by Owen Brandes, Contributor
A fortnight ago I nervously crept into the sepulchral crypt of the archmages. After ascending the serpentine stairway, and rounding a cloister corner, I eyed a luminous lamplight extending from one of the conjoined chambers. Hushed voices emanated from the interior. As I passed the thaumaturgical threshold, I was met with an explosive flash, and then…blackness. What I later found scrawled in my spellbook—presumably transcribed from the encounter—I have reproduced below. All I recall is the flash-frozen image of a bookshelf of Lenin, an utterance about Clifford Geertz, and the twinkling of a Casio keyboard…
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Owen Brandes: First of all, what is dungeon synth?
Nicholas Bujalski: In a very basic way—[it] comes from these instrumental tracks inserted into black metal records.
Kip Hutchins: You sit in the premise [of the song] forever, and the heavy metal riff never starts. In the early 2000s, DIY music became more the realm of the digital with the expansion of MIDI technology. [There’s black metal, and there’s] video game music, and a shared interest [for] these two communities is the Middle Ages, basically. The black metal enthusiast loves the Middle Ages, for a variety of reasons, some unsavory, and the video game enthusiast … same deal. You can hear it when you listen to different artists. Some of them are like—this is a metal track originally! And then this one is Ultima Underworld [an early RPG]. The really successful ones toe the line a little bit.
NB: When you see it live I think it’s fun to parse out which is which, or [how] they intermix. For example, this year at [the] Great Lakes Dungeon Siege, the two headliners—one’s Thangorodrim, which is a name from the Silmarillion. [There’s] the corpse paint and the chain mail with the synthesizer. It's very much harkening to the second wave black metal stuff.
But then the other headliner is Malfet, who I've seen before, who's awesome. And he’s like, “I’m a medieval minstrel,” right? Sorry, maybe that's a bit disparaging. He's a really nice guy, and his music is actually very self-consciously neo-medieval. He puts up all these Pre-Raphaelite paintings and stuff, but it's more of the nineteenth century's imagination of the Middle Ages, right? This is an invented Middle Ages, which I find fascinating, both in the black metal scene and in the [preoccupation with] fantasy. It's the Middle Ages via Tolkien, essentially.
OB: How did you both get into dungeon synth?
KH: So, I write about Mongolian folk music. I can’t remember who told me this, [but] your “writing” music has to be music that you’re not working on. So, while I was writing my dissertation, I was [listening to] was the exact opposite of folk fiddle music—electronic music. I was going through the Rolodex of [emergent] genres. Synthwave, vaporwave…
And if you need to write for four or five hours straight, four or five hours of Fief [a dungeon synth project]—albums I, II, and III back to back—will do the trick.
OB: I've done this before. Classic.
KH: That was my entry point into [dungeon synth]—the biggest of those emergent genres. Vaporwave kind of faded because it was largely a meme to begin with, but dungeon synth has this identity that’s kind of persisted. It’s basically folk music, but with non-analog technology. [Seeing it live] is culturally indistinguishable from going to a small fiddle show. And it’s a similar approach to the production of music.
NB: I love that it’s sort of like—what is the folk music of our post-industrial, atomized, petit-bourgeois, imperial core, horrifying age? Maybe it's dungeon synth.
KH: We need to talk about this more. That’s that [Jacques] Attali thing, right? [He says that] the problem with society is that we’re all mechanized and atomized or whatever. Pre-mechanization, pre-industrialization, every village had a fiddler!
[Attali’s] solution to the atomization of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries was that people would seize the mechanisms of record production and start making music at home again in a “village-like” way, at the particular level of industrialization of music afforded to them. Now, anybody can do this—anybody can download Reaper, do an endless free trial and download Synth One [a free synth plugin]. So today, you can just make a dungeon synth album!
The thing with folk music, before stage bluegrass and Bill Monroe, is that it didn’t matter if it “sounded good.” Virtuosity wasn’t the most important thing, and I think that for a lot of people making dungeon synth, doing something at home and putting it up on Bandcamp—it’s a similar situation. [They’re] starting from the perspective of: “I’m going to produce music,” and it’s a total reversal of the, “I have to study for twenty years before I can bear to let somebody hear me play violin.” It’s, “I've been playing synth for two hours, let's go. I found a chord—let's go!” I think that’s really freeing.
NB: I love that. I feel like my intro to the genre totally evidences all these things that you just said. It started in this community way for me. I had vaguely heard of it. I was listening—especially in grad school—mostly to black metal, but never really checked out [dungeon synth]. My [grad school] buddy Max, who noodled around on synths, after he got his PhD—he and his wife moved down to Texas.
I got more into it because when you have a friend doing it cross-country, you can still be part of a digital space together. I started following [the scene] more. He was doing bedroom stuff at first, but there was a moment post-COVID where shows started happening and people were booking. He flew back up and was like, “can you do a video for my live set?” It’s [developed] from there, and so for me, it’s built into a community of friends, both those I’ve met through dungeon synth but also prior to it as well.
[Max] plays under Mortwight. He just released his latest LP—it's a concept album about Walter Benjamin and the fist of empire crushing human community throughout world history, so shout out!
OB: What do you think Oberlin students could gain from giving dungeon synth a shot? I’m a big shill on campus. I’m trying hard to get people to check out Quest Master and Diplodocus.
NB: And Warlock Corpse…
KH: There's a couple things. First of all, if you need a chill four hours, throw on some to study. And then, next up, okay, you might not like dungeons or the Middle Ages, but it can still be enjoyed and be a legitimate expression of not only yourself, as a creative philosophy or epistemology, but the community that you would like to build around you. Dungeon synth will give you a playbook.
NB: Yeah, the dungeon holds universes, right?
OB: The dungeon holds universes…
