A room in Norway, 1994, holding a synthesiser, a drum machine used almost not at all, and no guitar anywhere in it. The man at the keys, Håvard Ellefsen, had spent about a year playing bass in Emperor and had walked away from the instrument entirely. What he recorded was a single composition in two parts running fifty three minutes, with no riffs, no blast beats and no voice raised above a murmur. Malicious Records issued it in 1994 as Født til å Herske. There was no name for what it was, and there would not be one for another seventeen years.
That record and the ones around it form the quietest branch of the family, and the one most often written off as a hobby. It is worth more attention than that, because it is the only part of black metal that survives with the guitars taken out of it, which is a serious claim about where the music's identity actually lives.
Two moves out of the same door
There are two things going on under this heading and they are frequently confused. Ambient black metal keeps the band, the distortion and the shriek, and hands the structural decisions to atmosphere: tempos that sit still for ten minutes, riffs repeated past the point of argument, keyboards or field noise sitting at the same level as the guitars rather than behind them. Dungeon synth removes the band altogether. No guitars, no drums, usually no voice, one person and a keyboard, and the entire content of black metal reduced to its mood and its imagery.
Both are the opposite manoeuvre to the one made in raw Black Metal. That branch strips the recording to noise and keeps every ounce of the aggression. This one very often keeps the poor recording and throws the aggression out, which turns out to be the more radical of the two positions, and it was taken first by people who came directly out of the second wave rather than by outsiders.
Dungeon synth is the entire content of black metal reduced to its mood and its imagery, with the band removed.
The keyboard records nobody knew how to file
Ellefsen called his own output dark dungeon music and kept at it through what he later labelled Era I, from 1993 to 2001, composed entirely on synthesisers until The Stargate in 1999 brought in acoustic guitars, flutes and a guest vocal from Sarah Jezebel Deva. He was not alone for long. Sigurd Wongraven of Satyricon made Fjelltronen under his own surname in 1995 for Moonfog, thirty two minutes of Norwegian folk melody put through the same equipment. Burzum issued two records made on synthesiser alone, Dauði Baldrs in 1997 and Hliðskjálf in 1999, both composed while their author was serving a prison sentence and had no access to a guitar. Germany's Depressive Silence released II in 1996 and an American project called Secret Stairways put out Enchantment of the Ring in 1997, both of them one person working alone with a tape machine.
| Artist | Album | Year | Origin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mortiis | Født til å Herske | 1994 | Norway |
| Wongraven | Fjelltronen | 1995 | Norway |
| Depressive Silence | II | 1996 | Germany |
| Burzum | Dauði Baldrs | 1997 | Norway |
| Secret Stairways | Enchantment of the Ring | 1997 | United States |
| Jääportit | Kauan Koskematon | 1999 | Finland |
Listened to now, the striking thing is how little any of it wants from the listener. There is no build, no chorus, no arrival. A theme of four or five notes is stated on a patch that was cheap in 1994 and is repeated with small alterations until it stops. Judged as composition it is thin. Judged as what it was made to be, which is a room to sit in for an hour, it works precisely because nothing in it asks for a response.
Summoning, or what happens when the guitars stay
The ambient wing produced one band larger and stranger than everything around it. Summoning, formed in Vienna in 1993 and reduced to Michael Gregor and Richard Lederer since 1995, put eight albums out through Napalm Records from Lugburz in 1995 to With Doom We Come in 2018, built on drums programmed and played in from a keyboard, horns and choirs stacked into a wall, guitars distorted but mixed down under the synthesisers, and a shriek somewhere in the middle of it. Almost all of the words come from Tolkien. They have never played a concert and have never wanted to, which they explain by saying they are composers rather than musicians, and the records are made accordingly: nothing on them would survive a stage.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree: where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
That refusal is the whole aesthetic in one decision. A black metal band exists to be unbearable in a room with other people in it. This branch has no room and no other people, and everything follows from that: the length, the repetition, the absence of anything that would work as a climax, the imagined architecture the sleeves keep pointing at. It is music written for one listener at a time, and the fact that it came out of the most confrontational genre in the world is the interesting part.
The word arrives in 2011
For seventeen years the material had no collective name and no audience beyond the people who had bought the tapes at the time. On 17 March 2011 a listener writing as Andrew Werdna opened a blog to gather it together and called it dungeon synth, taking the phrase off Ellefsen's own description, and the name held. What followed is the clearest case in metal of a genre being assembled backwards: the term went up first, the nineties catalogue was dug out and reviewed under it, and only then did anybody start making new records to fit. Bandcamp did the rest, and a compilation video posted by the French project Erang in 2013 pulled in an audience the original tapes never had.
The economics explain the volume. One person, one machine, no rehearsal room, no drummer, no venue, no press: the cost of releasing a dungeon synth album is a Bandcamp account and a cassette run of fifty. There are now more releases in a month than the nineties produced in a decade, and most of them are not good, which is the ordinary condition of any form with no barrier to entry. The good ones are very good and they are found the same way the tapes were, by asking somebody who already knows.
What it is worth
Taken seriously, this branch answers a question the rest of the family avoids: what part of black metal is the sound and what part is the attitude. Remove the distortion, the speed, the voice and the drums, keep only the melodic habits, the cold intervals and the imagery, and something recognisable is still standing. That is a real finding, and it explains why so much of the ambient wing sits comfortably next to the folk and heathen material covered in pagan and Viking Black Metal, which draws on the same well of melody from a different direction. Where all of it sits in relation to everything else is set out in the family tree. Nobody has to like it. It is not asking.
