Mortiis - Født Til Å Herske
Original release by Malicious Records, 1994 - This US version by Dark Dungeon Music, 1997



The debut solo album from Mortiis. Not at all what I was expecting when I first picked this up 20 years ago after his previous gig as the bass player for the mighty Emperor. Instead of raging black metal, we get this nicely done album of droning, ambient dungeon synth.

Note that the previous releases from Germany and Sweden on Malicious Records had different cover art than this. The original art is displayed on the video below. I much prefer the US cover on this particular release.

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Gordon Rekcikssa
Mortiis - Født Til Å Herske

Haven't thought about Mortiis in awhile, probably haven't heard any of his stuff in years. I never really got into his sound, but I think I had a couple tracks on an old CMI comp. I guess "dungeon synth" is it's own subgenre these days too, with people heavily inspired by those old tracks he made.

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LionsMouth

Haven't thought about Mortiis in awhile, probably haven't heard any of his stuff in years.

To be perfectly honest, I had forgotten all about this album. I was poking around in a closet at home and found ton of CDs I had stored in boxes and forgotten about. Most of the stuff I've been posting lately is from those boxes.

Yeah, I guess dungeon synth is a thing these days. I listen to some here and there, but I really have to be in the mood for it. I think it's cool, though, that people seem to be getting turned on to this stuff a whole generation later.

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Halftribe - Daydreams in Low Fidelity



This came up in my Bandcamp feed a few times so I decided to check it out. It sounds equally influenced by dub techno as the microsound/glitch stuff, but a lot of beats have been stripped back significantly. Need more listens to form a solid opinion, but I'm liking this so far.

Bandcamp Page

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Clay Rendering - Fires That Cleanse
Gods Of Tundra, 2016



Clay Rendering is the project of Mike and Tara Connelly. They have been involved with too many projects to list, but a few recognizable names like Hair Police, Wolf Eyes, and The Haunting should give you an idea of what to expect.

They should, but they don't.

With each release under the Clay Rendering name, they have drifted further and further from the noisy outsider art you may expect and closer to pure electronic ambient music. This EP finds some truly beautiful moments of blissful keyboard lines and synth drums combining with Tara Connelly's floating vocals to create surprising new soundscapes. There are still a few instances of that thin, blackened guitar that wouldn't sound out of place on an early Enslaved album hanging around, but they are used sparsely and effectively for pure atmosphere rather than experimental dissonance. This is a great record, and well worth checking out.

No videos or sound clips to be found for anything from this release, but I did find one for a show they performed late last summer in Glendale, California that gives a rough idea of where they're coming from in a live setting, but it doesn't really showcase those ambient textures I was taking about above.





Discogs - Clay Rendering

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