I’ve been listening to a good lot of dungeon synth music recently, so as synchronicity is high on my life path at the moment (ludicrously so) it wasn’t much of a surprise when this dropped into the review lists. So, well, I just kind of bowed to it and took it on. Besides I have a deep attraction to this strangest of relatives of the world of black metal all the way back to the first Mortiis album, and enjoying using it as background music to a tabletop RPG I was running. But outside of that I’ve always found something deeply evocative about good dungeon synth; it’s like browsing in an old bookshop and coming across a dusty, yellowed pulp fantasy paperback and knowing that it’s just going to pull you straight in.

This is Örnatorpet’s seventh full length and I gather a translation of the title is ‘always an outlander, forever distant’. From the opening, the distant sound of spoken word as the keyboards and timpani drums invoke a world this is very much rooted in traditional dungeon synth. By this I mean that it is slowly built on relatively simple melodic repetitions that always have that very much played live in a recording studio feel as opposed to painstakingly built and layered on a computer. It is a style that personally I love; some people see it as somehow too basic and even amateurish but as always the key is in the compositions. Three chords can make the greatest rock and roll song in the world, the perfect six note melody can breathe life into a world of the composer’s own creation.

Örnatorpet bring a distinctly cosmic sound to this album. The sound is crystalline and very much shrouded in darkness. It echoes, as though hiding in caves as something, some other stalks an empty dying world. Voices intrude here and there, though the words are indecipherable so the feeling of being a hidden observer somehow persists. There are passages that evoke beauty, that delicate crystalline sound like some light source reflecting from formations that might be natural or simply of a source unknown. But for all this they bring a definite sense of foreboding to the overall feel of this album.

This is the joy of ambient music such as this; if it reaches you, touches your imagination it should allow your own imagination to flower and take you on the journey they lay out. Now I am not going to say that Evigt Främmande, Evigt Fjärran is changing the landscape of dungeon synth. It is what it is; a good example of the genre that does what it should do. It evokes and it captivates and allows your mind to drift through its world for its time.

There are far, far worse places to be. And Örnatorpet have allowed me to escape the mundane world into theirs.

Not a bad way to relax is it?

(7/10 Gizmo)

https://www.facebook.com/ornatorpet

https://ornatorpet.bandcamp.com/album/evigt-fr-mmande-evigt-fj-rran