One of the interesting things about dungeon synth is music that comfortably fits into the genre was being made well before it had in fact been genre-fied. Back in the 90s you might have seen these releases lumped into the broader dark ambient categorization, and that’s certainly not wrong. But it does lack the specificity that the term dungeon synth invokes – cinematic, medieval, ancient.
Andrew Werdna launched a blog dedicated to this kind of music back in 2011 simply named “Dungeon Synth” (and still online HERE), and here’s what he had to say on his very first post:
Dungeon synth is the sound of the ancient crypt. The breath of the tomb, that can only be properly conveyed in music that is primitive, necro, lo-fi, forgotten, obscure, and ignored by all of mainstream society. When you listen to dungeon synth you are making a conscious choice to spend your time in a graveyard, to stare, by candle-light, into an obscure tome that holds subtle secrets about places that all sane men avoid.
I shall do my best to make you, gentle readers, aware of this genre. This genre that only attracts the most tortured of outsiders, those who long for the forgotten magic of the dead, to remain forever in the shadows of decaying tombs.
That description still holds pretty true, though the reach has grown beyond “the most tortured of outsiders”, with one of the largest (if not the largest) Facebook groups reaching almost 12,000 members and more specialty micro-labels than you can count. Discogs lists over 22,500 releases with the dungeon synth tag, and while many of these are different versions of the same album, that’s still a lot music. If you go to Bandcamp you can get lost for years in the ever-growing sea of dungeon synth titles.
Depressive Silence were one of the early groups creating dungeon synth before there was dungeon synth. Comprised of members of the Freiburg, Germany black metal band Mightiest, they put out a handful of releases between 1994 and 1997 before re-emerging in 2019 with a re-mixing of their early material and a live performance called Live In Freiburg 2019. They’ve deservedly earned their place in the dungeon synth cannon1 and have seen all their material re-released across multiple formats, including two box sets put out by the now defunct label Ancient Meadow – a three cassette, one 7″ box in 2020 called Twenty-Five Years, and more recently 2023s massive Vinyl Discography Boxset.
Jack Daniels may or may not have affected my decision to purchase Vinyl Discography Boxset2. Out Of Season picked up the leftover Ancient Meadow releases and had a sale, and, well, you know how it goes. You wake up on the morning and see the confirmation email from the label and you think, “oh yeah, I did order those.” But once the package arrived, any regret quickly dissipated.
Vinyl Discography Boxset collects the entire Depressive Silence catalog on five picture discs. I’m not going to lie – I almost passed because of this. I’m not a huge fan of the picture disc format as the sound quality is often marginal. But I have to give credit where credit is due – these records sound fantastic on my Rega. One record had a few pops and clicks in the first minute, but otherwise they are extremely clean, and since they’re on thicker stock you know they’ll stay flat. In addition to the five records, the box also incudes two patches (one large back-patch, one smaller), an eight-page booklet, a felt turntable mat, and a DVD of Live In Freiburg 2019 (the audio of which is also on one of the records). The box itself is of very high quality, including printing on the inside bottom, and everything fits comfortably inside.
I debated on doing a record-by-record review of the discs, but instead spent my time sitting back and enjoying them, allowing myself to be transported to different times and places. When done well this is what dungeon synth does best, serving as an escape not only from your day-to-day, but even from the present itself. Sure, the journey is sometimes dark, but so is life, and escaping to a different reality for a bit is a wonderful way to relax and recharge.
One of the things written about on a lot of dungeon synth forums is the low bar to entry in the genre, particularly with the inexpensive and high quality MIDIs and DAWs now available to pretty much anyone with a laptop. It’s never been easier to make your own music and get it out into the world, and I know from personal experience that dungeon synth fans are quite accepting of simple, straight-forward compositions. That, however, is not what Depressive Silence bring to the table. They clearly had the chops and it comes through in the music with lush soundscapes on songs like “Forest Of Eternity” and “Depths Of The Oceans”, tracks I couldn’t even dream of making myself.
Released in an edition of 300, Vinyl Discography Boxset is sold out at Out Of Season, so you’ll need to track it down in the retail or secondary market. It looks to have been selling in the $100 to $150 range on Discogs over the course of 2024, though the least expensive copy currently offered is at $160. Other options include buying individual records via the Depressive Silence Bandcamp page HERE, or via the Out Of Season label page HERE. Regardless of the path you choose, you owe it to yourself to explore some Depressive Silence.
- Their 1996 self-titled album (which is also known as “Mourning” and “III : Mourning”…) is one of those featured in the 2024 book ‘101 Dungeon Synth Albums You Must Here… Before You Rot In A Dungeon‘. ↩︎
- It most certainly did. ↩︎