And anti-Nazi too.
Awhile back, I discovered dungeon synth and thought it was super-cool. The Italian punk label HDK put out cool tapes (Kobold, Gnoll, Basic Dungeon), and I thought, “Hey! This is fun RPG music I can listen to and get inspired!”
Then the YouTube algorithm led me to other bands: Fief, Thangorodrim, Elador, Quest Master, Midnight Odyssey. I was digging all this new, evocative music.
But just the other day I stumbled (whilst looking up RPG stuff) onto a Reddit thread where people were talking about the Neo-Nazi, Neo-fascist dungeon synth scene and I was like, “Whoa! What?!” and started feeling all icky and gross because what if I had been listening to some disgusting fascist crap?
So now I am trying to research every album that popped up on YouTube and finding very little information about most of these bands. From what I can tell Fief and Thangorodrim are anti-fascist. And the stuff from HDK seems like leftist/anarchist; no Nazi stuff there, from what I can tell.
But I don’t feel safe listening to this genre anymore. It’s hard to find info about a lot of these bands, and I don’t want to listen to anything even remotely connected with racist or fascist ideology. I think HDK is still okay, especially considering they are more punk/diy/arthouse and seem to be coming at dungeon synth from the left. But it’s incredibly frustrating and upsetting that what seems like an innocuous subgenre of electronic music is very much attached to horrific Nazi stuff.
So just an explicit announcement: this blog is anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-Nazi, anti-white supremacy. From now on, I will probably leave off listening to most dungeon synth and just groove to old soundtracks from 80s movies.
