I was already a few years in the blog cosmos when the first posts of Andrew Werdna surfaced on his now historic website, describing a certain style of dark / fantasy ambient with forlorn medieval aesthetics and initially coining the term "dungeon synth". The genre, initially loosely consisting of side projects of musicians of the second wave of black metal, has undergone a time period of rebirth and reform the last 10 years, with more and more projects and dedicated labels coming up and honouring the forgotten art of the cassette tape. And if you've followed this micro scene even a little bit lately, the name Elminster will surely ring a bell. Restless and with seemingly unceasing inspiration, an abundance of projects are maintained almost solely by one musician, Maeglin Aumar, all at the same time, releasing material quite often and a lot throughout the year, while maintaining his own tape label Ithildin Tape Production too. Under different monikers, he experiments with a wide array of musical templates, spanning from dark ambient, to dusty hip hop, to dungeon synth, to raw black metal, and all over again. Elminster agreed to a discussion that includes an extensive description of his artistic presence, his motives, insight on past releases and a glimpse into the future.
- Thanks for finding the time, how is everything with your activities at the moment?
No problem at all, thank you for having me! Things are pretty good overall, just the usual anxiety surrounding finals week and uncertainty about my career as I am in my senior year of university. On the other hand, life is very exciting since I’m coming up on the next chapter of my life: entering the real world and having my girlfriend move in with me after school wraps up in May. While uncertain, life is looking good.
- First of all, how many active projects do you have right now? Is it even countable?
By my counting (which is incredibly likely to be wrong) I currently operate 26 projects, both public and anonymous. I have some projects involved in a black metal/black ambient circle that aren’t exactly secret, but I haven’t endorsed them through any of my official channels.
- What was your first experience with music creation that you remember?
My first memories of making music were this absolutely god awful punk demo that I made to show a classmate in highschool that I wanted to be involved with the local punk/mathcore/emo house show scene. I had a ton of fun making it, but it was incredibly amateurish: out of time, all of the mixer tracks were dry, no thought of tone, etc. Surprisingly, the kid actually enjoyed it and had nice things to say, but I wasn’t able to get any project started with him. Beyond that, there was the stereotypical experience of getting asked to join a budding band as a bass player, only to show up to rehearsal to find that the other guys just wanted to hang out, not practice or write songs. Technically, there was one song I wrote for a band that played an annual Hanukkah party that got nicknamed DTAF or “Drag that fucker out” which was meant to be a joke about its tempo and repetitive nature, but we never bothered to record it for obvious reasons. All of these experiences made me realize that while I love a lot of my music friends from my school days, I could only trust one or two of them to actually deliver on the promise of music making. As such, I decided to handle things in the form of one man projects because I could hold myself accountable to finish things.
- Elminster's first releases started appearing in August 2020, with The Making of A Mage (a wonderful example of traditional revivalist dungeon synth) being the standalone record with all your earlier EP series. What was your setup for recording back then?
Thank you so much for the kind words about the beginnings of Elminster. To be completely honest, I have a very complicated relationship with those early recordings. I don’t think that they really fit under the genre tag of dungeon synth cleanly, but would probably be best described as fantasy synth/fantasy ambient. However, I have an intense love for these songs because of the circumstances in which they were recorded. All of the demo era releases were recorded on an ailing laptop running a knock off DAW called Waveform 11 and using plugins such as Sonatina Orchestra or whatever synth plugins I happened to find on vst4free.com. The debut demo, The Making Of A Mage Pt. I - Brigand was recorded in an isolated cabin in the forest in Drummond Island, Michigan, where the year round population numbers roughly 500 and the nature would remind you of Maine, conifers, rocky beaches, wolves, birch trees, and moss. I think that lugging a 2.5 octave MIDI keyboard up to that cabin was probably the best decision I’ve ever made, in terms of recording since I was without distraction. I would listen to tapes during the day, I remember that VÄÄ - Ur sägen och hävd was what I played the most, read the first Elminster novel before and after dinner, and then would sit down to record at night whenever my extended family were watching movies, drinking coffee on the porch, etc. Once I finished up each night’s recording, I would lay on the grass and stargaze while listening to my tape of Garadrak - Nothing Beside Remains. Drummond Island doesn’t have any light pollution because the only infrastructure within 2 hours of it are a handful of mom and pop shops, a quarry, and a ferry service, so I would have a view of the night sky bested only by that in Grand Teton National Park. The other demos were recorded with the same setup in a combination of my dorm room, my university’s library, and my girlfriend’s dorm room whenever she would doze off while we watched movies.
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| The Making of a Mage |
- First side projects Anadûnê and The Owl Knight are born in close proximity to each other, one year after the beginning of Elminster. What drove you to release music under different names?
The genesis of Anadûnê and The Owl Knight came from my love of the different flavors of dungeon synth. While I accepted that Elminster’s sound could change whenever I felt like it, I wanted to have a dedicated project for Dark Dungeon Music in the style of Mortiis as well as a more naive project recorded straight to cassette via the aux port of a boombox drawing direct lineage to the works of Myst from Lost Armor Records (one of two members of the scene that most of my stylistic choices can be connected to, the other being Wyrm of Serpent’s Sword Records). The other reason for wishing to split into several projects is that I had been inspired to record as much music as humanly possible based on the catalog of work by Serpent’s Sword Records, all recorded by one entity. In particular, Wyrm’s interview on the Midnight Ambiance podcast discussing how he had written 62 releases that year. It had never occurred to me that someone could interact with music making in more of a ritualistic sense (habitual creation) as opposed to milestone based approach (the 3-5 year album cycle). I also felt like it took the pressure off of me to get stuff perfect and allowed me to practice becoming proficient with the recording process itself, the true secret of my output. I also began to notice that the first musical idea is the one that I liked the most and so I leaned into trusting my gut on such matters.
- Anadûnê has clear leanings towards the lore of Lord of the Rings, and sometimes slight musical inspirations from Summoning (for example the track "Glaurung" from The Days of Our Forefathers). Would you ever introduce a bit of black metal in the otherwise wonderful soundscapes of this project?
I think that if I were to do so it would either be in the style of Summoning where guitar is an instrument not the instrument. Other projects I’ve seen do this in a way that I like is Arrival Of The Dragonlord era Valar and Impious Battlefields era Elffor. Likewise, I am not above adding vocals to this project, but I would probably be hesitant to do it if I didn’t feel like the song required it.
- Under the same name, you have an amazing split with another notable artist, Frostgard. How did this collaboration happen?
The split with Frostgard is a high water mark of my music career thus far for a number of reasons: of the most recent wave of dungeon synth artists, she is one of the few artists who still records dungeon synth with a spirit of darkness and mystery. Don’t get me wrong, plenty of other artists make compelling music, but hers is one of only a handful of recent projects that make me feel wonder like the first time I listened to Thangorodrim or Barbaric Frost. Likewise, I had been very impressed by her Valaquenta albums not only due to their sound palette, but also in the sense that she had clearly put a lot of time and effort into developing her aesthetic for her promo shots. I had sent her a message to tell her how much I enjoyed her material and she surprised me by letting me know that she was a fan of my work as well (I often have intense imposter syndrome and forget that people listen to and, god forbid, enjoy my stuff as well). We discussed the idea of doing a split together someday and she requested to have my side be under my Anadûnê project since we could do a Tolkien themed split. After that, she had gotten several deals to release music through Out Of Season records, my favorite of the large revival era labels. I mentioned to her how excited I was that she had landed something with them and that I had been working up the courage to submit something myself. She replied by telling me that she would submit our split to them, which she did. OoS was kind enough to agree to release it and I had something that I did not expect to achieve: a split with one of my favorite artists coming out on my favorite label.
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| Echoes from the Thousand Caves |
- There is a wide musical chasm between for example, Whispers of Umbar and DCCCVIII. What is your compositional process and how often you come up with new ideas?
There certainly is a wide gap between these two sounds and it largely stems from my interest in pursuing different emotions and different genres within my musical journey. Whispers Of Umbar was created for the times when I feel depressed and need to think through things as well as for when I’m reading something with difficult prose and can’t allow myself to be distracted by music that is too “in your face”. I discuss my recording process for this project a bit in a book I am writing, but besides some commonalities in things like creating drone layers with tons of effects and using the plugin Wires by Hainbach, the process changes each time. It’s music by any means necessary. As for DCCCVIII, I was inspired by the UK Drill scene that I had discovered around the time of the pandemic lockdowns and decided to learn how to make beats in order to challenge myself to make some music a bit more “fun” in nature as well as learning the skills you inevitably pick up whenever you try something new. I would encourage every new recording artist to learn how to make trap for two reasons: with it being such a popular genre, there are endless videos on the topic and it teaches how to build good recording habits due to the formulaic nature of it (it forces a systematic approach to recording: create 2-3 melody loops, add bass, add drums, add ear candy, add FX, arrange). I pretty much only come up with new ideas for these projects when the previous ones begin to annoy me, otherwise it’s just “head empty, just record” as a relaxing pastime.
- You've also meddled with raw black metal and lo-fi recordings, under more than one moniker. Which styles of metal do you prefer and what bands would you say resemble your projects in sound?
- If you were to pick five music records of any genre to listen to for the rest of your life, which ones would they be?
Alright, so with any of these desert island list scenarios, there’s a certain amount of picking something for public image, but honestly, I’d be the one that has to actually listen to the records in questions so fuck it, I’m going to pick what I want, guilty pleasures and all. I’d like to have some rap, so I’d pick Kendrick Lamar - Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City. While his album To Pimp A Butterfly is definitely more of an artistically important record, I just have a stronger connection to the former. Next, I’d want to have some punk since it was my first love so I’d probably go with the album Useless ID - Redemption. For black metal, I would probably narrowly pick the first Enthroned album, Prophecies Of Pagan Fire, over their sophomore album. Next, I would pick Wongraven - Fjelltronen, my absolute gold standard for dungeon synth bar none. My last pick would have to be Hawthorne Heights - If Only You Were Lonely because I need some sad music sometimes.
- J.R.R. Tolkien, Forgotten Realms, Nordic mythology... What else is an inspiration behind your music?
In general, a childlike sense of wonder and old 70s/80s fantasy novels as well as my love of history, particularly medieval/dark ages. On top of all of this would be my fondness for nature, with mountains and evergreen forests being my favorite.
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| The Curtain of Time, by Moss Keep |
- Moss Keep is one of my favorites from your universe, how was the experience to perform live at Northern Dungeon Skirmish this year?
Thank you for the kind words! Honestly, it was much the same as recording a release except that I was dressed up and the lights were off. All of Moss Keep is improvised, which makes it ideal for a live setting, since I have neither the time nor patience to play something like Elminster live through the use of backing tracks. My sister’s friends did my corpse paint and had a good laugh, which made the whole experience really fun. Perhaps the most fun thing about that evening was that I had pretty much full control on who was also on the bill, so I picked two of my favorite artists, Frostgard and Garadrak.
- You have also now created your own short run cassette label, Ithildin Tape Productions, mainly for releasing your own music. Are you thinking - in case it hasn't already been arranged - of including other artists too?
I do! I run it primarily as a blend of the label styles of Lost Armor Records and Serpents Sword Records. Namely, high output, all music by me, and limited runs so that I don’t have to babysit a ton of overhead in my ever shrinking dorm room. I will not be releasing the work of other artists because I cannot offer them enough of a cut to make it worth their while on top of not wanting to possibly mess up the art of someone I care about. Also, I simply don’t sell enough units for it to be a good decision for an artist. Moving 5-15 units out the door is great when it's something I recorded over a couple of days and is the 4th album released that month, but if an artist has toiled for years, it would be insulting for a label with as little pull as mine to release it.
- Do you prefer making your own physical copies of your material, or was it too complicated to collaborate with existing labels?
Not at all, that was done purely out of necessity as opposed to any difficulty with labels. Let’s look at the bare numbers for a moment. Let’s say there’s 10-15 medium to large labels operating within revival era dungeon synth and let’s also say that 8-10 of those were to accept an album that I submit to them, if I’m recording ~80 albums a year, that’s 8-10 release slots per label. That’s not fair to those labels that I’m eating up so much real estate, it’s not fair to other artists who have just as much right to those spots as me, and it also means that the turnaround for each album will be immense. In short, I do my own runs because I can have a turnaround for physical releases within days as opposed to weeks/months and it’s a considerably lower strain on the label infrastructure of the community. I love to work with other labels, but I usually default to assuming I’ll be releasing something myself unless labels seem particularly interested in working with one of my projects. Likewise, split albums have to be released elsewhere since due to the aforementioned rule of thumb I have about releasing other artists’ work.
- Tell me a bit more about how the two full length albums by Maeglin this year, were conceived. There is a definite second wave Norwegian black metal influence to both of them.
Certainly, I’ve been wanting to get more comfortable at making black metal this past year and figured that challenging myself to make a double album would give me significant time behind the wheel to figure out what the hell I was doing. It made my rhythm guitar playing decent enough to nail most things in a couple takes, but I’m still a long ways off from playing anything especially technical such as black thrash. I hadn’t figured out a way to scream without having my throat bleed or losing my voice (which happened during the recording of the Ambrogio release last fall) at that time and asked Wyrm of Erythrite Throne/Cefaris to take over on vocals, which he was kind enough to do. I like a lot of things about that record, but I have a hard time listening to it since I changed guitar tones too much and didn’t record bass on most tracks since I didn’t have access to one during most sessions. As for the most recent release, I finally figured out an effects chain that let me put harshness in my voice without having to scream (I have 4 roommates who have been kind enough to put up with the guitar playing, I don’t want to push my luck) as well as finally found a guitar tone that was harsh in a way that didn’t make me worried about contracting tinnitus. Solving both of these problems made it possible for me to just enjoy writing and also sped up the process immensely. I also found drum kit sounds and synth sounds that I didn’t hate like old ones I used which added to the fun aspect of recording this album. I find what often trips me up the most is knowing that something about a tone I am using for each instrument is wrong, but not knowing what it should be. You would be right in your assumption that they are 2nd wave black metal inspired, but instead of directly Norwegian, they are more influenced by the aftershocks of that scene in Finland and Australia respectively, through the projects of Satanic Warmaster and Drowning The Light.
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| Where the Light Does Not Reach |
- One could notice two different trends in dungeon synth / fantasy music. There are artists who put out material quite often, with multiple releases per year, and then there's artists who take their time and go album by album, once per one or two years, or even more rarely. Why do you think that's the case? Is it perfectionism, or stricter filters, or simply different amounts of creativity?
I’d imagine that it’s partly a standards thing, but truthfully I think that the higher output projects view music making as ritualistic/entertainment whereas the low output projects more likely view their albums as works of art or as someone would view each of their children, equal in love but distinct from each other.
- You drop some names in every album release on your Bandcamp, people that you dedicate the work or thank for their support. Would you like to give some more insight to who they are and how they influence you as a creator?
Absolutely, the first are my parents who have been incredibly supportive in my hobby, particularly my dad who gave me free reign to use any of his musical equipment because he knew I’d use it within an inch of its life and have some serious fun while doing so. The next is my girlfriend, Tori, who remains a constant light in my life. As a fellow nerd (that’s right, I’m dating a near mythical gamer girl) who loves books and music, she has always been very supportive of my compulsive need to create and also understands that I like to collect physical music. She has always been and will always be my hypewoman. Lastly, my late grandpa Rog, who always went by Bump, was my best friend growing up and taught me to feed my curiosity, to love books and history, to be able to be emotionally vulnerable, and spoiled me rotten. He died 3 years ago and life really hasn’t been the same since then. I love and miss that prankster.
- Which active dungeon synth artists would you like to collaborate with in the near future?
My pipe dream short list would include artists like Myst, Thangorodrim, Hugin (of Uruk Hai), and Ancient Iron. All of these artists make incredible music and I’d be honored to work with any of them.
- Thanks a lot for your time. I leave it to you to close the interview as you like.
Thank you so much for having me! I would like to quickly plug my label, Ithildin Tape Productions as well as promote the fact that I have been writing a book this past year of journal entries based on being a dungeon synth and black metal artist, running a tape label, and my creative process in general. It currently is longer than 200 pages and should be available sometime next year. If you have any interest in staying up to date on it, feel free to follow my bandcamp page, instagram, or facebook, all of which are under Ithildin Tape Production’s name. Thank you again, V.!
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