Dungeon Synth: Work Like A Serf!
Why I'm escaping into 'medieval ambient'.
Our quest begins
I work from home. So, naturally, 99% of my day is spent finding the right background music for refreshing my email inbox.
There are a wide range of exclusion criteria for music I can work to. I won’t attempt to outline these here but I am in the process of engraving them onto 53 stone tablets which will be erected around the perimeter of my home. Suffice to say: thou shalt not have lyrics, or, like, be too jaunty.
Having quickly grown tired of the few albums I own which meet these exacting standards, I fell back upon whatever ambient, new age and drone music Gen Z had pirated to YouTube.
I am now expert at identifying, from a 1x1 inch album art thumbnail, which sequence of strange electronic beeps and hums will see me through an hour of tedious work.
However, all my delight in 80s Japanese minimal electronica has been as nothing to the joy I felt upon ‘discovering’ (being shown by the algorithm) the genre of dungeon synth.
Here, at last, I had found it. The perfect working‑to music: unobtrusive but not too bland, accepting of background noise, and full of innocent joy. Or so I thought.
Dungeon what now?
What is dungeon synth? In brief: faux‑medieval music played on synthesizers. Some of it is also known as ‘medieval ambient,’ or ‘fantasy ambient’. It aims to invoke a past, mythic age. It is a strange mixture of synth-based mathematical precision and medieval instrumentation: computer-generated pipe organs, lutes, flutes etc.
Dungeon synth reminds me of the soundtracks to computer RPGs (roleplaying games), like The Elder Scrolls, Planescape: Torment and Baldur’s Gate. It is also extremely silly.
A brief scan through the YouTube comments on some of the most popular DS albums shows that many listeners have similar associations. They refer to RPG gaming, its tropes and nostalgic longing.
Many also make reference to tabletop RPGs, especially Dungeons & Dragons. (Indeed, I am reliably informed that popular DS artist ‘Hedge Wizard’ is named after a character type in D&D.)
With dungeon synth as my ambience, I spent a happy and productive working week, imagining myself a medieval peasant, a monastery copyist, or perhaps just in an inn of some kind. I would welcome myself into my kitchen by announcing, in a lordly tone, ‘Traveller! You must have journeyed many miles to get here. Come rest by the fire awhile.”
Why should I care about dungeon synth?
You would be forgiven for thinking this is all rather strange (and, I must stress, very silly), but the genre is certainly popular. The YouTube channel ‘Dungeon Synth Archives’ (which uploads DS albums) has garnered 20 million views. Its most popular albums have around 500k–700k views. Not Taylor Swift numbers but certainly respectable for an obscure micro‑genre about elves.
Why are people so keen for medieval background music? What’s the appeal of placing oneself in such a scene?
We might ask a broader question about the current popularity of the fantasy‑medieval genre (like all these Lord of the Game of Witcher shows.). However, I do think dungeon synth is an interesting instance of this trend because it invokes a kind of dual nostalgia for leisure.
Let’s take a closer look at the most popular artist on the Dungeon Synth Archives: ‘Fief’. They have five albums, each of which I really like. Unlike much of the genre, Fief’s work actually sounds medieval (in a sort of camp, Men in Tights way) and it is unremittingly joyous. Give it a try.
The name ‘Fief’ obviously refers to feudalism. But if there is another theme to their work, it is leisure.
Their song titles contain the expected tropes of RPGs, fantasy adventure and fairy tale (‘The Days of Dice and Daring’; ‘Dawnlight Warms the Castle Stone’; ‘Citadel Streets’). However, they also suggest idleness (‘The Daydreaming Sentry’; ‘Medieval Reveries’) and festival (‘Faire’; ‘Deep Forest Dance’; ‘A Good Inn’; ‘Tales by Tavern Hearthglow’.)
Moreover, the songs do not place the listener in the position of the feudal lord of this imaginary fiefdom, but amongst the commoners (‘The Tinker’s Wagon’, ‘Wandering Minstrel’).
Fief’s work thus shows a longing for unstructured time, the leisure to be bored, and for community. The dual nostalgia here is, firstly, a yearning for something the audience have actually experienced. Both tabletop RPGs and their computer‑based equivalents take a long time. Like, hundreds of hours. As an adult with a job it is difficult, if not impossible, to find this time. I have been playing The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, on and off, for five years and still have not completed it.
Therefore DS offers a nostalgic escape to a lost past where the listener had time for D&D, video games and fantasy novels, or, to put it another way, for community, idleness and escape into imagination.
There is also a second layer of nostalgia, yearning for something which none of us have experienced: the unstructured time of agrarian feudalism.
During industrialisation, it was difficult for workers to adapt to industrial time. People in an agrarian society (one where the main economic activity was agriculture and most people lived in rural areas) were used to work being seasonal and varied. They were reluctant to work to a factory schedule: i.e. to work constantly and at the same thing every day.
In England, workers resisted factory time well into the late 18th and early 19th Century. In EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, a social history of this period of industrialisation, Thompson describes the 1806 case of…
William Child, a journeyman weaver [who] refused to enter a hand-loom factory because of his objections to ‘being confined to go exactly at such an hour and such a minute.1
Thompson remarks:
[…] the conflict is between two cultural modes or ways of life. We have seen that even before the advent of power the woollen weavers disliked the hand-loom factories. They resented, first, the discipline; the factory bell or hooter; the time-keeping which overrode ill-health, domestic arrangements, or the choice of more varied occupations.2
This new time, of the factory’s relentless production, eventually became the modern workplace, where work doesn’t stop even when you go home. It is unsurprising that a generation fed up with the boss messaging you on Microsoft Teams at midnight should want to escape (in fantasy) to a medieval, agrarian life where you might reasonably call it a day if it was raining.
Relatedly, the move from country to town also meant a loss of community, from the village where everyone knew everyone, to the anonymous urban landscape. The nostalgia for an agrarian past is thus also a nostalgia for community.
Again, this nostalgia is dual‑layered in dungeon synth. In the move from adolescence to adulthood, most of us experience a journey in a certain way analogous to the historical movement of populations from country to town. One goes from being a bored teenager with too much time to fill, hanging out with friends (and perhaps playing RPGs), to an adulthood where one sees one’s friends at, perhaps, one carefully‑planned social event per month.
It is worth adding that, although all this nostalgia is based loosely in historical fact, it’s obviously not a pining for the actual conditions of agrarian feudalism. Moreover, I understand there is much debate about whether any single thing called ‘feudalism’ ever really existed.
I don’t think that fans of dungeon synth (or players of Skyrim, readers of Tolkien, etc.) really want to live in the Middle Ages. What concerns me here is only the fantasy, which emphasises the few aspects of feudal life which were (relative to now) desirable, without all the terrible abuses, the never learning to read or write, the spending 40 years of your life standing in pig shit as your sons were killed in the armies of your feudal lord, before you were eventually gored to death by a bull.
So it’s about nostalgia for a simpler, rural life? I could have told you that.
Well, yes and no. I honestly wouldn’t have bothered you if I thought it was just that. After all, you have to get back to work. I hear the factory hooter.
It is also dignifying, for those who must labour under modern conditions of employment, to escape into a feudal fantasy because this fantasy perhaps offers an image of the power relations in which we actually live.
As influential political theorist Jodi Dean has argued3, rather than thinking of ourselves as living under capitalism, it might be truer to call it neofeudalism. This better describes the extreme inequality, the precarious nature of modern employment, the way the wealthy can circumvent national regulation, and the way the rich get richer simply through collecting rents and fees, rather than investing in any actual production.
‘Neofeudalism’ also describes the feudal‑like relationships inherent to ‘platforms’ like Deliveroo, Uber, or YouTube. The vassal (YouTuber) pays a tithe (revenue share, personal data) to the lord (YouTube) in exchange for the use of the lord’s land and mill (YouTube website) to grow and grind (produce and distribute) their wheat (cat videos).
Unlike a capitalist with their factory (i.e. a television production company) the feudal lord (YouTube) does not need to invest directly in the means of production (video cameras, ring lights, the maintenance and upkeep of adorable cats) but nonetheless collects a rent (revenue share, use of personal data) simply by owning the land and mill (YouTube website).
If we must work under feudal‑esque conditions, might we not find it comforting to escape into a time when our feudal lords at least had some obligations to look after us? And where they’d at least build a pretty castle or two? Moreover, the structures of oppression are at least readily apparent when the lord lives in a heavily armed fortress.
People recognise that they live under neofeudal conditions, amid gross inequality and unfairness. It makes them miserable. Escaping into a feudal fantasy is a way of looking at the bright side. It is comforting to think that, even under actual feudalism, one could find joy in idleness, community and adventure amid hardship.
Wait! Traveller! A word of warning before you go…
An adventurer like you is surely thinking of making your own journeys in the realm of dungeon synth. However, you are probably also wary of all this talk of a return to a simpler, rural, idyllic past. We all (especially those of us in the UK) are aware of the connection between this kind of Romanticism, nationalism and the far right.
You are right to be worried.
After my initial happy week of listening, I made the mistake of web‑searching ‘dungeon synth’. I was saddened, though not entirely surprised, to learn that what I’d thought was innocent keyboard plinking in the bedrooms of Ursula Le Guin fans was in fact a musical genre originally created by Neo‑Nazis.
Dungeon synth originally developed as an offshoot of Norwegian black metal. For those who don’t know, black metal is a genre so heavily associated with fascists that there exists a forum specifically dedicated to determining which black metal bands are not fascists4.
Like Dungeons & Dragons, black metal was a focus of the 1980s–1990s Satanic Panic. However, unlike D&D, it actually was evil. Its adherents gained notoriety for committing arson at a number of churches in Scandinavia to further a garbled but explicitly anti‑Semitic, supposedly pagan, agenda. Very unpleasant people.
Now, to be very clear, I am not saying that people who make dungeon synth are Nazis. I am certainly not saying that people who listen to it are Nazis (“Hello, PREVENT?”). And I am definitely not saying that people who like fantasy RPGs are Nazis. As far as I can tell, none of the DS artists I have mentioned here are Nazis, or directly connected to any black metal bands.
There are, in fact, probably two genres, both called ‘dungeon synth’. One is for dark ambient projects made by Nazis in the 90s. The other is for 2010s bedroom producers making music to remind them of their little RPG games. Happily, the latter genre appears to be the more successful.
However, dungeon synth’s Nazi origins (like, say, the tiresome racist anguish over the inclusion of literally any non‑white actors in The Lord of the Rings TV series) remind us that, of course, even the avowedly fictional past is a politically‑contested domain. So let’s contest it, and claim it as a place where anyone can go to escape factory time, and rediscover lost community, leisure and idleness.
Thanks for reading! In the best tradition of the fantasy genre, this was too long.
If you nonetheless enjoyed it, share it with a friend and subscribe to Gruel Deluxe.
Plus, you might enjoy my last essay, about the strange appeal of Formula 1.
EP Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963 (1991), pp.337–338)
Ibid.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/neofeudalism-the-end-of-capitalism/
https://old.reddit.com/r/rabm/