It's too bad Ancient Meadows decided to close its doors, I like and own a lot of the stuff that label put out. One of those is Tarkin Turfer's Old Finnbar Furrowbrow album, which I own on cassette. You can listen to it here: https://tarkinturfer.bandcamp.com/album/old-finnbar-furrowbrow and buy it for 3 bucks.
No one could accuse me of being too timely with my reviews, given that this was released in 2019. What the tape contains is a rather long album of endlessly fascinating music that must fit into that tiny subgenre of dungeon synth known as, "Gnomesynth." I assume this is the case since it's about a gnome, it has a gnome on the cover, it gives off a gnome-y vibe, etc.
I love the effort and love of the craft that it seems most dungeon synth artists put into their releases. I imagine that no one would look for artwork (or even commission it) that perfectly matches their project, matches the release, etc. if they didn't absolutely love what they were doing. This seems to have really grabbed several artists and brought them together in this regard for one singular vision.
But I'm talking too much about everything other than the music. My point is that the vibe is there before you ever start listening, then you put on the tape and you're "Whisked away," to a mystical, magical land...like Delaware.
Some of the tracks are so lush and alive that you wish they were longer, and other tracks are a little tedious to get through. The thing is, the album is so well crafted overall that you will want to listen to it all the way through and trudge through the slow parts to get to the more exciting ones. Drenched in phaser as some of it is, the effect is more dreamy than jarring in most cases. Tasteful use of reverb helps keep things from sounding too Sega Genesis like, and the judicious use of discordance throughout keep it from sounding too derivative of other releases in the genre - not that it could, Tarkin Turfer seems to be a true original while also respecting the genre as a whole.
Though a lot of dungeon synth and the related subgenres do end up sounding like Enya's cutting room floor, this album stands out with its sincere and interesting look at the genre. It manages to avoid pretention and give off the vibe of fun, but fun that someone spent a lot of time on. Like a very well crafted Dungeons & Dragons campaign.
The parts that become tedious generally sound to me like the intent was to add some sort of influence that I can't quite identify, sounding instead like a toy instrument being plopped into the mix of a bunch of ambient instruments. They just occasionally sound out of place. It's a double edged sword, at the same time it's jarring and sounds a little cheesy at times, it also draws the attention back to the listening experience at the right times, keeping it active instead of allowing you to drift and use this as simply background music. I had to listen to this music and focus on it, not put it on and read a book. This was easy with this album, and that's definitely a compliment.
I got to this one far too late, but it's in my life now, and I will likely be listening to it regularly for the next several months. The last thing this artist released under the name Tarkin Turfer appears to be in 2022. Given that we're almost halfway through 2025, I hope they haven't stopped creating for the project.
No comments:
Post a Comment