KALLE WYRSCH — ZUM VERSCHWINDEN GEBRACHT

Sounding like Sir Arthur from Ghosts 'n Goblins has exchanged slaying monsters for a lovely car ride along an open stretch of Autobahn, 'Zum Verschwinden gebracht' is the new single from dungeon synth-aligned musicmaker Kalle Wyrsch.

Atypically for the genre, the artwork features a contemporary cemetery instead of a fantasy graveyard — rightly so, being the first single from a new project by Wyrsch exploring "aesthetic concepts behind the architecture of the dead, strange customs and trivial folklore of burial rites and the liminality of graveyards".

Bass plays a propulsive octave groove while clipped drum machine percussion keeps time, giving a distinct Neue Deutsche Welle feel to this morsel of music. While this provides the vehicle for the music, the melodies that are conveyed along with it retain a sense of adventure still, muted chiptune-adjacent wanderings that evoke small doses of wonder and melancholy all at once. Bookending the piece, birdsong: fragile reality between far-flung, funereal thoughts.

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• 🔔 'Zum Verschwinden gebracht' (translating roughly to 'made to disappear') is taken from the forthcoming album Der letzte Garten & Das erste Geheimnis. Promising a "documentary-like approach to the dungeon synth genre", it is a split between Kalle Wyrsch and Topograph (Thomas Helm). It's out 9th September.

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☟ Kalle Wyrsch Internet Presence ☟
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VARIOUS ARTISTS — EPHEMERAL & FLEETING - MODULAR MUSIC OF JAPAN

In a digital world of AI and algorithms, analogue electronic music is as human as it gets. Through it we see human chaos, in the form of whim and curiosity, erupting in the midst of circuitry and order.

Any given modular setup is tangled with any number of wires, more and more wires connecting to various other boxes and controllers with buttons and dials and switches. In a sea of perfect glassy screens and haptic feedback, of code that does the heavy lifting, these physical objects are almost as anachronous as typewriters.

Such analogue antiquity is at the heart of Ephemeral & Fleeting - Modular Music of Japan, a new compilation album that arrives to us from Tokyo-based ato.archives ("an archive and a label"). Curated by Tokyoite and ambient producer Yumi Iwaki, the album encapsulates this duality of chaos and order: the ordered circuitry of analogue objects and the ordered mathematics of music and its rhythms、 versus the chaos of creativity and the random results that form through careful manipulation of modular synths.

As such, Ephemeral & Fleeting is an album of two halves, fittingly separated by Straytone (who also runs the label Obscure Sound Research) and their two-sided bass-heavy track 'Χάος Order Chaos'. Brooding and baleful, it begins quietly with insectoid chirrupings, which develops into a creeping flood of noise, whooshing like a stormy sea; an intense series of chords around halfway signals a lift-off into the sky — a cosmic orchestra tuning up before a symphony. Distorted feedback-esque melodies play us out with a noise-adjacent lament, sub-bass pulsing like a distant star. It is the album's pivotal point, before which we have (relative) order and lightness, and after which chaos plays out in darker tracks.

It's followed up with two contrasting tracks: 'exhale' by Chie Otomi, which is this awakening within the void – sparse and meandering, Kenichi Takagi's track, 'SBERM', which with juddering analogue thunder, balances rhythmic clattering order with experimental clouds of chaos, glimmering synths and waves of noise coinciding. Think sun gleaming behind mutating grim-grey clouds.

Two other tracks bear have this opposing relationship, in this instance appearing to mirror each other as a kind of pre- and post-track-five version of the other. 'Coalescence' by Endurance (Nara-based musicmaker Joshua Stefane) is expansive and cold, with icy electronic tricklings like the thawing of some giant, ancient bio-mechanical machine.

Then that same frigid atmosphere arises again with 'mete' by tatata5 (part of the label/collective Hasshiki), except by this time whatever was thawed in Endurance's track is well and truly alive, synths a solid chime yet fluid at the same time, distant howls and hoots as if heard within frosty burrows that tunnel like angular veins through a gargantuan living entity.

Order can be seen represented in 'A Gentle Feeling', the compilation opener by Yu Ogu. Feeling akin to the hirajōshi koto tuning, the guitar arpeggio forms a comfortable counterpoint with wandering high-register melodies. It is perhaps the most "conventional" of the tracks on Ephemeral & Fleeting.

Elsewhere, and for much of this exploration of the modular music of Japan, we hear the disarray of anlogue sounds arrange themselves into order — either through audio trickery or else via human intervention. For example, there is the seemingly random pattern of percussion and shifting sounds of 'Sound of uncertainty #001', but Jun H.'s track melds these into a legible beat, a complicated polyrhythm of glitching intricacies that form themselves into an illusory groove. Again, the track has a "partner" in the form of 'chronofracture' by analogue veteran HATAKEN: a sci-fi collage of disparate beats and propulsive rattlings.

Compilation curator Yumi Iwaki also plays with these percolating percussive sounds. In her track 'Styx Drift' they're like a colony of microscopic pebbles pulled along by some heavenly version of the track's namesake river. Its softness is a satisfying juxtaposition to Straytone's exploration of chaos.

But in the swirl of spells cast through these electronic devices, these wires and chips, are the humans who wield this modern magic. This is perhaps most obvious on compilation closer 'Fable of the Transient Soil', Chihei Hatakeyama's electronic tone poem on the theme of flux.

As it begins, we hear Hatakeyama, the human at work, hands moving, switching, turning dials, until around the two-minute mark, when it begins to sound as though we tuned in to an interdimensional frequency. It moves on, soaked in reverb that appears infinite but with a raw intimacy of something close at hand, in the same room.

It's a fitting finale to the harmony that has been struck throughout the compilation — the harmony between chaos and order, that is. Whether the resulting sound is classed as ambient music, or if it can be neatly filed away under "glitch" or the catch-all of experimental, Ephemeral & Fleeting has showcased a precarious, precious balance between modular synths and the mortal minds that use them.

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• 🔔 You may purchase Ephemeral & Fleeting - Modular Music of Japan over on Bandcamp, either digitally or on cassette tape.
• 🔔 The album release comes with an annoucmenet of the festival Ambient / Week (4-10th May), put on by "festival platform" MIMINOIMI. Several artists featured on this compilation will also make appearances, including Chihei Hatakeyama and tatata5, the latter of whom will be presenting her own event series within the festival, titled blue moment.

  The lineup includes Inoyama Land, Lawrence English, Masayoshi Fujita, Shuta Hiraki, Tatsuro Murakami, Toshi Tsuchitori, among others. For more information see the MIMINOIMI site and also this Resident Advisor page.

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☟ Yu Ogu Internet Presence ☟
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☟ Jun H. Internet Presence ☟
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☟ Endurance Internet Presence ☟
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☟ Yumi Iwaki Internet Presence ☟
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☟ Straytone Internet Presence ☟
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☟ Chie Otomi Internet Presence ☟
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☟ Kenichi Takagi Internet Presence ☟
⚘ discogs ⚘

☟ HATAKEN Internet Presence ☟
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☟ tatata5 Internet Presence ☟
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IRL — QUEST MASTER (SUPPORT ARCANE OUBLIETTE, PORTCULLIS) AT KOLA, PORTSMOUTH ⚔️ 5/4/26

BY ALEX GIBSON
CONTRIBUTING WRITER

VENUE: KOLA, PORTSMOUTH, UK
DATE: 5/04/2026
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALEX GIBSON

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Beneath clinking glasses and moody electric candle-lights, wizard hats and Renaissance dresses sway to the descending Korg staccatos of ARCANE OUBLIETTE. This magician, hunched over his synthesizer in resplendent red robes, transforms this lively Portsmouth dungeon into a glittering, mesmerising tavern.

Attendees chatter in low, excited voices, bobbing and teetering as Arcane Oubliette enchants the room, one wavering sawtooth chord at a time. Mellow arpeggios trickle up and down against ambient blasts of synthesizer organs. It is a curious blending of medieval ruins and twentieth century videogame OSTs, simultaneously comfortingly nostalgic and daringly unfamiliar — the halcyon days of long summers, fantasy RPGs, and make-believe. He beckons us to join him on this adventure.

Scrying with synth: Arcane Oubliette takes to the stage

From time to time, this dungeon master triumphantly raises Easter eggs above his head. The sword in the stone parallel is not lost on this crowd, who cheer in excitement each time an egg is raised. For a lot of attendees, Arcane Oubliette is their introduction to the vast, sprawling world of dungeon synth. And what better introduction than one which hurls Easter chocolates across an ecstatic crowd, their arms up in cheer, their fingers splayed.

PORTCULLIS, a one-man fellowship of keyboards, guitar synthesizers, and drums, usurps Arcane Oubliette to draw us further into the mysticism of fantasy synth. As Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 Lord of the Rings animation projects onto the backdrop, Portcullis leads the audience in chants and cheers, bellowing a ‘HEY!’ into the crowd, who – their voices canyon-deep and their fists tightly clenched – reply with a ‘HO!’. The audience might as well be a brotherhood of dwarves egressing their subterranean domain.

Portcullis weaves magic with a digital guitar and tabor

Between pounding drumbeats and enchanting refrains on his oddly-shaped guitar synthesizer, Portcullis’ call to adventure is a tranquilising contrast to the epic ambience of Arcane Oubliette’s atmospheric electronica. Here, audiences sway to instrumental odes on gentle seaside life, Tolkien’s Shire, and the South Coast’s own Hiorne Tower, projected in fantastical raven’s view behind the master musician. As Portcullis strolls up and down the synth fretboard in gentle, mesmerising licks, we can almost hear the lapping of waves against the shore, or the lackadaisical dancing of grass blades beneath Gothic towers.

Lowering the drawbridge into ruins of ancient magic is Australian dungeon-synth sorcerer QUEST MASTER, a warlock of dark ambience and textual synths. Quest Master ensnares the audience in a swirling cauldron of N64-era Korg keyboards, imitation cathode ray graphics, and dark fantasy-inspired harmonies. Oscillating between the sepulchral and the sylvan, Quest Master’s setlist strides confidently through a nostalgic fantasy land, from ‘Holy Glass Monolith of Rose River Canyon’ to ‘The Radiant Glow of the Submerged Temple’ (both on his 2021 album The Twelve Temples).

Dungeon synth stalwart Quest Master concentrating on his spells

Where many other dungeon synth maestros – including the UK’s own Arcane Oubliette and Portcullis – incorporate robes or crowns or on-stage roleplay into their repertoire, Quest Master enchants the room with his epic instrumentals alone. Like the most pensive wizard, he is silent in this darkened stronghold. One moment, the crowd sways with shut eyes to the crystalline, plinking keyboard drip-drops of a cascading waterfall. The next, they rock out to epic organ drones, led by hand and horse through crumbling cathedrals and cursed towers.

In between these epic juxtapositions of serenity and noise, the crowd chatters. Quest Master is not merely a musical moment but an enveloping experience. The audience themselves, enrobed in wizard hats and medieval dresses, understand dungeon synth as a soundtrack to their own lives. This is their tavern — as Quest Master warps through his blending of PlayStation cyberspace and Nintendo RPGs, they drink, debate, and dance.

In these mellow interims between dark wizards and elven crusades, the audience take each other’s hands and twirl. Others pump their fists to the pounding dungeon drumbeats. No two people dress the same. All dance together. This is dark magic. This is dungeon synth.

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☟ Quest Master Internet Presence ☟
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☟ Portcullis Internet Presence ☟
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SUSUMU YOKOTA — ICONIC AIR

'Iconic Air' cuts in like a collage, part sample-led groove, part majestic soundscape, the twang of spaghetti guitar against soft synth and smooth bass. In short, it's a trip — a slice of space western meets ambient by the late Susumu Yokota, known chiefly as a proponent of the latter genre, with albums like Acid Mt. Fuji (1994) and Sakura (1999). Really, though, he created in various genres, from techno to house, under various monikers, and also had a career as a designer.

The track comes from an upcoming album, Laputa, named after the flying island from Gulliver's Travels. Yokota never released the album, but – as 'Iconic Air' deftly demonstrates – it is an expansive journey of sound, not a million miles from a videogame soundtrack, filled with mystique and forboding, told in all the shades of the music that marked Yokota's own musical journey through life.

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• 🔔 Susumu Yokota's album Laputa is due out 8th April on Lo Recordings. You may pre-order it on Bandcamp, both in vinyl and compact disc formats (and digital also).

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☟ Susumu Yokota Internet Presence ☟
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NOTHING – CANNIBAL WORLD

BY ALEX GIBSON
CONTRIBUTING WRITER

A chamber of screeching shoegaze immures you, the drone of guitars driven by relentless breakbeat snares circles and swirls, catching you in the tow of their whirlpool. You must look up to avoid drowning in it.

In their single ‘Cannibal World’, Philadelphia post-shoegazers Nothing explode against the eardrums with layers of refined noise. Those palpitating drums compel the continually bleeding guitars to flood outwards from singer Domenic Palermo’s oneiric vocal melody, creating a visceral body of sound.

Enveloped within this organism of unnameable noises, spilling through unnameable membranes, we are powerless but to grasp out at that unplaceable feeling — something “deeper than bone marrow”, as Palermo sings.

‘Cannibal World’ peels away its flesh to reveal a tender middle eight. Echoing vocals oscillate. Everything thickens and, for a moment, the drums disappear. It’s a peace that doesn’t hold. The song builds towards yet another geyser of sound with intimations of noise, a flashflood of pouring guitars and high-pitched, rhythmic judders. With an unsteady, staccato heartbeat, they whimper. And with this resolution, Nothing soars again.

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• 🔔 'Cannibal World' is taken from Nothing's new album a short history of decay, which is out now and available on vinyl, cassette tape, compact disc and digitally. You may purchase it on Bandcamp.

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☟ Nothing Internet Presence ☟
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