Artist: Blades Of Folmär
Title: Eternal Dungeon II
Type: EP
Label: Digital / Cassette (sold out) Sokol Keep
Well 2025 has slunk away like the cowardly beast it was but it’s also a fair time to take a last look at what turned out to be an incredible year for Sokol Keep as a label and the variety of artists they offered releases and artefacts for. Case in point is Blades Of Folmär who featured no less then three times in these pages. So yes I was a bit hesitant in beginning the year with another but it turned out this album was my main musical companion over the Yule period alongside Mithril Sword’s ‘Breeglander’s Carol’ and despite only being digital now its a grand way to start the Mausoleum Monday year.
‘The Moonlit Portcullis’ has what I think of as the Blades touch; slow and dark but also a little moonful. As ever this is old school in sound and style and all the more evocative for it. The main tune slips into the background as a second layer rises with those notes of pure moonlight trembling on dark iron. It paints a haunting winters image, a still and silent one but for all the eerie sounds a most beautiful one too.
‘To Dine In Carrion Halls’ has the beat of drums, emphasising the importance of the place, the woodwind sounds like some dusty, shadowed group of bards upon a mostly ignored stage as the cloak tails of death whisper past. This what I feel as the glorious talent of Blades Of Folmär; the delicate and thoughtful precision with which they weave simple but effective tales with their synths and their feel for the layers and the ebb and the flow.
‘Gurrok Cairn’ is the ominous track. It flows like a wave of darkness from some high hill in my mind. Grey black skies, dark and bleak world and not simply a place of age but a place where things have happened that perhaps should, if the world was to be a little better, not have happened. The strange thing though is the sense of movement. The cairn must be the fixed point and yet there is a shifting in the music. Maybe we circle it warily, needing something here but not wanting to touch it. Or perhaps the dark soul of this place is so weighty, as the deep black drone hints, that the veils bend and stretch and collapse around it and worlds shift and fade. It is a soundscape, ambient, and time perhaps slows with it, just a little.
‘Glademist’ closes this quest. And its sound just as its title suggests; a misty, still but magical place where the presence of the fey maybe dance and smile and plan mischief upon you. You never know, you may even like it…
A short but magical EP to close my dungeon synth year. Thank you Blades Of Folmär, thank you indeed.
Gizmo
Eternal Dungeon II | ⚔️ Blades of Folmär | Sokol Keep DIY Sessions | SOKOL KEEP
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