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Interview: Dark Dungeon Music: The Unlikely Story of Dungeon Synth

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Interview by Dayal Patterson

Dark Dungeon Music: The Unlikely Story of Dungeon Synth is a huge new book telling the definitive story of – you guessed it – the dungeon synth genre. What may be less obvious (to some anyway) is that dungeon synth is directly linked to the Black Metal genre, pioneered in the 1990s by musicians from that movement who wished to explore the darkness with a different tool than the electric guitar. 

Thus, this new sound was created by the likes of ex-Emperor bassist/lyricist Mortiis, Absu member Equitant and Depressive Silence (a side project of German Black Metal band Mightiest), not to mention actual Black Metal bands such as Summoning and Burzum, who created equally evocative pieces. Vocals were kept to a minimum, with synths and keyboards taking a primary role in conjuring richly atmospheric and often ritualistic tracks full of ancient mystery and malice.

As fiercely underground as Black Metal itself, the genre existed without attention and even a proper name for decades until the early 2010s, when, against the odds, it began to be discovered and celebrated by a new generation of fans. Since then, a legion of new acts have surfaced, including Erang, Old Tower, Weress, An Old Sad Ghost, Frostgard, and Kyvon, to name but a few, and this new wave has been mirrored by an increasingly broad listener base, some of whom are little aware of the genre’s dark roots. We caught up with Jordan to talk about his monstrous new tome and the genre he’s dedicated himself to.


This is Black Metal: Hello Jordan, your book is officially released this month, how are you feeling at the moment?

Jordan Whiteman: “Thanks for having me. I have felt quite a bit of relief since the book was published, but there’s still plenty of work ahead.”

 

TIBM: Despite being a diehard devotee of the Dungeon Synth genre today, I know you discovered it fairly late, and that you were already familiar with Black Metal at that point, which led you to discover the genre in the first place. How did you discover Black Metal initially?

Jordan: “I am a 90s kid through and through. I don’t recall when, but I recall how: The end of the ‘Satanic panic’ stretched into the mid-1990s. I remember seeing daytime television news coverage of various sensational events tied (even just loosely) to Satanism and one of those was some typical exposé on what transpired in Norway in the mid-1990s. I didn’t discover Black Metal proper, and begin to digest what had actually happened and the gravity of it all, until I was in my early teens. That was during the peer-to-peer file-sharing era, so finding stuff was easier than before, but I didn’t really know what to look for other than Burzum, Mayhem, Immortal, Emperor, and all the typical surface-level stuff.”

 

TIBM: How did that lead you to discover Dungeon Synth?

Jordan: “Many, many years later, I was searching YouTube for a Black Metal demo. I can’t recall which one it was or if I ever found it, but in the search results was Thangorodrim’s “Taur nu Fuin”. I saw the words ‘Dungeon Synth’ in the description and was instantly drawn to the music.”

 

TIBM: What was your first name impression, and how did you relate Dungeon Synth to Black Metal at that time?

Jordan: “My initial impression was that I had finally stumbled across something that resonated with my innermost turmoil. Dungeon Synth was recondite and socially unfit for mass appeal. It felt like discovering something you were never supposed to know about; like discovering a secret coterie that had long since disappeared yet still felt like it was lingering somewhere in the irretrievable past. A thing you can know but never truly possess.”

“The most immediate correlation to Black Metal is the aesthetic. Dungeon Synth – genuine Dungeon Synth – is visually indistinguishable from Black Metal. Second, they share almost total overlap in content and subject matter. The ethos of Dungeon Synth is the ethos of Black Metal. Dungeon Synth unto itself is simply the cultural manifestation of Black Metal in electronic music. Dungeon Synth borrows sonic elements from the litany of industrial offshoots and subgenres (which Black Metal had done several times from the late 80s to the early 90s when Dungeon Synth manifested) and pairs them with the appearance and non-musical content of Black Metal.”

 

TIBM: At what point did you envisage the idea of creating the huge literary undertaking that became the new Dark Dungeon Music book?

Jordan: “Almost immediately, honestly. I love writing. I’ve been writing on and off since 2008. I did a lot of journalism stuff over the years, publishing in local rags, a few more respectable publications here and there, and some other things unworthy of a mention. What really cemented the idea of writing a book was when I began to realise that Dungeon Synth had such an immense and deeply fascinating history. I felt like there wasn’t enough emphasis and scrutiny on that history, it’s the most significant era of the music, it’s the genesis of the genre.”

 

TIBM: How did you start putting the book together and did you focus on a particular aim when planning it?

Jordan: “The book began as a single Microsoft Word document in 2019 or 2020. It grew to around 30,000 words before I realised that I needed to take a different approach and refine my understanding of the genre. I threw out that first incarnation of the book along with a few other ancillary chapters that I had started. My aim wasn’t very specific, just that I was compelled to write a book on the genre and hopefully write an honest one.”

 

 

TIBM: How did things progress from this point on? In what way did you change your approach?

Jordan: “It really kind of unfolded in a series of fits and starts. I wrote most of the book out of sequence. I would start a chapter, and it would go on for a while before I felt I had to switch to something else so I could come back to it with a renewed perspective, or I would come across some new information on the origin of the genre, and it would get me started on another chapter or expanding one I thought was finished. The book took a long time to finish for that reason. I’m not even really sure it’s finished, or if it will ever be finished. I just sort of had to stop.”

 

TIBM: The book contains what for some might be a surprising amount of Black Metal-related content. Is it fair to say that you were keen to highlight Dungeon Synth’s Black Metal roots and do you feel this has been forgotten in recent years with the influx of new listeners?

Jordan: “Really, anyone who knows me (and even the people who don’t) knew to expect that from this book. Though some are determined to rewrite history, they are inextricably two sides of the same coin. There’s a thread of revisionism winding its way through modern conversations on Dungeon Synth with would-be clairvoyants pontificating that Dungeon Synth as we understand it now still would have coalesced without Black Metal, and that’s a claim I won’t seriously consider. Lamentably, to a lot of new fans, the genre equates to ‘Dungeon & Dragons music,’  ‘video game soundtrack music,’ or some flavour of fantasy music.

These misconceptions are the (sometimes wilfully ignorant) assumptions of dilettantes that have a deleterious effect on the genre. Not that long ago no one would ever have questioned the sonic and cultural foundations of Dungeon Synth. My ulterior motive with this book was to illustrate and cement that connection.”

 

TIBM: What were the biggest challenges with writing the Dark Dungeon Music book would you say?

Jordan: “The research was really challenging and time-consuming as it took years to track down various pieces of the history of this genre, which I discuss in the book. There was also a certain amount of waiting for some of the people making this stuff back in the 1990s to resurface so that I could talk to them about their old music or their old record label or zine. Second to that, just writing it was pretty challenging.

There’s a ton in there, as you know now. I kept constantly going back and forth between ‘Is this saying everything I need to say?’ and ‘I have so much more to say.’ Ultimately, I still feel like I left a lot unsaid and unexplored, but I suppose that’s a hazard of writing a book. It has to wrap up at some point.”

 

TIBM: The book is packed full of a huge number of images, where did those come from and how much of a challenge was it gathering them all?

Jordan: “Yeah, there’s a lot in there. Essentially, all of the Cassette scans or Promotional/Flier materials are scans from my own collection. There are a lot of rare or unseen artist promo photos in there and there are also some live shots of performances that I captured myself or was generously permitted to use by friends. My pal Peter [Beste] also contributed a substantial number of photos from his work over the past couple of years; photos from all of those shoots will also culminate in a photo book on Dungeon Synth at some point.”

 

 

 

TIBM: Is it fair to say that the book was written to appeal to both newcomers to Dungeon Synth and scene veterans?

Jordan: “There’s something in there for everyone – even non-fans. It’s really a lot of books in one, hence its size. My vision was way, way larger than what I think one could really even reasonably fit into a single book. It’s a history book, a survey book, and a guidebook. My fellow fanatics will find stories in there that they did not know about, and newcomers will find excruciating detail on the primordial origins of the genre.”

 

TIBM: Do you have any last words for the readers, perhaps bearing in mind that many will be Black Metal devotees perhaps only discovering more about Dungeon Synth through this interview?

“’‘Please keep an open mind.’ This stuff has been an integral part of Black Metal (and other incarnations of Metal) reaching back to its birth in the 1980s. Though it seems contrary to the accepted characteristics of Black Metal on the surface, this Dark, Melodic Synth/Keyboard/Piano stuff has been a hallmark of Black Metal from the outset. Late 80s Black Metal had a love affair with dark strains of Industrial music that would eventually materialise as an expected element of any serious Black Metal record during the second wave. Dungeon Synth is a fascinating part of the Black Metal story, and it is woefully being appropriated by people who fatally mischaracterise its meaning and ethos – the same way that has been attempted with Black Metal so many times over the decades. As good stewards of the music, we have a moral obligation to prevent the appropriation of this significant cultural element of Black Metal.”

Author Jordan Whiteman, with his huge new 400 page hardback book ‘Dark Dungeon Music: The Unlikely Story of Dungeon Synth’, and a ‘few’ of his favourite tapes.

Photo by Betsy Whiteman.


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