A most peculiar underground music festival is coming to town.

You may be into meditative ambient electronic music but like things dark and foreboding with leather and spikes on the edges. Or maybe you are a gamer who gets together with friends in your mom’s wood-paneled basement with a pile of rulebooks and a set of polyhedral dice. Would you believe there’s a musical soundtrack for that? 

Musicians and fans from around the U.S. are coming to the inaugural Great Lakes Dungeon Siege at Piere’s from Oct. 18-20.

Separate camps

This “mystifying microgenre,” as Fort Wayne musician Nathan Gulley dubs it, is called “dungeon synth,” and it’s a collision of two worlds in a slow-motion mêlée.

About half of the artists come from black metal, notorious and infamous. They create albums of keyboard playing, but without metal’s extreme guitars, blast beats, or guttural vocals. 

Beginning in the early ’90s, Norwegian black metal often featured quieter intros and interludes played on keyboards, and this music extrapolates from there. What’s now dungeon synth was originally called “dark ambient” music.

But the other half of the musicians in dungeon synth — and there is an implicit clash of cultures despite the camaraderie — are the newcomers. They are musically skilled Dungeons & Dragons nerds, men and women, composing programmatic soundtracks to gaming campaigns. It’s their time to roll for initiative.

From the darkness

Dungeon Siege’s acts are mostly one solitary person playing keyboard, but this is not your grandmother’s piano recital. 

An artist plays live but often with pre-recorded or sequenced backing tracks, and the music only rarely involves vocals. This isn’t rock. The tempos are slow, the tones in a minor key, long and droning. Recorded drums and beats are sparse. The sounds are thick orchestral textures, and the mood is dark when played by the artists coming from black metal. 

In contrast, the artists from the D&D side might go in for pastoral, bucolic soundscapes with the counterpoint of rustic, medieval instrument sounds.

What strikes me is that with many of these tunes, if you only heard the music and nobody told you it comes from black metal, you would not guess the source. You might think you were listening to ambient electronic music and Windham Hill-style new age from the ’70s and ’80s. Cheerful moments sometimes peek out from the foreboding gloom.

Getting into costume

As for the meeting of the two musical camps: “You’ll see it for yourself,” Gulley said. 

“About half the people will be there with their battle jackets and black clothes and tattoos and piercings, the obvious black metal guys. The other half will be people with elf ears or swords on their back or wearing armor. There is a divide there, and you can tell it’s about cross-pollination between two different groups of people, but it makes for interesting events.”

When Gulley takes the stage with his trio, Sorrowmoon, “I will wear my battle vest and a long sleeve black metal shirt. And when we play, of course, we’ll put corpse paint on, but not when we’re in the crowd.” 

Gulley stresses that for the fans, cosplay isn’t mandatory; people are welcome to dress any way they like.

Gulley told me about the music and its community, which he calls his life’s work. He explains he’s from the D&D camp. He’s working on his fourth solo album of self-produced music under the name Kyvon.

Going back in time

Great Lakes Dungeon Siege is based on the annual Northeast Dungeon Siege in Worcester, Massachusetts, held since 2018, and this year’s Texas Dungeon Siege in Austin. 

It’s only fitting that they stage a festival in this region, with its connection to Dungeons & Dragons, which was birthed in the early 1970s at the legendary table-top gaming convention held in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, called Gen Con. In recent years Gen Con has been held in Indianapolis.

You can hear dungeon synth artists from Europe and the New World on their Bandcamp sites, where the scene is anchored. However, if you are streaming or buying digital downloads, you are ignoring the medium that defines the message: dungeon synth albums are properly collected and listened to on cassette tapes, shipped through the mail, as in days of old, beyond the fields we know, when magic filled the air and the tapes wowed, fluttered, and hissed. Like music did in the ’70s and ’80s, when Dungeons & Dragons arose to trouble the land. But I digress.

Much of the music appears to be recorded to analog tape, although computer-based multi-tracking plays a role. The more lo-fi and raw the playing and recording, the more dungeon cred for the artists. Boutique record labels manufacture the albums on cassette, complete with artwork in the cassette case J-card format. 

Gulley says labels Out of Season and Dungeons Deep will be selling albums on cassette and other merch at the festival.

As in black metal, dungeon synth artists go by mythopoeic stage names that sound like they were chosen by Tolkien fans who side with the orcs and the ringwraiths. They favor the traditional thorny logos that look great on black. 

At Piere’s, you’ll see such musicians as Coniferous Myst of Montana; Cernunnos Woods of Minnesota; Moonkissed Spires and Sorrowmoon of Indiana; Alkilith and Mors Vitaque of Illinois; Hedge Wizard and Fanged Imp of Ohio; Elminster and Elyvilon of Michigan; Sombre Arcane, The Oracle, and Unsheathed Glory of Massachusetts; Pumpkin Witch and Hermit Knight of New York; Mortwight of Texas; Wraith Knight and Trollkjerring of Oregon; Nahadoth of Connecticut; Vanhellig of New Hampshire; Valen of South Carolina; Jenn Taiga of Pennsylvania; and Vaelastrasz and Obsidian of Virginia. 

Likewise, fans will be coming in from all over the country, and it’s likely there will be a few folks from Canada and Europe as well.

Plans are for Great Lakes Dungeon Siege to be livestreamed on Twitch so fans around the world can tune in.