Matt Wesolowski's Blog, page 4

In the Dungeon, the mighty Dungeon… True outsider music

“What the fuck’s that?”

I held up the CD case.

“You spent fifteen quid on that?

My old housemate had a point. The front cover of my CD displayed a bat-winged, humanoid creature with pale skin, prosthetic pointed nose and ears, clad in studded leather and a codpiece made from a human skull. Behind the creature, a crimson sun set behind the tips of a mountainous landscape. The music itself was part-medieval, part ambient, part synthesiser soundscapes to a fantasy epic, the music of a story. I had never had anything like it. Being a fan of industrial, black metal and The Cure, I had no idea how to react to the soundtrack to this wordless world. It took me back to the Tolkien-inspired imaginary forests of my childhood, the thrill of the blade, the bow and the monsters from the books by my bedside.

The year was 1998 and the album was the fifth release from ex Emperor bassist, Håvard Ellefsen, otherwise known as ‘Mortiis’.

For the uninitiated, this type of music is known as ‘Dungeon Synth’.

This label fits loosely, a tunic rather than a codpiece. Some is more experimental than others; some are forest-y, some medieval-y, some are acoustic; some have words, some don’t.

Dungeon Synth is a convenient collective term for this ‘fantasy music’. (It’s a nice one too, in my irrelevant opinion.) What, for me, does classify ‘Dungeon Synth’ is its escapist and fantasy undertones and the fact that it is not ‘polished’, most dungeon synth artists do not use sequencers, preferring analogue synthesizers and/or keyboards. 

In an interview with Tiwaz of the (superb) Finnish act ‘Gvasdnahr‘, he describes the genre in a much more articulate way than I could;

“I kind of think of Dungeon Synth as a lone, ancient castle, hidden in a dark desolate corner in the shadow of Black Metal. Only a few know it’s there. And out of those few who dare to enter, only a few are capable of finding its treasure.”

Indeed, the origins of Dungeon Synth can be traced to the black metal scene of the mid 90s. Burzum’s 1994 album ‘Hvis Lyset Tarr Oss’ album contained the 14 minute song ‘Tomhet’ (Emptiness) an eerie synth-driven track in stark contrast to the brutality of the rest of the album.

A couple of years later saw the release of ‘Cintecele Diavolui’, “a musical experiment that consists of the stories and songs by the vampire Vukodlak, a creature once more brought to “life” by Mortiis.” Another odd, synth-led affair, complete with B-movie vampire samples but underpinned with a grim ambiance.

 

The most well known and probably originators of the genre were Burzum and Mortiis. On (in my opinion) one of the best albums ever created, Burzum’s ‘Filosofem’ there’s a 25 minute dungeon synth track ‘Rundtgåing av den transcendentale egenhetens støtte‘ No effects, a simple synth-led track which is probably one of the most influential and atmospheric pieces of music and one that could epitomise the genre.

Whilst Mortiis’ current music is far from its ambient origins, his back catalogue is a rich one to peruse (and much more enjoyable, sorry Håvard, if you’re reading a blog by some writer-nobody and getting upset.)

Mortiis arguably has the edge and is considered the forerunner of the genre, despite taking his influence from those early Burzum songs.

 Født til å Herske and Keiser av en Dimensjon Ukjen are both masterpieces – able to induce a depth of belief; it’s world-building with music, an unashamed fantasy world described by the man himself as ‘Dark, dungeon music’.  

There’s a hell of a lot more to Dungeon synth than these two though. Wongraven’s – Fjelltrollen (1995) (Satyr from Satyricon) is considred a masterpiece of the genre as is Gothmog’s – ‘Medieval Journeys (1998)

 

 

Dungeon Synth today hasn’t changed much and is perhaps even stronger than the 90s (both of these are good things!) Dungeon Synth has not tried to modernise; not being ‘perfect’, the dropped notes not always being quite on-time and the sparse production is what gives Dungeon Synth its charm.

 

For me, Dungeon Synth is an escape and has a child-like quality to it that takes me back to being a kid who was obsessed with swords and monsters. ‘Erang‘ an active and superb Dungeon Synth producer describes his name and the world he creates with his music as

“A kingdom from my childhood that nobody knows and where I will probably never go back.“

 

That’s beautiful. To me, that’s what I love about Dungeon Synth over more high-brow ‘ambient’ or ‘dark-ambient’ music.

Dungeon synth is outsider music without trying to be cool about it. Dungeon synth  is the music of dungeons and dragons, Warhammer fantasy battle, the world that outsiders like me escaped to in books and their own made up worlds. Not everyone will understand or like this music, but that’s fine. Dungeon synth is not there to make money, in fact virtually all of it is either free or ‘name your price’ on bandcamp.

 

A lovely way to sum up this truly underground genre comes from the inimitable ‘Dungeon Synth’-  a blog about medieval synthesiser dreamscapes’

Dungeon synth is an attempt to rediscover and walk these inner pathways, which might lead us into the mystical sacred realms somewhere in the collective unconscious, a place of nymphs and sorcery. Whether the artists of this genre are successful depends on whether they have assisted the lone listener with his explorations of the imagination. This is art not for the masses, but for those with the mind of a storyteller, those that can give atmospheric music genuine life with their mind’s eye.

 

If you are a newcomer to Dungeon Synth or simply want to know what on earth I have been going on about, here are some links to some of my personal favourite (free or name-your-price) Dungeon Synth albums that I can’t get enough of at the minute. (This list by no means defines the genre…that’s for you to do yourself)

This world might not be for you….but that’s fine. If it is, welcome…don’t worry about wiping your feet at the door. 

Erang & Lord Lovidicus – Gifted by Magic

Abandoned Places – Giantlands 

Gvasdnahr (all of them!)

Myrrdin – Glomung Ofer se Weald

Valscharuhn – Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

 

 

 

Behold! The Night Vale…

Imagine, if you will, a collaboration between David Lynch, Daniel Clowes and HP Lovecraft. Imagine a small town, a little bit like Twin Peaks, only with blurred edges; sub-dimensional wrinkles that descend into lost and impossible places, reticent of the ancient city of R’lyeh.

Imagine a place in which people and things that aren’t people can enter and exit of their own will. Where people and buildings  disappear without a trace, inhabited by hooded figures and librarians (AKA: The most fearsome creatures imaginable’) and watched over by a Glow Cloud that rains down dead lizards and crows, smells faintly of vanilla and has mind-control abilities (It has now joined the school board).

Imagine a community news program broadcasted from a building that’s can only be opened by bleeding; a radio station owned by the StrexCorp (who have taken it over from ‘Previous unseen forces too terrifying to behold’.  Imagine a radio station whose interns have all met terrible ends and Khoshekh the station cat who hovers by the sink in the gents.

Imagine what the daily community news program of this radio station sounds like…

Like virtually everyone else who’s heard of this podcast, I heard about it through word of mouth. It’s free, its episodes are released on the 1st and 15th of each month and Welcome to Night Vale has become one of the most popular podcasts in the world.

It’s not hard to see why.

The podcast is written by Jospeh Fink and Jeffery Cranor and its form is a community news bulletin, complete with a weather report, words from the sponsors, the ‘Children’s fun fact science corner’ and traffic. None of these things are what they seem and it’s easy to slip inside the dulcet tones of the congenial and charming presenter, Cecil Palmer and find yourself lost in this strange and troubling place, like being wrapped inside the comforting insect-warmth of a leaf-coloured cocoon.

I have been lost in the place below Night Vale’s stars after setting off home from work and found myself at my front door, my mind reverberating with, as Lovecraft might say, an iridescent and cosmic effulgence. It’s linguistic style is elegant, its music ethereal, yet within its cyclopean madness, carries a razor-edged wit.

There are linear themes that runt through the podcasts, (currently on 49 episodes at the time of writing this)  however it is possible to dip in and out but for the full experience, I would recommend you start at episode 1.

I have deliberately been sparse about the content as Welcome to Night Vale is something that simply just needs to be heard.

Anyone with a leaning toward the dark and the idiosyncratic will find their home here, a little town lit by lights that cannot be explained, where yellow helicopters circle and you should never, under any circumstances, enter the dog park.

Night Vale have recently been doing live shows and are touring Europe in October. I’ve not been this excited about a live show since Summer Slam 1992…

Within The Dark Mind – Guest Post by M J Wesolowski

MJ Wesolowski:

Guest post from me on JS Collyer’s blog. She’s a good un.

Originally posted on The Path - J. S. Collyer's Writing Blog:

I’m pleased to welcome M J Wesolowski to my WordPress this week. He is a horror writer

M J Wesolowski – horror writer

who has had success with his short fiction and has recently released his first novella The Black Land which I reviewed when it first came out. I have also had the chance to interview him and as an aficionado of all things dark, and someone who has recently started his own WordPress, he is well worth checking out for those, like me, who like a little edge in their fiction.

For his guest post he has explored the idea of darkness and how it can add to fiction and reality.

Within the Dark Mind

By MJ Wesolowski

“All the beautiful things in the world are lies. They count for nothing in the end.”

Patrick McCabe – ‘The Butcher Boy’

“Here, Vez.”

That’s what they…

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The Goblin Road

Local history , these days, is mostly relegated to the enthusiasts, the elderly group that meet  at the back of the library; the place where the silent sun peeks in through the windows, in yellow slats of dancing dust. The good old days.

There are things about where we live that have been buried by the heavy and unrelenting march of time; there are rich sweetmeats banished between the pages of forgotten books or dimmed by the fading light of memory.

There are things that have been buried in these places for a reason.

Behind my house lies the old waggonway, it snakes, unseen and largely forgotten in a thick, green artery that pulses with undisturbed invertebrate and insect life. Nearly completely overgrown, its paths are just visible between the coils of thorns, birds nest in the ruins that poke like jagged teeth and intervals along its course. As kids, we called it the ‘tram track’; made dens beneath its looming trees and its wild, earth-smell stayed on our clothes and in our hair until bath time.

As the local history group in the library would tell you, the waggonway round here carried coal and fireclay from the Colliery pit  to the staiths on the banks of the river. The photographs from back then show a well kept rail route; the buildings beside it, proud homes.

The 1800s saw the end of the pit. It closed only a year or so after its official opening in 1864; yet unlike the other collieries in the area, this one is only touched on briefly in museum archives and online; ‘all seams abandoned’ is the only available explanation to be found for the desertion and swift desolation of the once proud mine, before it disappeared below the earth.

So what went wrong here all that time ago and what are the origins of the rhyme hat echoed from my own childhood as we played on the silent,  tangled paths of that ancient place?

“Don’t cut short me lad, no don’t cut short me bonny boy,

For if ye run that goblins road, my son, thou’ll leave no mark

They’ll mak’ you into leaves and bark.”

The trees that line the waggonway are thick and unkempt; they lean over the path, closing out the daylight in a gambrel of interlocked leaves. They have watched the slow march of time, seen the horse carts go back and forth as the years went by, the rails rust and vanish and the way fall silent.

The council have erected fences; tight and tipped with rolls of silver thorns where the old colliery once stood. Faded signs proclaim the road is unstable and warn of hidden shafts; Ivy and weeds reach like trailing fingers from the sink-hole, 9 fathoms deep. We used to hurl stones beyond the fence and run; never waiting to hear an answering echo as our missiles disappeared into that dark place.

Digging a little deeper, in those old dusty books and the smudged print of archives; there are few passages concerning the old mine. Certain pages have been deleted, nothing left but torn edges and only the mystified stare of the librarian to answer of their whereabouts. What is left makes for perplexing reading.

The paths through the trees was there long before the mine, it seems and it was referred to by the locals as the ‘Gobba’way’.  What remains of local monographs on the subject (that are not missing or despoiled) are whimsical in the extreme and fresh with an idiosyncrasy that can only be explained as the ravings of madmen or an elaborate joke.

One such transcription speaks of ‘I shalle not forget as long as I live, the hand that grasped my shoulder from the trees of the Gobbaway. Its skin the dead brown of brittle leaves…’  and later, a different  ‘…the eyes of the fyends [SP] that gazed at the lads from the trees send their steeds into a frenzy and the marras mad with rage and godly terrors.’

London’s early 1900s publication ‘Mining Magazine’ reported on the trouble that dogged the digging of the pit itself.

…escaped beasts from a travelling menagerie have troubled the steeds along the Gobbaway; ‘the nags rolled their eyes in fear and their mouths frothed as the trees above head rustle with the unnatural rush of feet over hands’….   

According to this same publication, a troupe of Dowsers reported ‘…strange and ungodly motions of the sticks above the pit‘ and draws its speculation to a halt at ‘the unwelcome rhythm below the earth‘

A sinkhole swallowed the colliery a year or so after its abandonment and there are little traces of anything left in its place, save for the sound of the wind that wails up from that derelict chasm and the ruins of the houses where people watched the wagons winding their way to the river.

To walk along that old path today is far from a peaceful or comforting experience. Even in the extremes of summer, the shade of the old branches casts a foreboding shadow over the place. The green tunnel seems to expel a foul and cloying air – something leftover from the fathoms of the old pit? There are rustlings in those trees which do attune to the disturbance of avian life, but that one is trespassing on the territory of something that does not wish to for company here.

Sometimes one is sure that there are shadows moving from all sides; shadows that can be explained away by the movement of sun through dappled leaves and foliage. The gnarled and spiny hands that brush against and clutch the exposed patches of your own flesh, the back of the neck and the soft temples of your skull are not hands but trailing branches. Overgrown thorn bushes, thistles or curious flies. You tell yourself this as you run home, the old rhyme beating a maddening tattoo between your ears and remaining long after you have caught your breath behind the thick walls of home.

For if ye run that goblins road, my son, thou’ll leave no mark

They’ll mak’ you into leaves and bark.

Review – “The Black Land” by MJ Wesolowski

MJ Wesolowski:

Great review of ‘The Black Land’ Thanks to Matthew Fryer for this!

Originally posted on WELCOME TO THE HELLFORGE:

After a few days of June sunshine spent in pub beer gardens, it was a grey and rainy afternoon, so I thought some old-school terror would be the perfect way to while away a couple of hours. This downloaded novella from Blood Bound Books proved to be just the thing with its baleful castle, ghosts in wolfskins and a splendid descent into madness for all those unfortunate enough to be involved.

We meet Martin Walker, an American self-made tycoon who owns the exclusive Gateway Resorts. He arrives in North-East England with his wife and two young children in tow, intent on acquiring the remote island of Blamenholme to add to his luxurious list of locations. But the bleak slab of rock is also home to a forbidding and long-abandoned castle that was once garrisoned by invading Norsemen. And it appears that these “Children of Odin” – psychotic wolfskin-wearing warriors high…

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Who I am and what I do.

Hello, I’ll introduce myself.

I am Matthew John Wesolowski.

I am a man with a face and a head and I make up stories and I write them down. Sometimes people like them and read them. Sometimes people like them enough to buy them. That’s nice, it makes me happy. Here’s a picture of me looking all grim and moody and author-y. (I don’t really like having my photo taken)

Writing is everything to me. Writing never got banished to the attic along with the art pencils, the musical instruments and the sports equipment. Writing isn’t a journey, a job or even a hobby; writing is everything to me, writing is the only thing I do well.

I write because I have to, there’s no other explanation.  I have stories that come bubbling out of my brain, all bulging tentacles and teeth. I have to write them down.

I was born in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in the North East of England. As I grew up, reading was my salvation from maths lessons, bullies, other children and jobs I hated.

The childhood soundscapes  of Michael Rosen and Roald Dahl, the fairy tales of Terry Jones and the silhouetted lands of Jan Pienkowski gave way to Tolkien’s Middle Earth during my childhood. Then came the school library and Usbourne’s ‘World of the Unknown’ – monsters, ghosts and UFOs

and that was me hooked.

They say you don’t find your genre, your genre finds you.

From the World of the Unknown, it was the ‘Point Horror’ series; notably ‘The Cheerleader‘ by Carlone B Cooney which was perhaps the first vampire fiction I ever read. The idea of this ancient Eastern European legend preying on the jocks and cheerleader culture of the early 90s was fascinating. From there, I couldn’t stop, I think I read every single point horror novel the school had.

This could go on for aeons, but I think you know what I’m getting at. What I will leave you with is the few books that gave me a passion for reading and writing horror.

First and perhaps the best is ‘Del-Del‘ by Victor Kelleher, a magnificent story of demon possession that still haunts me to this day. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you do. I am yet to find a book that has left such a lasting impression on me.

Second and perhaps very different, ‘The Rats‘ by James Herbert which I read immediately after our school English teacher told us not to read books like that because there was naughty swearing and sex in them (you tell an 11 year old boy not to read something because it has sex and violence in it….what do you think is going to happen?) To this day, I wonder if that teacher was using subtle reverse psychology to expand our reading horizons…I’m guessing not!

My teenage years were filled with Poppy Z Brite (Now Billy Martin) beside the gritty brutality of Niall Griffiths and Patrick McCabe. I read ‘The Dead School‘ once every couple of years, just for the lasting delicious  trauma it leaves me with.

At the minute, I’m particularly enjoying the work of Gillian Flynn, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir and of course, the master himself, Stephen King.

This could go on and on….but, for your sake, it won’t.

I’ve written fiction ever since I could write. My first book in year 5 ‘Attack of the Killer Flytraps’ (a folded 3 page epic containing my own illustrations) is sadly lost to the ravages of time, but if I unearth it in an old box somewhere, I’ll scan it and put it up here.

I have had short stories published in ‘Ethereal tales’ magazine, now sadly defunct (not my fault… I hope, anyway!), the ‘Midnight Movie Creature Feature‘ and my debut Novella, ‘The Black Land‘ is available for a very reasonable price on Kindle. (Please leave a review, even if you hated every stinking word of it.)

 

Last little bit of admin:  I don’t really do Facebook. For me, Facebook is like looking through the window at the stragglers at the end of a really bad party…a party that you weren’t even invited to. However, you can ‘like’ me on there should you wish. I do update it with news when necessary.

 

Twitter will be coming soon. I just need to change my username and delete all my curmudgeonly bleating about inconsequential things that irritate me. Link coming soon.

 

So there you go. If you made it down to here, congratulations. I promise that the remainder of this blog will be considerably  less narcissistic, but, like hacking a particularly stubborn wart from your finger with nail scissors (it works, but I wouldn’t recommend it!) it has to be done.

Over and out.

MJ