Dungeon Synth Zine

17/07/2024

Heralding Dungeon Synth Zine #10: BAERDCYN!

"Heritage of the Bay"

So many stories and passions in just one man! Baerdcyn’s stories are just like his music - easy going, pleasant and best digested on a summer morning when the sun is shining and the sky is blue. Let’s join and enjoy this conversation that has everything that is unusual for dungeon synth - real life instruments, boats, Lego blocks and salty water.

DSZ: Your final fixation that I found especially interesting was that you built a boat. What was its fate?

Glenn Bokay That boat is very special to me. That was my senior year of high school woodshop project. How the class worked was that you could take Woodshop One where you went and they taught you how to use all the tools. And then the following year, you had the option to take what they called Woodshop Two. And the teacher - one of the best teachers I've ever had - would literally let you sit there and do whatever you wanted for Woodshop Two. He would tell kids that he would give them an automatic A, no matter who you were, as long as you were in Woodshop Two. Half the kids would go for instant A. I went into Woodshop Two and said ‘I'm going to build a boat.’ So we built it. It was a 10 foot jon boat. I had gotten probably about halfway through the entire boat. The boat itself was, woodwise, built. It was about ready to be fiberglassed when I graduated high school. I lived at the time for about 45 minutes away from my grandparents. We had brought the boat down there and I stayed pretty much the entire summer. I remember the day I finished the boat, it was around September 27th or 28th. So from late June until then, I was living with my grandparents and my grandfather and I finished the boat. He's been a bayman and a clammer and a duck hunter and a fisherman all his life. So he knew what he was doing to help put into the boat. We'd cut the back down and fiberglassed it, painted it up real nice and neat and put it in the local boat show and craftsmen show in town that year, and I got third place. I still have it. I don't take it out as much as I would like to. Plus also my outboard for it is currently shot, but it definitely still lives on.

Dungeon Synth Zine #10 will arrive on September 1, 2024.

14/07/2024

Heralding Dungeon Synth Zine #10: ELYVILON!

Dungeon synth is complicated. On the one hand, it relies on DIY work, which, well, yes, it’s wonderful that a regular person can have their own way to vent artistic urges… On the other hand, though, it fuels the deluge of low-effort music which is fulfilling to the musician only. It’s a hobby, and people put various amounts of time into their hobbies. In this world, once a year, we find someone with fire in their eyes dedicated to hone their craft as if tomorrow was never to come, a project of focused effort that shines like the Arkenstone in Smaug’s treasure heap. This time it’s Elyvilon: twenty percent talent, twenty percent skill, sixty percent concentrated power of will.

DSZ: Fairy tales. At one point, you mentioned that there are some fairy tales linked to your own family history. How so?

Tristan Feilla: I was born here in the US, but my father was born in France to a Finnish mother and a father from Egypt, born into a French family there. Quite the melange! They did a great job of keeping their cultural roots, and so I was raised with strong cultural influences from these two locations, including many bits and pieces of Finnish culture specifically, whether it was reading Moomintroll or Tomten books as a child, or simple familiarity with the Kalevala or music by Sibelius, even just some types of candy from Finland.

I’ve been lucky enough to visit the country as well. I remember hiking with my grandmother up in some rocky highlands, in deep forests with tall pines and rocky stone faces covered in moss. And I remember her saying “watch out, do you see that moss-eaten log by the path? That's a troll home, be careful! But we're safe if we go around it… if they leave the troll home and they follow us and they're touched by sunlight, they'll pop!” That sort of story really took root in my head. I've always loved the idea of trolls, and their artistic interpretations in many pieces of media. This album [Drums in the Deepwood] celebrates that aspect of my upbringing.

Dungeon Synth Zine #10 will arrive on September 1, 2024.

02/07/2024

Heralding Dungeon Synth Zine #10: FOGLORD!

DSZ: Speaking about light, I looked around the internet for opinions on Foglord in general, and I found, specifically on Dungeon Synth Forum, that somebody mentioned that they thought that there are two sides of dungeon synth: the dark one, which is a no brainer, and the light one. And, he put Foglord on the light side of dungeon synth. Do you feel like you are on the light side?

Foglord: I would say so in a way because I've never had an interest, except for when I started out, in doing darker stuff. A lot of my music is lighter themed. As I mentioned, the deciding factor was when I heard that Depressive Silence demo. I've never had a dark feeling associated with their music because of the beauty of it. There's always been a light feeling associated with it so that inspired me. Light and beauty is something I've always liked to incorporate into my music in some way -- maybe brief shades here and there of darker, more melancholy stuff, but never strictly dark.

My second album, In The Essence of Astral Solitude, was more of a dark ambient sounding album. But overall, musically, when it comes to light and dark and everything else, I think music can be seen as a spectrum of concepts, ideas and feelings. All the different genres and subgenres that exist in all kinds of music expresses and reflects different parts of our experience and makeup. Music is an unseen thing and our feelings are unseen and the spiritual element of life is unseen. So I feel that music can portray a lot of different things that we experience in our life. To create music or any other artform is to liberate those feelings so other people can feel and relate to them. Everyone has different feelings associated with music and the important thing is what somebody feels in it.

Dungeon Synth Zine #10 will arrive on September 1, 2024.

25/06/2024

Heralding Dungeon Synth Zine #10: TALES UNDER THE OAK!

Oaken roots go deep, and oaken trunks grow tall. I won’t say that they are eternal - they are not, as you will learn in this interview as well - but they are built to last and to spend time under them. The same can be said about tales, their roots can go just as deep into our souls. Therefore, oaks and tales are natural companions. Tales Under the Oak took the dungeon synth scene by storm - a passionate outsider showed that you don’t have to be a part of the team to be able to show what dungeon synth is all about. He has released 4 albums now and would like to tell you about them. Sit here, please, under this tree. Stay awhile and listen.

DSZ: What is one of your fondest memories from childhood?

Sergey Gdanian: The times when I went to visit my grandmother and grandfather, we used to drink tea and eat dough rings. In Russian it's called baranki – these round things that hang on a thread around the samovar. I loved this as a child and my grandmother was always giving it to me. We used to talk about random stuff. Nothing specific. No high arts and music, just simple life stuff. When I'm thinking about comforting music and some styles/subgenres of dungeon synth, like comfy synth, I have this soundtrack in my head when I remember these visits with my grandparents. This is more about childhood between 8 and 13 years old. After that, video games rushed into my life. That’s where the whole story with RPG games started. I connect my childhood very much with video games, as I suppose a lot of people of our age do.

Dungeon Synth Zine #10 will arrive on September 1, 2024.

21/06/2024

HERALDING DUNGEON SYNTH ZINE #10: TEST! ARE YOU A GATEKEEPER?

Many of you write letters to our plague doctors, asking: “Doctor, am I a gatekeeper?”, followed by various descriptions of symptoms. Some of these symptoms are completely harmless and should not interfere with your everyday life. Our plague doctor knows at least two people who were so deep into gatekeeping that they locked even bedroom doors for the night, resulting in difficulties with getting to the bathroom and wetting bedsheets (in one case even browned them, which was a serious nuisance until the morning). Others occasionally fall into panic whenever they see doors completely open.

They also have their counterparts, people of minds so open that they would not be able to define tea. They have their own symptoms. They often fall victim to burglars, because their homes are never locked. They also get sick easily, because open doors and windows result in drafts of wind which leave them desperate for blankets!

In moderation, however, both open-minded people, as well as gatekeepers, can live in harmony, provided that they omit topics of hot-dogs, dinosaurs and garden gnomes. What about you, though?

Dungeon Synth Zine #10 will arrive on September 1, 2024.

21/06/2024

09/06/2024

Dungeon Synth Zine #10.
The last one.
1.09.2024.

28/04/2024

OK folks, now that everyone's got their "101 Dungeon Synth Albums" book, tell me one thing: what is, in your opinion, missing?

01/04/2024

My general message to everyone at NEDS

27/03/2024

DSZ shop will be closed any day now to focus on work on DSZ 10. If you hesitated whether to buy or not, the time to decide is now (it will be closed on the first day of no sales, which, hopefully, will be tomorrow cuz I'm tired of all these packages;). They still will be found in various quantities of 7-20 copies at some point in:

Dungeons Deep Records USA (plus DSZ9 if I recall correctly)
WereGnome Records USA
Ancient Entity Records UK
Cosmic Ocean Records UK

DSZ 4, 6, 7 won't be available anywhere.
The rest is sold out, no plans to reprint.

11/02/2024

Hey, just letting all potential zine buyers know that we're permanently out of DSZ #1, #2, #3 and #8. I'm not going to reprint it because printing it in single copies, like up to a hundred, makes zero financial sense, and printing in offset needs to print 500 copies, and I can't hold 2000 additional zines at my apartment ;) What's left:

#4 - 9 copies
#5 - 4 copies
#6 - a dozen or so
#7 and #9 - should last a little more

I'm just letting you know that if the ones above are sold, there's very little chance you'll get them separetely. It's possible that in the future I'll just print compendiums of zine 1-5 and 6-10, but it's also a huge financial decision and might happen or not. This post is not to push anybody to buy, it's just because I know that many people ask for #1 or #8, and they will not come back anymore.

Cheers!

09/02/2024

It's super nice that so many of you are asking about the book and want to buy it now, but please bear with me until March, it will be sold in retail then:-) For now, distros only:)

08/02/2024

TO DISTROS AND LABELS:

You might be interested in distributing this small book of "101 Dungeon Synth Albums You Must Hear... Before You Rot In a Dungeon". The initial interest is promising. It will be officially sold at the beginning of March, which means that if you decide now, I can ship even tomorrow and we will be aligned when the sales start.

Regular price: 8€ (35 PLN)
Wholesale price (15 copies and more): 4.5€ (20 PLN)

72 pages, contains not only the list and descriptions of 101 dungeon synth albums, but also articles on the definition of dungeon synth, how to succeed in it and non-musical influences, as well as multiple full-page graphics from Joan Llopis Doménech and other artists.

Overall, a book that is small, but also the one that has been needed for a long time.

17/01/2024

Latest trade with . Finally I feel complete;-)

11/12/2023

JJeff Obermeyerwas kind enough to write a few words about our release: Nest - Live in Poland. Thank you!

December 3, 2023 Nest – “Both Men And Wild Beasts Listened To The Harper In The Glade / Live In Poland” Cassette (2023) I’m not entirely sure how I found my way to the dungeon synth genre (abbreviated moving forward as DS). I think it was via Lich Lord – I know him from his punk bands, so ...

29/10/2023

"The Sabbath Dance" from 1863 that I found in my edition of "Malleus Maleficarum", the infamous book about witches, how to discover them, torture and execute. I'm sharing mostly because of this poignant frog at the bottom 🐸 🧹 🐐

03/09/2023

Heralding DSZ #9, pt. 10: JÄÄPORTIT!

https://www.jaaportit.net

Do you ever feel blue (da ba dee bee da da)? Tuomas certainly does sometimes - just look at the Jääportit artworks. Blue is cold, blue is sadness, blue stands for the wintry dusk. Hardly any people in sight, and even if, always turned with their backs to you. Only nature stands forever, only nature will prevail. Jääportit has prevailed since 1997 and is still active as one of the groundbreaking dungeon synth projects in this part of Europe. Rediscovered recently and appreciated, Jääportit was one of the very first to mark a completely new sub-genre - winter synth. Embrace the cold, walk barefoot in the snow and read about cats and forest spirits.

DSZ: So, speaking about your favorites, I would love to know the top 10 albums of your life.

Jääportit: Okay. So this is a very hard question for me to answer, because there's so many albums and my music taste varies a lot. But anyways, not in any particular order, this list doesn't include Finnish bands because I already said the important ones earlier. Pink Floyd “Dark Side of the Moon”, Vangelis “Blade Runner OST”, that's one of my favorites. The Doors “The Doors”. Mortiis “Crypt Of The Wizard”, Dead Can Dance “Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun”. Emperor “In The Nightside Eclipse”. Nirvana “Nevermind”. Aphex Twin “Come To Daddy”. Radiohead “OK Computer”. Lastly, Brzum “Filosofem”.

DSZ: Obviously I knew and expected some of them like Mortiis, Brzum and Dead Can Dance because you also spoke about them, but it's quite interesting to hear about Pink Floyd and Nirvana. Do you think that they can be heard in your own music as well?

Jääportit: Yes. At least in the later, progressive style of my music. I found out about Pink Floyd, The Doors after I had released the “Kauan Koskematon” album. That’s when I started listening to them. And immediately Nirvana was my favorite band when I was 15 years old before I knew anything about anything.

Dungeon Synth Zine #9 will arrive in September.

30/08/2023

Heralding DSZ #9, pt. 9: GRZMIĄRNDER “GRZMONER ZUK​Ü​Z​Ł​YCH ERZEUGEŃ” - POSTMODERNISTIC DUNGEON SYNTH OR A JOKE?

https://grzmiarnder.bandcamp.com

I somehow felt like this album deserves it’s own two pages because of the ‘what the f**k?’ value it brings to the table. It made me scratch my head so much that I’m almost bald now. “Grzmoner Zuk​ü​z​ł​ych Erzeugeń” was released online on June 6, 2023 and for some weird reason I think it should never be released physically.

(...)

What about the cover art? It should be shown in classes just to make people aware of what AI generated art looks like. At first, if you don’t look close, it seems just fine. It’s a knight riding a horse into a valley, right? Pretty cool, huh? Well, no sir. The longer you look, the weirder the uncanny valley grows. What is he riding on? A river? Where is he riding to? A fu***ng lake? Where is the horse’s fourth leg? Something is deeply amiss here.

(...)

What about the title? We have already crossed the gates of hell and it’s only getting worse! “Grzmoner Zuk​ü​z​ł​ych Erzeugeń” means absolutely nothing and I believe that it has gone through the same process as the project’s name. It contains both exclusively Polish diacritics as well as some others, non-Polish ones. My idea is that the original concept was “Grzmot Złych Wierzeń” (in Polish: “Thunder of Evil Beliefs”).

28/08/2023

Heralding DSZ #9, pt. 8: DEDICATED TO THE OLD WAYS - Article!

(Originality written for the yet unreleased book about dungeon synth by Jordan from Ancient Meadow Records that you will hear about... Soon!)

If we ever want to buy a Thangorodrim T-shirt, we might wear the words "Dedicated to the Old Ways" on our backs. We can safely assume that it refers both to black metal music and culture (or, more generally, to the underground), naturally standing in opposition to the way things are most popular nowadays - fast, efficient and impersonal.

(...)

When it comes to physicality in dungeon synth, someone might observe that, after all, every project starts with Bandcamp, and that’s something intangible. This is true. However, I dare say that it's never or almost never just about Bandcamp, because the real goal is to materialize your music in the form of a cassette (or a vinyl pressing if you’re really ambitious). Having such an object in your hands makes you, as a musician, feel fulfilled, because subconsciously we know very well that despite the saying that “what’s uploaded to the internet stays there forever”, it's simply not true. If you don't believe me, look for my travel blog which I stopped paying hosting for before I realized that its content was lost.

(...)

Dungeon Synth Zine #9 will arrive in September.

26/08/2023

Heralding DSZ #9, pt. 7: CRYPT HOP!

Article by Luke Vandalorum.

So how did crypt hop start? In 2020 I came across an album on Soundcloud called "Pale" by Leneaux. The cover art was a black and white skeleton warrior killed underneath a tree, the typical type of visual you'd expect from a dungeon synth or black metal cover. The music, however, was very different. When I clicked play, I was pleasantly surprised to hear a beautiful portrait of melancholic, almost depressive synthesizer riffs carried by infectious, minimal trap beats. It was like nothing I'd ever heard before and scratched an itch for music that I didn't know I had. I wanted to share it with the dungeon synth groups on Facebook, but having a familiarity with the groups' taste and reactions to similar music in the past, I figured there would be some backlash. At that moment I decided there ought to be a separate group where people who enjoyed this style of music could come together and share their findings and original work. Thus, the crypt hop Facebook group was born.

Dungeon Synth Zine #9 will arrive in September.

23/08/2023

Heralding DSZ #9, pt. 6: AI ART - A BLESSING OR A CURSE?

The topic of AI-generated images has been igniting online discussions ever since Midjourney emerged from its alpha phase and became available to everyone through Discord. The dungeon synth community has also not escaped the crater after the bomb that Midjourney and Night Cafe turned out to be. The topic has been flying around my head like an intrusive fly since the very beginning and if I don't write it all down and publish it, I think I'll s**t my pants - just like all the other Internet users - but I'll try to do it in a more orderly way.

(...)

John, fan of dungeon synth, finds other benefits. Like many other dungeon synth fans, John is an introvert and doesn’t really like talking to people. They make John’s hands tremble and his armpits sweat. It’s cool to talk to friends, but speaking to someone he doesn’t know is not so easy. What’s worse, it’s not enough to start a conversation, he must have a very specific vision, because otherwise it might backfire - what if the picture drawn by the artist is not exactly what John expected? Let’s repeat, John is an introvert, a very polite man, and he hates telling people that maybe that’s not exactly what he wanted, because he respects their work. Unfortunately, he’s sometimes more OK to other people than they are to him, which leads to suffering.

(...)

So humans first played music with some stones or other s**t, they clubbed each other’s heads to make noises and rhythm. Later they discovered that if you dismember an animal and take out guts, you can blow in them to make other interesting noises. That’s how bagpipes appeared I guess, but it’s not really important. Do not mind small inconsistencies, what’s important is the general process, you know what I mean. As time passed, people perfected vocal skills, Gregorian chants and finally opera. Do you ever visit the opera? I do. Opera is, first and foremost, vocals. If there’s no vocals, it means you are in a philharmonic. Opera perfected vocals, but even if you go there, you might not fully understand it. What you need is one weaker singer who will be visibly worse than others. Only then will you notice how good the good ones are. What we really need to focus on now, however, is that one little fact: they didn’t need a microphone to sing to hundreds of people and be heard because they were wonderfully trained motherf**kers.
Then, at some point, the microphone appeared and even the weaker vocalists could be heard. They started punk rock bands. (...)

Dungeon Synth Zine #9 will arrive in September.

22/08/2023

Heralding DSZ #9, pt. 5: FORGOTTEN PATHWAYS!

https://forgottenpathways.bandcamp.com

DSZ: I also wanted to ask about “A long way home”, which you recorded after quite a long hiatus in 2015. I will tell you my interpretation that you already know because you read it on Facebook, but I wonder if I'm anywhere close to reality, because my interpretation was that it's about children lost in the forest at night who experience various adventures, trying to find the way home. Does it make sense?

Cedric Hommel: Yeah, but that's only partly correct. Let me see the tracklist. It's mostly about various fairy tales. Not only, but mostly. You've seen the children lost in the forest picture inside the booklet. So that's the base motive of many German fairy tales, about someone getting lost and having to find the way back. In that case I used a linoleum cut from an old painting from the 19th century of Hansel and Gretel. I made all the lino cuts from 19th century woodcuts or illustrations from fairy tale books or similar things. So in a way it has to do with children trying to find a way. Maybe that's like Forgotten Pathways in general. We are all like children and also trying to find our way back. Maybe when you were a child, you had some time, then you started to grow up. Some people are happy with that and that's part of life, but others, and it's quite safe to say that people who listen to dungeon synth are quite alike in this trait. sometimes feel like children trying to find their way back and are lost in a forest.

DSZ: Man, that's fu***ng scary! It's much worse than being lost in the literal forest.

Dungeon Synth Zine #9 will be released in September.

21/08/2023

Heralding DSZ #9, pt. 4: QUEST MASTER!

https://questmaster.bandcamp.com

Many people have waited for a good Quest Master interview. LG is one of these people who are pushing the borders of dungeon synth (or fantasy synth) not by cheap gimmicks, but by actual depth of musical knowledge and intelligent references to music history. It was also a wonderful occasion to talk about Tasmania, platypuses, koalas and consoles!

Quest Master: Some of the songs are definitely inspired by Final Fantasy 7, particularly how they have that marriage of science fiction and magic. So, visually, that was what I was picturing.
DSZ: Wow, Final Fantasy 7. When did this come out? 1999 or 98? I think that you're maybe one or two years older than me, but we are in the same era for gaming, I play pretty much only the games that are at least 20 years old. I just got stuck in this very early childhood age. What about you?

Quest Master: Yeah, I've been playing modern games recently, but I do find myself just going back for nostalgia’s sake. I used to collect a lot of games, but I haven't collected them in years now. I'm playing the remakes or the remasters now, but I should get back into it. I think it's quite fun.

DSZ: Do you have any titles that you regularly come back to every year or every two years? So you know, just go from the beginning to the end?

Quest Master: Yeah, I always played Donkey Kong Country. I've got the Super Nintendo still. I'll dust off and I'll play that. And then Dark Souls is what I've been playing, I guess modern type games. Just the first one. I was replaying that.

14/08/2023

Heralding DSZ #9, pt. 3: HERMIT KNIGHT!

“Man, I can't believe I did that!”

https://hermitknight.bandcamp.com

DSZ: You also spoke about NEDS already. So, let's transition to this because the next question was supposed to be, how did you feel at the NEDS? We already know that your tummy hurt.

Nicholas Pahman: The day of the first NEDS show I was drinking a couple beers and feeling good, but that was physically exhausting. Getting older, it gets harder and harder to do things like that. But NEDS was fantastic. It was the best festival I've ever been to in my life because I got to meet all of my friends that I've been talking to online for years who actually get this. You have people in your personal life that you talk to about what you love about dungeon synth and fantasy music, and for me personally, too, comfy synth, whatever it may be. You tell your family or your friends around you in your physical space, and they get it, but they don't get it, you know what I mean? Because they're into different things. And so being in a room of 300 or something people who got it, it was a high all in itself. It's probably one of the biggest parts of my life. My parents don't understand it. What are you into? This is what I'm into. And they're like, ‘that's nice’. You know, which is cool. They're still supportive about it, but I don't expect anyone else to get it. But you know, like you said, they don't really know any part about this life. So being in that room with the people who are that same way because they don't have other people that know about that part of their life, and then getting it all together, dude! I did not see one mad person that whole weekend. Everybody was smiling ear to ear. Even the most hardcore people that you think might be angry, true cult fanatics, they were the happiest.

01/09/2022

Vaelastrasz Tapes and print from after the release od their interview in DSZ #8:)