Droning pads, bright, shining leads, and simple, catchy loops weave together a symphony of mystical energy and auditory magic. Mystic Towers, a creation made by the legendary Adam Kalmbach (the man behind projects such as Jute Gyte, Abandoned Places, Erdstall, and many others), is a hugely important project from the beginning of the modern dungeon synth revival. Originally released in 2012 in purely digital formats, both Mystic Towers releases (Chapter 1: Inner Kingdom and Chapter 2: Caverns of Crystal) were recently remastered by Out of Season, one of the world’s largest dungeon synth record labels, and released on physical formats for the first time. I managed to get my hands on a special edition of both releases on tape, and was blown away by the sheer quality of the music.
Before I talk about the actual music, though, I think that I should explain a little about dungeon synth. It’s an underground genre that’s had a cult following since the 1990s, when it first emerged from the second wave of Norwegian black metal. 2WNBM often featured mellower, synth-laden tracks to begin, end, or break up the more intense sections of their albums, and that has stayed with the genre since then. However, in the 90s, some musicians began to create whole albums of these dark yet calm tracks, beginning with groups and artists such as Mortiis, The Dark Funeral, and Jim Kirkwood. People began to listen to these artists, and the genre began to gain traction. Unfortunately, the genre fell onto a backburner for some time during the 2000s, with fewer artists producing music and fewer fans discovering it. In the 2010s, dungeon synth began to experience a revival, with artists such as Thangorodrim, Jim Kirkwood (again), and Adam Kalmbach’s many projects once again came to the forefront. Since then, the dungeon synth scene has stayed strong, with more fans and artists than ever. The genre has begun to slowly spread out, as new subgenres have slowly started to appear, such as fantasy synth and Keller synth.
Mystic Towers in particular helped to kick off the fantasy synth movement, harkening back to ‘80s and ‘90s fantasy aesthetics, with its album covers featuring robed, bearded wizards poring over ancient tomes and magic swords. It also took a very strong influence from late ‘90s and early ‘00s DOS games, which it sought to emulate with its sound and artwork. Since then, fantasy synth has become quite prominent and one of my personal favorite genres, with incredible artists like Fogweaver, Quest Master, Fief, and Sequestered Keep becoming mainstays in my collection.
Mystic Towers is a project with 2 albums, each one about 40-50 minutes long. Each album features two songs, with length somewhere around 25 minutes. The songs themselves are long and slow, using repeated motifs and themes to craft a extended, slightly somber melody that’s barely detectable at times. Deep drones suffuse themselves throughout the pieces, and intense reverb covers each song, with every note ringing out for several seconds. Simple chord progressions are layered under simple melodies. The music, at its core, is meant to be ambient, like the soundtrack to a dungeon crawl in a classic Windows 95 RPG. Each song builds itself up and breaks itself back down dozens of times, ebbing and flowing, sometimes only a single instrument is playing low chords in front of a drone, and other times eight or nine synths and loops are layered on top of one another, creating a cascading feeling and drowning out the world around you, cocooning your mind in layers upon layers of drones, arpeggios, chords, and loops.
Both albums invoke that same feeling that old dark fantasy films like The Dark Crystal managed to capture, pulling you deeper into a doomed world where magic and mystery abound. The slowness of the music breathes life into it, and the focus on rhythms and chords over melody give it a coherence that’s hard to capture in longer pieces of music like this. The music is beautifully filled out, and feels complete even when only one or two instruments are holding a single chord. It’s unlike any other music I’ve heard- even later dungeon and fantasy synth can’t quite come close. I would say that Adam Kalmbach captured lighting in a bottle, but his other projects, such as Erdstall and Abandoned Places, manage to do similarly amazing things. Of course, they aren’t quite like Mystic Towers, but the underlying feeling of being drawn into some other world completely unlike our own remains.
The instruments themselves are also worth mentioning, because they sound so unique compared to other sounds I hear in dungeon synth. Rather than sounding like specially crafted synthetic instruments, the project sounds like it was written in a soundfont, like soundtracks for an old video game console. The instruments still sound like synths, but are slightly bitcrushed, like the soundfont of the Sega Genesis or the NES. This lends to the project’s feeling of nostalgia and its invocation of a time gone by, and I seriously don’t think that Mystic Towers would’ve been anywhere near as wonderful or influential as it is if the instruments didn’t sound exactly like they do. Adam Kalmbach is a genius when it comes to synthesis, as he has the skill to create not just whatever sound he likes, but a whole suite of unique instruments that somehow sound not just coherent, but like part of one single sound when played together, such that you can’t really imagine how the instrument would sound when removed from the whole. I think that this is best shown in the use of drones, which I’ve mentioned a lot but not really explained. The drones are softer, quieter tones that never stop throughout the whole of the piece. They don’t change note or key unless the song changes, and they eventually seem to fade into the background of the piece, similar to the drones on bagpipes or hurdy-gurdies. They can be hard to pick out from the other sounds, but they give the music so much depth. It’s extremely impressive, and something that I don’t hear in a lot of contemporary music. To me, the use of drones simply solidifies the mastery on display with Mystic Towers, and is just as expressive of Adam Kalmbach’s skill as anything else could be.
This is the part of a review where I would normally talk about my favorite songs on the album, but I feel like that’s kind of impossible to do here. The songs blend into one another like the movements of a classical composition, and if not for the few seconds of pause between songs, it would be impossible to tell where one ended and one began. Personally, I love this approach. Mystic Towers feels like one coherent piece- an arcane, minimalist symphony built from memories of some world long gone. It does feel inherently nostalgic to me for some reason, maybe because I grew up listening to some of the soundtracks that it’s based on. I think that’s what Adam Kalmbach was going for with this, trying to create some sort of melancholic, nostalgic piece of music that feels like looking into an ancient wizard’s crystal ball and seeing your life play out before you, warped slightly by the curved glass.
Mystic Towers is incredible. There’s really nothing more that I can say about it. The atmosphere, the composition, the sounds themselves, the intricacy of the instrumentation, the strange and beautiful music and the feelings that it invokes- it’s unlike anything else. If you want to start exploring new music, Mystic Towers and dungeon synth as a whole is truly incredible to look into. The beauty and expression of Mystic Towers is something that every musician hopes to capture their own version of. Very few can successfully do this, even fewer can do it consistently. Yet, somehow, Adam Kalmbach manages to make it seem effortless.
All things considered, Mystic Towers is simply something else.
Go give it a listen: https://mystictowers.bandcamp.com/music
