18/11/2024

 New project: WRAITHSPIRE

 

 

01/07/2024

WEBSITE UPDATES:

Sections:

    -MY WORKS
    -MIGUEL'S PICKS

 

27/06/2024

WEBSITE UPDATES:



 

05/06/2024


 

A new romanticism? Yeah, sure... but, why not?
 

Every three months, I come across some new technological advancement that makes me think, "this will change everything." What will happen when kids who are 9 or 10 today are 19 or 20? Will they live at an even faster and more fragmented pace than today? Or maybe they'll start seeing all this as something stupid their parents did?. If it's already difficult to find reliable information on the internet today, I can only imagine that in ten years it will be completely absurd. It wouldn't be strange to see a backlash against this. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but if we think about something like TikTok, whose sole purpose is to generate dopamine and distraction, it can't go much further than that. They can keep beating a dead horse, but for how long? When the dopamine circuit is exhausted and it's impossible to continue with that model, other platforms will inevitably emerge. Ted Gioia talks about a new romanticism, which seems overly optimistic to me but not at all far-fetched.

An example of this is Dungeon Synth. Dungeon Synth is a genre that emerged in the 90s and comes from Black Metal, but it focuses on the use of synthesizers, monotonous rhythms, medieval and dark aesthetics, and above all, it places a great emphasis on human craftmanship. My label Rusty Pilgrim, among other things, includes some Dungeon Synth projects, but also a lot of Dark Ambient, and I'm not too much of a purist, as I have projects that combine, for example, Dungeon Synth with folklore from my region (Argentinian Patagonia), so I feel capable of observing the scene from the outside.

In the largest Dungeon Synth group on Facebook, AI content is banned. If your album cover is handmade and even ugly, it has much, much more value than if you have a cover made with AI. The format in which the music is shared is the cassette. I don't think choosing the cassette as the primary format for the genre is solely driven by nostalgia. Maybe we can't label it as 'nostalgia' to desire enjoying a low-cost format that was taken from us and is part of the musical experience. Maybe music deserves to be appreciated outside of a screen. Maybe there are people who find the experience of listening to a real album, much more enriching than seeing it as just another post on the internet that gets lost in a sea of irrelevance.

 

 

I don't think there's currently any other musical genre in the world that tries so hard to distance itself from algorithmic, hyper-technological reality as Dungeon Synth. And there's nothing more romantic than that. The question is whether the resurgence of Dungeon Synth is just another passing trend (although it never really became a trend like Vaporwave) or if it's one of the first signs of something more. Of course, I hope it's the latter. Nothing will be as funny as watching the big tech leaders trying to offer something real to people.

 

 
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