I’m sitting here on rainy, cold, dark Saturday morning. It feels like the transition from summer to not-summer was almost instantaneous this year, mother nature flipping a switch and taking us from sun to clouds, from early morning light to mid-morning gloom over the course of the week. We weren’t given any time to adjust, to mourn the light and gird ourselves for the upcoming grayness of another Seattle winter. The older I get the more the perpetual dampness, the constant mist hanging in the air making the temperature feel even colder as a the tiniest layer of beaded water attaches itself to every surface, weighs on me and affects my mood. Coffee helps, but only so much.
Of course, the unrelenting grind of capitalism isn’t helping much either. I have one more workday until we depart for Reykjavik for the Iceland Airwaves Music Festival and all I can think about is how much work I need to get done before we leave. “Well you could fire up the ol’ laptop and spend a few uninterrupted hours getting to some of that stuff,” some might say. And that’s true. But when have we given enough time? Because one thing that becomes more and more apparent to me every day as someone who has less years in front of me than I do behind me is that the our most important resource is, in fact, time. Which is why we sell our time for money, the money we need to survive. Don’t get me wrong – I know I live in a level of comfort almost anyone, anywhere, at any previous time in human history would have killed for. There’s a roof over my head, warm air being blown through the house, indoor plumbing, and a refrigerator full of food. I’m hardly rich. But I certainly am comfortable. But I also know, or at least fear, that it could all disappear in a moment. Because that’s the world we’ve built.
I suspect having spent the last few hours reading Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life is probably contributing to my outlook as well, but that’s not Fisher’s fault – he simply wrote about how he saw life and society and culture. It’s his writing on hauntology that is really messing with my mind, though. Wikipedia defines the concept as “a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as if to haunt the present,” but I like Fisher’s take in his interview with the artist Burial: “The power in Derrida’s1 concept lay in its idea of being haunted by events that failed to materialize and remained spectral.” You might think this is the same thing as regret, but it’s not. When applied to music in particular it’s more about the present being haunted by cultural elements of the past, a sort of nostalgia for a future that never actually happened, and perhaps even the slightest mourning for what never was.
Which of course brings me to dungeon synth.
Is part of the appeal of dungeon synth this nostalgia for a romanticized past that never evolved into a romanticized future?
Castle Zagyx is a dungeon synth project from Spain. As with many artists in the genre, it’s difficult to put a full timeline around their history, but Zagyx looks to have started putting out music in 2016. Dungeons of Despair was originally released digitally in 2019, then was put out on a limited edition of 100 cassettes the following year by the Forgotten Castle Records label out of Poland. To my ears this falls into the more classic style of dungeon synth – fantasy inspired by the classic sword and sorcery films of the 1970s and 80s, somewhat dark and mysterious, with an undercurrent of impending violence. Will the evil queen’s guards catch our fearless adventurers? Is a were-creature hiding in the myst, following you through the dark forest waiting for an opportunity to pounce and infect you, subjecting you to the curse of shape-shifting?
I wrote the above before translating the artist’s own description of the album on Bandcamp:
This mini-album is my personal tribute to those places in classic Sword and Sorcery fiction where the sun we know doesn’t shine: the damp, gloomy dungeon; the once glorious fortress, now in ruins; the natural corridors carved by the wind over eons; the pelagic chasms of vertigo-inducing underwater depths; the telluric depths; the noxious vapor of the Tartaric fissures; the chambers with blasphemous apses and non-Euclidean forms.
I’m sure the listener will easily recognize in the themes of these five songs some of the passages of Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock, Gary Gygax, or J.R.R. Tolkien; those where the masters speak to us of Man’s descent into the underworld of his own mind, often equipped with little more than a source of light. What else could those fictional dungeons represent but the struggle of human beings against hopelessness and fatality?
Circling back to hauntology, Dungeons of Despair isn’t so much about a Medieval-like future that never came to be, but perhaps more a haunting of the artist’s own psyche by the works of the writers they cite, their fictional pasts haunting the current day. Dungeon synth, regardless of which of the sub-genres (or even sub-sub-genres…)2 it adheres to, is about elements of the past, whether they be historical (like the music of Chaucerian Myth) or fictional (Castle Zagyx), haunting the future. How we view that haunting depends on us. Ghosts can be terrifying (the Bell Witch) or cute (Casper), or something else entirely… a wisp of the dead past reaching out to us today longingly, trying to remind us that it is better to be in the world of the living (the present) than in the realm of the dead (the past).
I’m guessing you’ll have to hit the secondary market to find a cassette copy of Dungeons of Despair. But if you’re just interested in the music, despair not, for it is available on the Castle Zagyx Bandcamp page HERE.