that it may require multiple listens to really get a sense of these tracks as cohesive songs, not something that is meant to be immediately accessible and hook the listener at first glance.  At times it is even a bit dissonant, seeming to intentionally try and repel the listener, such as the track “Her Sombre Horizons.”  Those tensions are generally resolved though, clearly a lot of thought having gone into how the path develops over time.  The struggles are intended and rewarded with a satisfying course of rumination.

The mood is gloomy and melancholic, never overtly sad, but there’s a sense of coldness and being weighed down, and a deep loneliness.  The sense of isolation makes the album title, Empires, seem somewhat ironic.  The last image this music brings to mind is throngs of people, marching armies, and towering monuments.  What this album evokes for me is ruins of empire, everything having crumbled long ago and now being overtaken by the one true empire, nature herself.  In that way it seems to me the concept is largely a reflection upon the fact that no matter how big and seemingly all-powerful they become, all empires still fall.  Like our own short lives, it is the condition invariably shared, that everything dies.  But hope is not lost because always corresponding with that tragedy of inescapable loss is rebirth.  Life will always find a way to reemerge and eventually thrive, and with it vast empires which might stretch on into incomprehensible millennia, perhaps free and glorious or perhaps cruel and tyrannical, but they all will meet their end eventually.  Even all memory of their existence will fade, and so we are just left to wonder and marvel at the vast cosmic scope of what once was and now forgotten. 

 

Right now the only way I'm aware of to listen to Neptunell - Empires is by downloading the four tracks individually (“empires1.zip,” “empires2.zip,” “empires3.zip,” and “empires4.zip”) from this website: https://files.scene.org/browse/music/artists/neptunell/