Drawn to the Dungeon
It begins with a quest. A marauder, simple traveler or possibly a knave takes to the road or a barely visible forest path in search of some knowledge, treasure. In this case, the trail winds east on Cesar Chavez street and ends just a block east of JuiceLand and Poke-Poke. Tiny Minotaur is the destination, a private club that requires a doorbell ring and a sign-in for admittance. But weary pilgrims on the weekend of May 4 are not just resting quietly with possibly a chicken pot pie and an admittedly good but rather pricey can of French cider — the assortment of folks within the gates, some with their own staffs and capes, have been drawn by the frequently harmonious and just as discordant hymns of dungeon synth, and in particular the international TEXAS DUNGEON SIEGE 2025 festival.
In the popular imagination, dungeons may be associated with torture, banishment, darkness, and possibly dragons. Completely conversely, the synthesizer’s advent in the mid-sixties had it utilized to switch on Bach, produce cortex-numbing prog-rock, and to always, always score films that signaled the futuristic. What this commingling of worlds in dungeon synth seems to ask is: what if an era without electricity could be evoked by sounds meant to conjure the year 2500, but circa 1988? What if the Castlevania soundtracks were a more formative musical text than Abbey Road? What if merry and unholy creatures jigged and cavorted to the sound of a Yamaha DX7?
While obviously niche, dungeon synth has the unique quality of being unstintingly familiar. Any person who played a console game in the 90s featuring ‘spooky’ themes encountered a synthian-cousin, and it is somewhat tied — at least aesthetically — to the darker parts of nascent new age music (before it was all doves and vibrations from the sun, etc.) and fantasy literature. Dungeon synth is also wedded to black metal, and like that genre it often evokes an orthodoxy, then pushes at the edges. Based on the logical contradiction of combining medieval times with modern ones, it can not be taken literally. But it can be taken seriously.
The first artist I tried to watch at the festival — there is no stage outside at Tiny Minotaur, just a performance area with people standing around cutting off your sight line — was Fallen Desert Colour, a “textural, meditative desert drone audio/visual project.” The one-person act was joined here by “a very special guest from the fetid depths of Attic Shrines…” Attic Shrines fed what sounded like decaying static via cassette tape through one end while Fallen Desert Colour added abstract, ringing sounds partially pounded out of a hammered dulcimer.
This is the experimental edge of dungeon synth, while the next performer Steaming Woodlands hewed closer to the determined, more melodic version of the genre that I had been expecting. Songs with a bright martialness, all played in the sun by one man in oval sunglasses. His set ended abruptly when the power to his keyboard went out. Closing out the day portion of the festival was Meadow Goat from Washington. Meadow Goat was wearing a yellow dress and a kind of sun hat, and this final performance bridged, to me, the worlds between the experimental and more traditional flavors of dungeon synth, partially airy and abstract, at other times more grounded.
One dinner of braised meats made in the fashion of far off lands (Kebabalicious) later, the party moved to Elysium for the evening. Crawl, a project from places below (San Antonio) features drums to the front (festooned by a skeleton), screaming, and a truly heavy bass/synth triggered in part by the artist slamming the strings with his drumsticks. During this set I was unhappily surprised to learn I was in the exact path of the smoke machine and had to move.
The final performance I want to mention dovetails into a more Austin-area related complaint about either the dearth of boundary-pushing live music performances and/or venues to host such shows. If you believe this, you should have seen Jenn Taiga, whose immersive performance on four synthesizers was overshadowed a bit by the existence of a tied-up, silent sub on stage. After using knives to press down (?) the synthesizer keys and then leaving them to drone, Jenn walked up to the sub, spit in their mouth and applied what I was told was about nine piercings to their lightly bloodying head. I was through with watching after about three.
With the distance of a few days I can still smell that smoke machine, incense, leaves, and see visions of synth-playing people cast in light and darkness. Just a bit was nasty; mostly it was creepy in a good way, borderline spoopy. In any case, after a slow birth of some thirty-ish years, dungeon synth has moved from the periphery into something closer to the bleeding edge, with all the necessary documentation behind it. The Texas Dungeon Siege Festival, from what I briefly experienced, crossed different strains of this not-so-ancient and still-emerging musical phenomenon, and pretty holistically. Dungeon synth may not be huge, but it is growing. Fortunately, dungeons have a lot of room.
