I first learned about and started to listen and love dungeon synth through my friend Kktz(Tenebrositas, Talog) who sent me couple of releases and this was an ideal meditative and music for my darkened heart besides black metal. In time, I explored the scene and found out some really magnificent entities and releases. Skhemty hails from France and its theme is musical exploration of ancient Egypt, its mystic and mystery. But Skhemty also manages to create atmosphere of medieval Byzant and Middle East in its musical direction and this album is a keeper. There are eleven songs on this opus and what immediately comes to mind, songs are not too long or repetitive to become boring, quite the contrary. This is a epic and emotional dark journey filled with almost cinematic enthusiasm and a bit of melancholy and sadness. Great album for all you dungeon synth/dark ambient fiends out there. My personal favorites are Golden Age, Mirage over the Dunes and Ancient Ruins in the Desert.
Norwegian black metal legends Satyricon prepared an interesting project merging their music with paintings of Norwegian legendary fantastic painter Edward Munch and the result, as a soundtrack to the exhibition and project is this opus containing just one song in time of just under one hour. Any fans who are looking for songs or black metal here like they are used to from Satyr and Frost will be disappointed here. This is an art album, or rather album supporting art and music which serves to add up to the atmosphere of paintings and I am sure it fits perfectly with exhibition, but I lack the seeing of paintings here so I will have to concentrate on music only. There is a lot of perfect synth darkened minimalistic melody here with some dark ambient influenced passages marking the musical landscape. When guitar kicks in, it delivers black metal riffs and parts but somehow in connection with synth parts they hit even stronger and more grandiose than your average black metal tremolos. Acoustic guitar passages accompanied by dungeon synth melodic dark ambiental music brought me to some other dimension. Sometimes calm, sometimes angered black flame burning parts are the mirror to ones own soul and black heart. I love this one. Not for everyday listening, but a black gem indeed.
Only a few days have passed since the New Year, there is an active movement around the house of the Hungarian ritual / dark ambient DøD project.The herald of death, “blessed” from last year’s album ‘Allegory Of Death’, released a clip that exudes the stench of Hell:
But the shiver isn’t over yet, as the second album ‘Nightmares By Imprisoned Soul’ has been announced. ‘Nightmares By Imprisoned Soul’ will accompany the listener through 7 items in the realm of nightmares.If you want to hear more details about the upcoming album, you can follow the DøD facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/dod0119 Bandcamp:https://dod0119.bandcamp.com/album/allegory-of-death
KRAYKULLA-WEBZINE 