Re-appraising the ambient hut

Full text:

In 2021, born of the euphoria of lockdown boredom, my co-host on the Necropolis podcast Jason, aka Lonegoat from the necroclassical project Goatcraft, started a joke/parody/satire DS project he dubbed Garden Gnome,. The project was to be kept anonymous, with only a chosen few knowing Garden Gnome’s true identity. It rapidly spat out digital releases on Bandcamp, all named around gnome puns; ‘True Gnomewegian DS’, ‘Into the Infergnome’, ‘The Gnomer of the Beast’.

I offered a couple of Hate Meditations writeups for the first couple of releases. Given the fact that I was in on the joke, I struggled to lend the reviews my normal, sober style. Did I buy into the joke, and pretend Garden Gnome was some fascinating little project worthy of study? Or did I feign outrage at the blatant kitsch on display?

The stakes couldn’t be lower, so I went with the latter, directing my ire at the very concept of DS. This was music that could have frankly been composed by a machine for a cheap cartoon, feigning innocence yet cloaked in high-class irony. The essays riled up the intended crowd of terminally online Fort Geek residents and snooty coffeehouse synthers.

The reception to Garden Gnome itself, a mysterious, anonymous project appearing within the online DS community, was muted but positive. The music and presentation were just on the right side of believable to look like the genuine article.

Jason eventually revealed his identity and the fact that Garden Gnome was not a “serious” project. But this micro-genre has made a home for itself at the complex intersection of sincerity and satire. In the process it has become so porous as to be utterly impervious to the traditional Trojan Horse satire Garden Gnome traded in. Jason continues to release DS under the Garden Gnome name via Bandcamp, retaining the cutesy packaging and not so subtle winks to the audience, who follow on regardless, with each new EP racking up respectable listener stats by the standards of this small community.

I myself wasn’t done with DS either. I needed to know more. Had I given it a fair shake? Had I missed something? How can a genre retain such an ambiguous relationship to its own legitimacy yet endure for so long?

Nurtured under the stewardship of black metal’s geekier wing, it now serves as a town square for D&D players, metalheads seeking a rest stop, refugees of the mid-2000s hipster boom, and curious members of various electronica and ambient scenes.

Since 2021, I have listened to a lot of DS, possibly too much. In part it serves as an answer to the lo-fi hip hop my wife plays after a stressful day, in part I lurked on the edges of the community, reading the conceptual material artists put out with their releases, purchasing some cassettes, and trying to review the more substantial works I come across with the same rigour I attempt to apply to metal albums. 

What follows is an account of my learnings, my reason for fixing my attention here for so long, and why I believe DS contains the kernel for a radical form of music fandom I have dubbed “activist listening” (for a more direct potted history of the genre, I recommend checking out Pseidiom’s long introduction to DS, which gives a great summary of how the genre has grown since Mortiis).

I have broken this account down into sections. First looking at the raw musical materials, I argue that it is impossible to take these in isolation because they lack any common relationship to a body of music theory that defines the genre’s orthodoxy. Second I dissect the culture itself. Who listens to DS, and how does the music exaggerate or alleviate the postmodern anxieties shared by this demographic?

I then look to how DS plays with and resituates one of the defining characteristics of 21^st Century Western culture, the nostalgia complex. This dovetails into a look at the requisite material conditions required for a postmodern genre like DS to exist, and how it digests the inherent contradictions this entails, before finally trying to once again reformulate and answer the question: is DS good? 

Musical features

In essence, DS is black metal untethered from any sense of realism, rationalism, or brute purpose. To put it another way, untethered from “adulthood”. I say adulthood and not maturity to emphasise that there is real value in us periodically compartmentalising the ceaseless struggles of everyday life in order to indulge in idol fantasy.

Having sprouted from an intersection of black metal, video game music, fantasy film scores, and various artefacts of folklore, the DS tag has grown to encompass music well beyond “medieval fantasy ambient”. Essentially being applied to any form of explicitly themed minimalist ambient music; comfy synth, dino synth, desert synth, goblin synth. Pick a theme and prefix it with “synth” and it probably falls within the scope of our enquiry.

Binding this loose conglomerate together is the genre’s impeccable DIY credentials. The vast majority of releases are not written or performed on instruments. It takes place almost entirely in the realm of software, the bar of entry in terms of musical ability blocks no one. Releases that are perhaps too clever with music theory, compositional techniques, or ability, are, if anything, frowned upon.

One in sense then, DS is just another iteration of music caught between the push and pull of impenetrable esoterica and the simple democratisation of folk or punk, which in turn is constantly under pressure to limit itself in order to retain accessibility. But further, for DS, one does not need to know a single chord or even own an instrument. And like many forms of music from the unwashed masses that are sometimes unaware that there’s even an orthodoxy they are subverting, this can lead it up some interesting avenues.

To put it bluntly, traditional music is composed on instruments, before a composition can then go through the process of sharpening the timbre, applying effects, perfecting the synth tones, producing, mixing and mastering. In other words, the aesthetic seasoning is applied after the process of writing, to a ready baked composition.

This process is becoming a rarity in contemporary music. Software and home studio setups are such that one can write and record an entire album without ever having to hit a note. As digital recording software grows more sophisticated, the home user has a limitless array of synth patches and effects at their disposal.

DS was a forerunner to this process. It takes the reversal of how music can be constructed to its logical conclusion. Tone and timbre are treated as starting point, given total mastery over the shape of a composition. Often (but not always) written by someone with only rudimentary knowledge of music theory and technical knowhow. It is perhaps ironic then, that the body of classic DS albums – in insofar as DS can be said to have a canon – are predominantly crafted from synthetic versions of acoustic instruments, from strings and harps, to pianos and flutes. Music software has undermined the old order, negating the need for any engagement with music theory or the need to learn an instrument. DS both fully embraces this, with artists given license to write and record without ever hitting a note, yet it explicitly attempts to mimic the qualities of highly traditional musical ensembles.   

More recently, DS has moved into the abstract territory of explicitly “synth” music, crafting albums from timbres that acoustic instruments could never reproduce. Often, one can almost hear the decision to capitalise on a particular synth patch if it works well for a certain hook, as if totally beholden to the capabilities of the tech at hand with little conscious input from the user themselves. This allows dungeon synthers to balance the near limitless possibilities of the tech in front of them with the need to adhere to the strictly DIY (and generally historically minded) aesthetic of the genre. A dearth of substance leaves room for gentle tonal poems to air out, making a virtue out of the inherent minimalism.

Whilst many professional musicians have made a strong case in defence of music theory whilst acknowledging that the hierarchy of musical academia is more often a block to the democratisation of creativity, (one must know the rules in order to break them), there is something revolutionary going within DS’s approach. It goes completely against contemporary music’s increasingly tired deification of artistry. As the music in neighbouring genres – particularly metal – grows ever more complex and technical, DS’s choice to compose music by curating pre-existing tones and effects, mediated by software, as opposed to acquiring technical mastery of an instrument, looks like an act of defiance.  

This poses some important questions for not only how DS is defined, but whether we should consider it “sincere” music. Is the disregard for music theory a defining feature of the genre, to the point where if a DS album attains a level of complexity (compositionally, in arrangement, production, and performance), is it still considered DS? Or does it move into the broader and “legitimate” world of ambient music? Jason is a classically trained pianist who deliberately limited his ability and knowledge of composition in order to make Garden Gnome look convincing. His other “serious” project Goatcraft occupies the same territory of dark, mystical ambient-cum-neoclassical, but the virtuosity and density of Goatcraft’s music places it worlds away from anything close to dungeon synth. Is it the complexity alone that distinguishes it? Further, is the fact that DS leans so heavily on extra musical features to give it substance a strength? Or is this a barrier to it ever being taken seriously?

Culture

Whether it’s basic chiptune pieces or rich orchestration worthy of a film score, underlying most DS is the desire for escapism. It’s worth unpacking this idea further, because DS’s relationship to escapism is riddled with paradox. As an arm of geek culture, DS can be read as a vast act of world building. But the music propping up these fantasy quests is extremely (and deliberately) limiting, obvious, unsubtle. Is it possible to recast this self-limitation as an act of defiance?

In a world of “takes”, of cynicism, of the constant need to engage in a job, in the latest mindfulness trend, in “issues”, in this environment the unapologetic naivety of DS could look like protest music. It poses a unique quandary for anyone wishing to champion the virtues of “engagement”. It challenges us to consciously turn away from the abrasive demands of life, to switch off and indulge in the fantasy, in an inner need to convince ourselves that maybe everything will be alright.

Despite the fact that many albums sound like a series of soothing vignettes scored for a kid’s TV show, there is an underlying acknowledgement that the fantasy always ends. “Reality”, with its nebulous package of non-negotiable demands, always drags us back. Further, the music is composed entirely through synthetic means, yet is desirous of a return to an age before mass production, before access to the raw materials required for this form of creative process was even possible, desirous of a world without the soul destroying jobs required to create the very consumer goods necessary for the creation and exchange of digital music.

DS is hardly unique in this regard. But it is perhaps uniquely situated to point out the underlying tragedy of innocence. It does this through a process I’ve dubbed reflexive naivety (borrowed from Keith Kahn-Harris’s reflexive anti-reflexivity description of extreme metal).

Look at the “geek” concept for example. However we understand the term today, IT knowhow probably features strongly. Geeks have always been early adopters of new technological and scientific developments. Videos games are a case in point. Evolving in tandem with the internet arriving in every home and the background chat of online forums in the early 90s, self-identifying geeks combined a love of new tech with fantasy world-building escapism. A closed and esoteric craft that allowed them access to secret knowledge shut off from the mainstream.

Flash forward to the 2020s and a very different picture emerges. Geek culture is all but synonymous with pop culture, or at least a significant arm of it. Fantasy and sci-fi dominates film and TV and a good portion of mainstream discourse. IT is no longer some arcane body of knowledge under the exclusive remit of a pasty monastic order. The lifestyle of ensconcing oneself off from society in order to gain cryptic tech wisdom is a thing of the past, with the field now being monopolised by corporations owned by jock billionaires and the tech-bros of Silicon Valley.

This creates an internal tension at the heart of DS. Like many formally geeky subgenres, DS has a siege mentality. Perceived outsiders try to appropriate its novelty. Despite the well documented toxicity this tends to engender, the hipsterisation of geekdom warrants scrutiny. There are geeks by choice and there are geeks by necessity. Coffeehouse synthers are certainly the former. They are also the branch of DS most likely to engage in and stoke the kind of three dimensional postmodernist play that surrounded Garden Gnome. Am I in on the joke? Is there a joke? Where’s the punchline?

To be truly weird is to have no other choice. Purest DS is not just weird but charmingly naïve, free of the postmodern bells and whistles clogging up much of the contemporary style. But it is perhaps more complicated than a simple “geek synth: good, hipster synth: bad” binary. Let’s take another look at the sandbox of geekdom to unpack this further.

One reading of the Tolkienist branch of fantasy that evolved from 1950s onwards is precisely as a form of postmodernist play, with a particular interest in the myths and legends populating pre-Christian Northern Europe, repurposing them in new and novel ways. Under this reading, explicitly “geeky” DS looks like a form of reflexive naivety. The artist and listener are aware of the obvious fact that the fantasy worlds they are building are fabricated, professing no realism, living on borrowed imagery.

But the mindset of DS can accommodate this tension because what matters first and foremast is the expression of yearning. The community knows that the vibrant world building of high fantasy is concocted entirely from its imaginations. Through a shared process of interpretation and negotiation, the community attributes meaning to the aesthetics and musical features.

This recasts DS as a postmodern eulogy for pre-Christian folklore and theology. But the boundless potential for lore renewal and the limitless space offered by its digital environment allows it to contain and deal with such a weighty conceptual legacy without crumbling under its own contradictions. It is therefore so much more than a simple expression of the melancholia of naivety.

Nostalgia

The retro trend has arguably defined 21^st Century pop culture. From film to music to fashion to homeware. We live in the epoch of the absence of epoch. DS is a unique instance of this because it takes the condition of living in an epoch without an epoch to its logical conclusion. As the final decades of the last epoch, that of modernity, what exactly is it that we miss about the 70s, 80s, or 90s? Do we miss being young? Not having a job and bills to worry about? Do we miss the cultural landscape? Or, given civilisation’s acceleration toward catastrophe, do we just want to check out of the contemporary moment entirely? As the very idea of epoch collapses, what compels us to ensconce ourselves in the aesthetics of memory?

By tapping into the detritus of fairy stories, fantasy and sci-fi, video games et al., DS serves as an outlet for our desire to return to youth. In one way the genre is a conceptually dense attempt at wish fulfilment. But rather than an expression of a desire for the return of an epoch, a simple yearning for a time when your days floated by under hours of responsibility free D&D, DS is more a desire for civilisation to return to some prelapsarian utopia. However fabricated this pre-modern epoch might be, it speaks of a desire to re-establish our sense of wonder. A time when much of the world remained mysterious, its physical mechanics influenced by spell and ritual, and personal action was determined by clear ideas of right and wrong.

DS is the process of post rational humanity reacquainting itself with an imagined form of the pre-rational. A glossy, idealised view of human experience before the age of discovery and enlightenment, when the figments of myth and legend held as much sway over people’s lives as the algorithms and big data sets currently hold over our own.

Authenticity, faithfulness to any source material, or historical accuracy, all are far from the point. As society grows more incomprehensible, unjust, destructive, and recklessly hedonistic in its nihilism, the regressive appeal of DS’s reflexive naivety is not hard to understand.  

Material context (what’s actually happening here?)

Do you ever wonder what it would actually be like to exist in the worlds depicted on DS and black metal albums covers? Artworks that speak of high adventure, mysticism, the binary moral codes of battle and the obscurantist esoterica of mysterious pantheons. The artworks – even those of a violent or threatening aesthetic – beckon us in.

The heavy industry, mass production, global supply chains, power grids, and raw materials required to create a genre like DS stand at odds with the fragile ecosystems implied by its aesthetic. There is an inherent tragedy in expressing this deep yearning, this wistful desire to be swept away into these worlds through technologies and means of distribution, the very existence of which implies the impossibility of such tranquil, solitary, unspoiled scenes of fantasy, adventure, and mysticism. The mundanity of modernism was a prerequisite for the existence of the computer and synthesiser, yet through this we articulate our desire to be free of this totalitarian plastic boredom.  

The fantasy genre harnesses the technology of industrialisation – whether this be print media, computer graphics, digital recording techniques, or the internet’s infrastructure – to explore and articulate a vision of pre-industrial humanity. Importantly, the vision expressed by advocates of high fantasy are conscious of, but untroubled by, what the reality was for the majority of people living in an age that lacked basic healthcare and civil liberties. This is reflexive naivety in action.

But this is not simply a case of ignoring internal contradictions. Baked within its very infrastructure is a hugely radical approach to the production and consumption of culture. Beyond the aesthetic and thematic material littering DS albums, the genre structures itself akin to a pre-industrial agrarian community.

DS is fervently decentralised, egalitarian. It eschews the rigid hierarchies and halls-of-fame that define its larger neighbouring communities. It is negotiated almost entirely online, through limited cassette runs, digital only releases, artistic anonymity, most members of the community have projects of their own, leaving little room for the mindless deification of rockstar personas and all the toxicity that comes with that territory.  

Is it good?

From churlish dismissal, to idol curiosity, to frank rumination, my thoughts have obviously evolved since writing “How I learned to stop worrying and love DS”. But despite this dissection, there is still the “why?” of it all to unpack.

If we are to deduce an “ought”, from all the factual talk of what “is”, it could be tied together under five key factors we have identified within DS:

1. The low bar of entry on a technical level
2. anonymity
3. The fleeting attitude to individual works thanks to the digital or cassette format
4. The decentralised, non-hierarchical structure
5. Clustering the music by vibe, colour, or conceptual theme rather than specific sets of artists that in turn get deified.

These features make DS a potential hotbed of radical thought (and I mean that sincerely).

Capitalism as an ideology sustains itself by apportioning off elements of society and defining them as “private property”. From land and the natural resources within it, to modes of production and technology, but also to abstract ideas, to “intellectual property”.

Capitalist ideologues have always been only too happy to reinforce the concept of art as an elitist, and therefore uniquely valuable (read profitable) commodity. Everything from the rise of European secular classical music in the 18th Century, to the enshrinement of copyright law in the UK under the Statute of Anne in 1709, to the Romantic deification of creatives as uniquely gifted people whose art was characterised as an act of sheer individualist will, all were solidified with the rise of modern capitalism and the legal formalisation of intellectual property.

The 21st Century has seen this orthodoxy shaken to its very core. The segregation of the auteur, the maestro, the virtuoso, over there on the stage, and we, the audience, looking on, this is a very recent phenomenon, and one that appears to be collapsing with the rapid transformation of contemporary music into a participation sport.  But the artists (artisans?) themselves remain  stuck on the bottom rung of the ladder in terms of fair recompense for their work, especially when compared to the managers of digital infrastructure and distribution.

So it’s probably far too early to declare the end of artistic ownership and the full democratisation of the creative sphere.

There is still a significant gulf between fan and artist maintained by the managers of capital within the creative industries, whether this be a label boss, PR firm, or social media algorithm. But there is little doubt that this gulf is narrowing, making it all the more necessary for us to take another look at what this means for the act of consuming art, or indeed, artistic ownership itself.

DS is a shining example of a community and a form of music that anyone is welcome to engage in. The fact that this is non-musician’s music negates the need to dissect every atom of each release with a forensic critique. They are moments in time, shared and distributed within the community, and let go of just as quickly. There are some legacy releases that remain revered. But there is nothing like the deranged idolisation of tired geriatrics that we see in metal and rock. The churn of new works is high, encouraging greater back and forth between creator and audience.

A happy side effect of this is the willingness of fans – who will likely have dungeon synth projects of their own – to part with their cash to support artists they like. Different variants of dungeon synth branch off depending on an individual’s interests, taking on specific traits based on their influences in much the same way that traditional folk songs often split into several different versions across different groups of people.

Given all that however, it’s still fairly obvious that even if the notoriously unjust financial models of streaming services were fixed, this would not result in a mirror image of the pre-modern folkways described above. For one thing, the recorded work is still considered a definitive version, therefore falling under the legal and financial jurisdiction of the creator. DS, like any community with radical potential, is still beholden to the realities of the macro structures that surrounds it. Equally, many – myself included – prefer to mix in more…shall we say “composed and performed” music into their listening schedule, music that requires far more dedication in time, practice, and equipment to produce, thus skewing the ratio of fan to musician back to its original, 20^th Century structure.

But no one can deny that even within more “musical” genres these structures are shifting. DS plots a possible route for we as listeners to prepare for this shift by understanding the increasing power we now wield. By this I mean that we need to change our understanding of what we think artists owe us, and by extension re-examine audience responsibilities toward the artistic process, and how art is understood and used in the public realm. To put it another way, we should make consumption itself an act of creation. We play a realy part in how art is received and understood, which in themselves are part of the creative purpose.

Micro-genres with a high creator to listener ratio such as DS are already undertaking this process.