Artist: Secluded Tower
Title: Adventurer’s Map
Type: Album
Label: Digital / Sokol Keep
A debut no less, always an exciting time but sometimes when that first opening theme makes you feel in the place you have to wonder from whence did this bard come? It is a low, dark wash of perfect dark dungeon synth. A bell tolls in the distance, notes like brittle glass fall and form the melody and a stillness is upon us and the strange land we see stretching into the fog. ‘Enter An Ancient Land’ is the music, and indeed it seems to be where we are.
So in strange company, a little wary, we take the ‘Road To The Tower’. If the land was not entirely welcoming, the road is worse. There is an undertow to the path, it feels as though it seeks to warn us but with a predatory smile. The step is wary with us all, light of foot as though the ground hides things and all around us the prickle and tingle of magic and the unknown. That is the beauty of this music created by Tower Knight, the shadow behind this project; it perfectly understands the world they seek to show us and can do so with deft, slight passes of their hand.
‘Fireside Faerie Tale’ crackles into life, the sparks twist and perform a spiralling dance into the night as motes, as notes too sparkling with an almost playful touch. The night may be dark and danger lurks outside the light in the low deep voice of the synth but the faerie lights warm and the tale is spun…
And yet somehwo we become ‘Lost In The Dark’. A step too far from the fire and that dark warning voice obscures the path. There are waves of darkness, ebb and flow as something like spikes forming notes stalk us. The music feels as though we stepforward, turn, lose even more of our place and the slow fear begins to grip us…
But daylight comes and we are alive. Crows, other birds, those commonplace sounds of preparing for the day perhaps? The sliding of metal. A sword into it’s sheath? A pack prepared? Maybe. But the halting tune has more than a whisper of sadness that comes with ‘Many Partings’. Perhaps it is simple the role of companions on the road; they meet, they perhaps face some night no one else will ever know of, and yet the survive and their journeys part like the branching of a tree. There will always be where they met but they may never cross again and even if they do they will be changed companions. It is a sombre tune, beautifully layered with that sunlit bittersweet need for memory to persist to warm us in times of cold. The time may fade as the journeys go onwards, but the meories and those simple, gentle smiles they evoke will coax flames from any campfire ember.
Be good, gentle adventurers. Be brave. And never, never let go of those companions of the road we shared perhaps mere moments with. Every story has a beginning, a moment and an end and every one is important to the players.
Distance has no meaning to those once met. Adventurer’s Map in your pouch, eyes set on the dusk ahead, but those memories bridge any land in a moment and you will be together once more, alive and sharing the times.
Onwards.
Gizmo
Adventurer’s Map | Secluded Tower
Secluded Tower – Adventurer’s Map | Secluded Tower | SOKOL KEEP
Walking The Liminal Space 