Aura - Rain (2013)

You proceed into the interior of the tower, looking upward to see that it stretches straight up into the clouds, which have somehow made their way into the building. There are circular metal walkways every ten feet up, with ladders between each floor. Along the walls of each floor, as far as you can see from your current vantage point, are wine racks, most cluttered full with bottles. You proceed up the ladder, onto the second floor and inspect the bottles more closely. They seem to be grouped together according to their vintage, with labels indicating they were produced this year. You climb up to the next floor, glancing around at these bottles to see they are slightly older. You keep climbing, with no particular destination in mind, but only to satisfy your curiosity at what you will find. Is it wine bottles all the way up? How far up does it go? You keep climbing and climbing, for what feels like hours, your arms and legs aching, when you suddenly find yourself surrounded by fog, the cloud layer. You stop off at that floor to rest, laying on your back. You turn and glance down at the massive drop below, with a stomach lurch and immediate sense of dizzy vertigo. You quickly focus on the wine bottles to steady yourself.  These racks are mostly empty compared to the lower levels.  You stand up and walk over to the nearest rack, pulling out a random bottle. It is shaped differently than the bottles from the first few floors, more narrow. There is no label, perhaps worn off by the droplets of condensation covering the glass. You wonder how sitting for so long at such an altitude might affect the flavor? Perhaps it would not taste like any ordinary wine at all... You look around for a bottle opener.

At one point back in 2013 I made a note of this album, Aura – Rain, wondering if it could be classified as dungeon synth. I decided it was of course, but didn't write anything more about it. I can't even remember how I found out about it. It is wistfully sad, but not in a bleak despondent way, but rather like a cleansing release of troubles, a comfortable hopeful melancholy. According to the Youtube description, most of the songs were made in the late 2000s, and there is something about the sound that very much reminds me of that time period, when I was first learning music production and how to use a DAW myself. It is raw and primitive in a way that feels authentic, like it was just the best the artist could do at the time, rather than intentionally made in a lofi style. There are a lot of odd idiosyncracies, like unbalanced mixing of the different synth layers, and inconsistent timing, but that only adds to the charm, and there is still a feeling of focused intent. It feels direct and honest, and so it is easy to get swept up in the misty contemplative atmospheres that I believe the artist intended to conjure.

There are many albums now that do these things well, and this album is not unique for its influence or innovation, unlike most of the albums I try to focus on with this blog. So why review this one? I wanted to discuss how music ages, and I think Aura – Rain is special in that way, at least for me. I listened to it once or twice when it was first released, then basically forgot about it until now, over a decade later. I did not take much notice of it when it was released, seeming like just someone's early attempts at music production, and I would not take much notice if it were released today. And yet, because the project ended with this album and seems to have been forgotten by everyone, it now resonates for me like a pure time capsule preserving the enthusiastic simplicity of dungeon synth in 2013. But there's also the wistfulness of wondering, what could have been had this project continued? Very fitting for the rainy melancholic theme.  I find all of those elements come together to give it some sort inherent charged magic, some sort of mysterious essence or energy between the sparse simple notes, built up by the long years of unknown dormancy.

So many albums coming out these days do not get the attention they deserve, and so many seem inexplicable in our current era. I think if an album goes totally unnoticed the month it is released, and even if it is hidden away in complete obscurity for decades, it can become all the more resonant and powerful because of that. It is like all those obscure old 90s tapes that went totally unnoticed until the passage of time allowed people to see their limitations in a different way, as distinguishing traits of art from a certain time and place rather than just diminishing defects. So what will be the unique limitations of our current era in 2025 that we might be nostalgic about decades from now? It is a comforting thought that perhaps all the albums being sincerely made now have the potential to eventually become future classics, at least from some individual perspectives. Aura – Rain is such an album I believe, one that is greatly elevated by time and obscurity, and might continue to grow more interesting as the years pass.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TACH2NPStS8

Vindkaldr - Enchantments of Old Lore (2015)

 

 

You climb carefully down the ivy caked against the stone wall, until you make your way to the ground, arms shaking from the strain. You look around to find yourself in what was once a garden, now overgrown so densely that it seems like a jungle. Roots twist gnarling every which way through the soil. Vines cascade all along the packed treeline. Bugs, birds, and some unknown animals in the distance all chipper and hum in a chorus of permeating nature. You wonder to yourself how long this place must've been abandoned to get like this? Was it at one time neat and orderly, with long stretches of clear flat grass and carefully-sectioned foliage? Or even when it might've once been bustling with people, frolicking and fighting in their way, were they happy to let the wilderness encroach into their domain? You walk steadily along, navigating through the thick underbrush, until you reach an open area of paved stone, a large square clearing. In the center is a strange looking tower, intricately detailed with carved embellishments, stretching so far into the sky that you have to squint to see it, covering your eyes from the glare of the sun now peeking through the clouds. There is a cliff on one side of the square, with a waterfall rushing down its side and into a channel through the center of the stone walkway. You see the door of the tower is open, and you proceed inward.

Enchantments of Old Lore is quite a well-known album at this point, and from what I remember was popular even around the time it was released. That was not from any sort of promotional hype, but simply the music itself being so immediately affecting, obviously beautiful to anyone who would take the time to listen. The mood is deeply solemn, reverential, contemplative, and modest, but in awe of some vast grandeur of being. If ever one wanted to make the case that dungeon synth could be spiritual, this album would be a prime example. The composition is a bit sparse and minimal, soft analog-style synth pads drift and waltz in a vast cavernous temple of reverb. There are only ever a handful of layers, generally playing close notes and similar sounds, which all blend together in an echoey fusion. There is a very human organicness, in that everything seems recorded live and loose, even seemingly improvisational at times. I doubt there is any midi quantization going on here. I think you can really feel the artist's focused inspiration in the performance itself. The melodies are mostly simple and unadorned, but quite gorgeous, acting in a very focused way to transport the listener to a place of serene introspection.

When I really think about the surface details of Enchantments of Old Lore, it seems not so straight-up dungeon synth, at least not in the way I used to conceive it. I used to identify rigid riff-based melodic structures, similar to early black metal, as being a distinguishing compositional characteristic. And for the synths I felt sample-based rompler textures were more essential to the dungeon sound, and the more futuristic synthesized sounds of analog and virtual analog style subtractive synthesis usually felt anachronistic, except when hidden just as pads in the background or for a rare moment of otherworldliness. Here pretty much all we get are those very synthy sounds, and not the rigid riff-based structures, but rather a more ethereal floating style of composition, all which would make this album more akin to winter synth, new age, or ambient generally, rather than dungeon synth. So it seems a bit contradictory to even consider this album "dark dungeon music," and yet I still can't shake the feeling that it is planted squarely in the center of the vortex. So that brings me to a couple of different conclusions, firstly that winter synth is dungeon synth and maybe always has been, and secondly, how "true" an album is really depends more on the vibes and attitude of the artist rather than any objective details about the music.

I feel a hesitation in writing about this album, due only to its relative popularity. I was actually reluctant to even listen to it for a few years after it was released because it had so much attention on it. I feel like that is not really fair to the music or the artist though, because if anything it seems like it's trying to resist exposure, and with a track title like "In Solitude Until The End Of Time," I certainly would not think Vindkaldr was trying to be a household name. Sometimes that can make a work all the more appealing to a large audience though, especially in a scene so fascinated by obscurity. But I remember the first time I listened to this album, a few years after it was released, I approached it with an attitude of, "Alright, let's see what all the fuss is about," and was blown away. I have not had quite the same reaction to some of the big hits of other artists the past decade or so, but some of those were even more popular and did not seem to have the same hype-resistant aspect, and so I was perhaps not as willing to be open-minded. I think this is very much a shortcoming on my part and is partially why I've had such a hard time keeping up with this blog. For some reason I have this feeling that if anyone else is talking about a particular album online then it would be lame for me to also do so. But I think Enchantments of Old Lore is a strong reminder that often things are popular for good reason. To deny ourselves the experience of things just because they're trendy is to be as slavish to the crowd as only following the trends. Ideally we should be able to appreciate things on their own merits, whether they are world-famous or completely unknown.

Even though most people reading this are probably already well-familiar with Enchantments of Old Lore, I'd say give it another spin.  It's great on the first listen and remains great after many more.  There is a timeless beauty about it, and it is a touchstone of the genre which I think any music lover could appreciate.

https://vindkaldr.bandcamp.com/album/enchantments-of-old-lore