“Please don’t pull up the drawbridge.”
In the 1990s, members of the black metal underground started recording atmospheric, fantasy-themed ambient music. This music, retrospectively classified as dungeon synth, received a mixed reception within the black metal scene, no commercial success, and had faded into obscurity by the early 2000s. Yet now, in the 2020s, dungeon synth is back and bigger than ever. How on earth did a genre almost die and then return to life? This is the story that Jordan Whiteman tries to tell in his book Dark Dungeon Music: The Unlikely Story of Dungeon Synth.
Starting from the earliest days of the genre (even Black Sabbath’s early work), metal albums have often had short, instrumental interludes. But it is black metal that is most associated with atmospheric interludes. Many classic black metal albums, perhaps most notably the early-mid 90s releases of Summoning and Burzum, feature short, atmospheric, keyboard-driven intros, outros and mid-album interludes. These pieces now sound terribly dated, but they have a moody, fantastical, nostalgic charm to them.
After finishing his brief stint as Emperor’s bassist and lyricist in 1992, Mortiis started recording entire albums in the style of these interludes. Mortiis was an admirer of Burzum’s early keyboard tracks and took inspiration from the long-form electronic music of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze and the aesthetics of Dead Can Dance. Mortiis was not the only one writing music in this style at the time: Equitant, The Dark Funeral and Cernunnos Woods all produced similarly-inspired music at around the same time. (In the case of Cernunnos Woods, it was because the founder was unable to recruit other musicians to start a black metal band).
Out of these early, disparate atmospheric fantasy projects, it was Mortiis that had the most staying power: He eventually signed to Cold Meat Industry, he had name recognition through his brief association with Emperor, and he was a prolific tape-trader in the underground black metal scene. In the mid-1990s, other members of the black metal underground were inspired by Mortiis to produce their own music in this vein. Forgotten Pathways, Maelifell, Uruk-Hai, Secret Stairways and Depressive Silence were some of the better-known projects releasing music in this style: Depressive Silence’s “Forests of Eternity” is now regarded as an example of what this genre of music can do at its finest.
So by the mid-90s, a new genre of music was establishing itself. We now call this genre dungeon synth. It had common points of musical inspiration: interludes on black metal albums, pioneering 1970s electronic acts and neoclassical darkwave. The works of Tolkien influenced the titles of songs, albums (and sometimes even the names of projects themselves). Further inspiration was found in 1980s fantasy films, such as Conan the Barbarian and Legend, and a range of fantasy-themed video games. The lo-fi nature of dungeon synth – predominantly performed on cheap keyboards and recorded using basic technology – gave it a distinctive sound.
But while many of the musicians producing these projects were in contact, trading tapes through the black metal underground, there wasn’t really a distinctive scene. This is probably why, in the 90s, there was no agreed upon name for this style of music.
Another challenge facing dungeon synth was the decidedly mixed reaction it received. Perhaps this can be partially explained by the legendary snobbishness of the black metal scene. However, if we’re completely honest, part of the problem was probably with the music itself. With just one or two exceptions (most notably Depressive Silence), most of the musicians writing dungeon synth had no formal musical training. If I introduced you to a music genre by telling you it was made by people who had next to no experience of recording music, or writing music (or sometimes even playing music at all), would you be rushing to check it out?
Therefore, it’s probably unsurprising that by the late 90s, dungeon synth – never more than a small niche – was starting to fade away. Gradually, most dungeon synth projects disbanded. Mortiis switched to releasing industrial synth-pop. The tape-trading black metal underground that had sustained dungeon synth was made obsolete by the internet. It’s not clear if dungeon synth really did die away in the 00s, or simply if new dungeon synth music released in this decade never made it beyond obscure Geocities sites. Either way, many look back to the mid-90s as a golden age for the genre.
In 2011, a new blog was started by Andrew Werdna. The opening post coined the term “dungeon synth” and the blog went on to document long-forgotten dungeon synth albums. Werdna’s blog, the Dungeon Synth blog, is credited with sparking a revival in dungeon synth, not least by giving it a name around which a community could coalesce. Another blog, Asmodian Coven, which started in 2008, covered dungeon synth in a similar manner. In 2009, a new, prolific artist called Lord Lovidicus started uploading music with all the hallmarks of dungeon synth to a then-fledgling music service called Bandcamp. Over the coming years, a new generation of dungeon synth projects started to appear. Many of these artists, such as Erang, Balrog and Caoranach, cite Lord Lovidicus as a major influence alongside the sources of inspiration common to the dungeon synth of the 90s.
As the 2010s progressed, this new incarnation of dungeon synth continued to grow. Sharing the music online allowed it to reach a larger audience than ever before: The Dungeon Synth Archives YouTube channel alone has over 100,000 subscribers. It is also easier than ever for new dungeon synth projects to be shared: the “dungeon synth” tag on Bandcamp is probably one of the single largest forces in driving the continued growth of the genre. Many of the new dungeon synth acts, such as Old Sorcery, Fief, Old Tower and Thangorodrim, match or even surpass the quality of the very best dungeon synth released in the 90s. New records labels have been founded during the revival era solely to promote dungeon synth, and there is now a live dungeon synth scene, leading to small dungeon synth festivals such as 2024’s Northeast Dungeon Siege in Massachusetts and 2025’s Albion Dungeon Fest in London. While dungeon synth remains a small scene, it has grown in size far beyond anything any of the genre’s originators could have hoped for.
Music from the “revival era” of dungeon synth can be placed into one of two categories. The first attempts to emulate 1990s dungeon synth by using the same black metal aesthetic. (A strong parallel can be drawn to the synthwave genre.) The second category attempts to apply the perceived underlying values of dungeon synth in new ways. One example of this is Diplodocus, which replaces the usual medieval fantasy theme with one centred on prehistoric cave-dwellers. This second category also includes those involved with emerging dungeon synth subgenres, such as “comfy synth”. If this second category becomes dominant, it is easy to imagine dungeon synth breaking free of its association to black metal and being regarded as a “real” genre in its own right.
It is at this point in the history of dungeon synth, in 2024, that Jordan Whiteman’s book Dark Dungeon Music: The Unlikely Story of Dungeon Synth was published. Cult Never Dies had only recently published the 120-page Dungeon Synth: The Rebirth of the Legend by Ruslan Akimov, so why have they published another book? The defining feature of Dark Dungeon Music is its size: it is a huge book for a very small genre. Almost all of its over 400 pages are crammed with album art, promo pictures, excerpts from old black metal zines and even letters written between members of the 90s tape trading scene. It’s especially delightful to see Whiteman celebrating the act of creativity, however amateur it might be. There are chapters detailing the recording gear used to make some of the classic dungeon synth albums, and Whiteman has devoted a huge amount of time to figuring out the origins of many dungeon synth album covers (mainly from illustrations of Tolkien’s work). There are also over 30 interviews, running to over 100 pages, of musicians, bloggers and record label managers associated with the early and modern eras of dungeon synth.
So as a reference work on dungeon synth, Dark Dungeon Music is unprecedented. It would make a great resource for anyone working on a dungeon synth wiki. But how does it fare as a book?
I am going to be as polite as possible: I sacrificed three months of lunch breaks reading Dark Dungeon Music so you wouldn’t have to.
There is an extraordinary level of redundancy and needless detail in Dark Dungeon Music. We did not need 100 pages of interviews making the same points over and over again. We did not need 50 pages of Whiteman essentially giving us a tour of his dungeon synth collection. We did not need 20 pages of Whiteman showing us which details of Tolkien-inspired artwork were used as album art. All this extra information adds next to no new insight. Dark Dungeon Music is 200,000 words long – that’s comparable to the longer Harry Potter books. Dungeon synth is not a big genre: you do not need a 400-page book to do it justice (I think I did a pretty reasonable job above in under 1,500 words). This feels less like a book and more like 400 pages of notes compiled to aid in the writing of a book.
The book is also terribly organised. At no point does it feel like a coherent story is being told: the chapter on “Who Was First” comes before the chapter on dungeon synth’s antecedents. Whiteman keeps on referring to things he has yet to properly introduce us to. The writing is atrocious: the worst kind of pompous, purple prose. I have no idea why the editor thought this book was publishable in its current form.
In some ways, it feels appropriate that a book describing a crude, amateur, DIY genre itself feels crude, amateur and DIY. It would almost be endearing if it didn’t go on for hundreds of pages. Jordan Whiteman is in some ways an odd choice to write this book: while he ran Ancient Meadow Records from 2017-2024, he is a relative latecomer to the genre (discovering it in 2016) and clearly has no prior experience as a writer. Why is Whiteman writing this book and not, say, one of the veteran bloggers of the genre?
This is where things get rather uncomfortable.
I’ll be honest with you: I am quite invested in dungeon synth. I have been listening to this music for over a decade and even have my own dungeon synth project. (One positive about this book is that it inspired me to finally finish off the dungeon synth album I’ve had on the back-burner for the past five years.) Yet even I will freely admit that most dungeon synth albums aren’t exactly masterpieces. Dungeon synth – especially 90s-era dungeon synth – is essentially a genre of keyboard music made by people who can barely play keyboards. Now don’t get me wrong: there is good dungeon synth music out there, and the “lo-fi” sensibilities give some people (such as myself) confidence to produce music without worrying if they are good enough. That’s quite a special thing. Overall, dungeon synth can be good, and fun, but you mustn’t be afraid to giggle at the silly promo photos or farty keyboard sounds.
Jordan Whiteman completely disagrees. “Beyond an explicit affinity with antiquity and a penchant for stirring despondent emotions and nostalgia,” he writes, “dungeon synth is also a genre that demands to be taken seriously.” (I warned you about the purple prose.) He goes further: “Comedy, parody, and irony have no legitimate place in the music.” Initially, this attitude only adds a further layer of absurdity to the proceedings. But it eventually becomes clear that there are two sides to Whiteman: one is the passionate, nerdy collector of old dungeon synth tapes; the other is rather less wholesome.
Whiteman starts his book by expressing a reluctance to define dungeon synth. He does not want to “narrow and refine the channel for what is passable as dungeon synth.” A reasonable sentiment, and one which Whiteman spends the rest of the book ignoring.
Jordan Whiteman clearly believes that dungeon synth has fixed characteristics: change is to be resisted, and the new wave of dungeon synth is corrupting the genre. He says Fief is not dungeon synth because – wait for it – it is primarily inspired by medieval fantasy (and not black metal). A special venom is saved for Bandcamp, a supposedly “awful, autocratic authoritarian platform,” because anyone can label their music as “dungeon synth”. (The horror!) He is adamant that those trying to change genres are being “disruptive to pre-existing communities”, but also says “true dungeon synth” is permitted to deviate from the genre norms. All interviews in this book open with the question “What is dungeon synth?” I get the impression that, in the mind of Jordan Whiteman, music can only truly be dungeon synth if Jordan Whiteman says it is.
Whiteman concedes that “not every instance of this happening… is malicious.” How generous of him. He then tries to refute anticipated criticisms of his position with increasingly overwrought language. Anyone who opposes his views is gaslighting, or pushing a post-truth narrative, or equating his views with “sociopolitical conservatism.” Whiteman insists he isn’t gatekeeping: oh no, no, no, he’s encouraging good stewardship of the genre. Right.
He sees no problem with his position: “The desire to maintain the status quo in a genre of music… [is] an endeavour that harms no one.” Imagine if someone active in the 1990s black metal scene had successfully suppressed any fresh takes on the genre. Think of all the incredible bands who would have been excluded from the scene – or, worse, simply never got going.
Whiteman sounds like he wants to preserve dungeon synth for an exclusive clique: “Dungeon synth is tiny even compared to other ‘obscure’ genres, and if we’re lucky, it will remain that way.” But Whiteman, who discovered the genre in 2016, is part of the wave of interest he so derides. The interviews in this book make it clear that he has been generously welcomed into the dungeon synth community, but he seems incredibly reluctant to extend that same kindness to others. It feels like Whiteman wants to pull up the drawbridge to dungeon synth (badum-tssh).
Whiteman tries to push his elitist views of dungeon synth in this book’s interviews, but perhaps tellingly, the majority of interviewees are reluctant to endorse his views. “Truthfully, I’m too old and tired to gatekeep or argue about the fundamentals that either include or exclude an artist from the genre,” says Lord Bill, “There are a lot of young folks who may not find any connection to black metal on their dungeon synth journey, and perhaps they are the new generation who should be making the call.” Erang is more blunt: “In the end, it doesn’t really matter.”
Whiteman’s diatribes are infantile, hysterical and exhausting – and they pervade the entire book. They feel like they are the product of a long, angry argument on an internet forum – the sort of thing that adults don’t get involved in because they have better things to do with their time. But these rants do suggest what motivated the author to write this book. Whiteman has been interviewed and given spots at music festivals to promote his work. Writing Dark Dungeon Music has given him a platform to allow him to push his incoherent views and settle some scores.
Dungeon synth is a small genre, but thankfully, not so small that one person can wield much influence. Anybody interested in exploring this quirky little community will have a lot of fun. I had not heard of Jordan Whiteman before reading Dark Dungeon Music and look forward to ignoring him as I continue my own adventures in the genre.
Dungeon Music: The Unlikely Story of Dungeon Synth released throught Cult Never Dies in January 2025 and can be ordered here.