Old Sorcery, the project of Finnish musician Vechi Vrajitor, indulged in
"dungeon" synth ambient music on its all-instrumental album
Realms of Magickal Sorrow (2017).
Sorcerer's Dream (12:02) sets the tone with its stately and gothic,
also baroque and cinematic, fantasia.
The soaring melodic theme of A Lost Soul Amid the Listening Trees (09:12) has a macabre ending.
The more pastoral melody of In a Forest Trapped floats through an enchanted suspenseful atmosphere.
Alas, the longest piece, Further Beyond the Melancholic Horizon (13:44), is too languid and sickly.
Like most of the
dungeon synth genre, this music is dejavu for those who heard the electronic new-age music of the 1980s.
The 20-minute piece of the EP The Path Lies Hidden (2018) is another melodic fantasia that unfolds slowly, a cinematic soundtrack with a peak of pathos after about eight minutes and then a long slumber leading into the gentle carillon of minute 16.
Strange and Eternal (2019) continued in that vein.
If The Crystal Funeral (11:14) fails to achieve more than a
trivial melody and a trivial rhythm,
A Moss Covered Grimoire (7:30) is a kaleidoscopic cinematic fantasia
with folkish motifs, similar to what
Mike Oldfield did in the 1970s.
De facto, Tears Of A Dying Star (5:42) is a ditty of instrumental synth-pop.
Tulessa Uinuva Kuningas (15:54) begins with the sound of a
blizzard in the tundra, from which a
magniloquent melody emerges that sounds like a symphonic requiem, but then
the piece gets lost in tedious declamation.
The 21-minute piece of the EP An Inkling of Void (2020)
unfolds too slowly, perhaps aiming for a Zen-like ecstasy.
Clandestine Meditation in Two Chapters (2020)
collects the EPs The Path Lies Hidden and An Inkling of Void.
Vrajitor converted to
Burzum-esque black metal on
Sorrowcrown (2020).
The 19-minute Fortress Of Molten Silver unleashes a combination of
grating guitar drones, demonik shrieks and hysterical synth melodies, but
after ten minutes it gets stuck in an anemic hypnosis and the solemn ending is a bit facile.
The 16-minute Voidborn is swept for nine minutes by merciless gusts of guitar distortion and blastbeats and then shivers to a laconic end.
The 13-minute Phantasm is instead an electronic melodic fantasia of the kind that filled his first two albums.
Unfortunately the 20-minute Blades Of A Reflection is another case of
little substance in a long aimless composition.
Vrajitor has a gift for melody but lacks a gift for editing down his compositions.
