#nanoverse

transform and empathy purge (based off of nanoray’s song transform, and purityfilter’s album empathy purge)

oomf tags: @appleviines @plum-at-sea

[Album of the day] Various Artists - HDK 151 † Hell Night

Milan, ITA // 2023 // Heimat Der Katastrophe (HDK)

[Genres] dungeon synth, synth rock, prog rock, doom metal

[Themes] Hell's generals have escaped onto the material plane and you're a biker who has to track them down and drag them back, one by one

[FFO] indie RPGs, liturgical metal, Lingua Ignota

[Thoughts] This is the first album I've picked from the label HDK, an independent group of synth-loving Italians. Quoth their Bandcamp page: "DIY label focused on ambient punk, minimal-synth, dungeon-drone, wartime music and post-nuclear wave. Managed by a creative punx collective from Milano city."

As a fan of dungeon synth, I think HDK is grand. Most of their releases can be split into about three categories:

Old-school, fantasy dungeon synth (e.g. Kobold, Gnoll). Great music for classic TTRPGs. If you purchase the cassette release, you'll typically get a mini dungeon map and a scenario for any old-school RPG.

Cinematic synth music in the Italian tradition. Think Claudio Simonetti's Goblin, films like The Long Good Friday and Tenebre, bands like Zombi. Check out TEETH OF GLASS and A. RALLA.

Cold-War synth/signalwave, typically with a focus on the atomic era (i.e. sovietwave).* Conceptually interesting and a little underrated. I'd recommend RNLT and TSAR-BOMB.

Other frequent features in the HDK catalogue are proggy synth rock (e.g. POLONIUS), space rock (e.g. LOGIC GATE), and synthwave (e.g. MAX ROGUISH). HDK also has several official soundtracks to indie RPGs, most famously GNOLL's soundtrack to MÖRK BORG and CASIOTOMB's soundtrack to ALTNYC88.

Today's album is an official soundtrack to the indie RPG of the same name, Hell Night by Gavriel Quiroga (link to the DriveThru RPG page below). I haven't played the game,** but I have listened to this soundtrack about a dozen times. I love it. It's a compilation album but feels very proggy; all the tracks are from different artists and different musical styles, but they fit together really well.

Give the album a listen, try out the game, and check out HDK's other releases. I subscribed to their label on Bandcamp a while back, and I haven't regretted it.

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* These tend to remind me of the menu screen for CoD: Black Ops.

** But I would like to, it looks like a lot of fun.

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[From the band/label]

"As these last words were spoken, an explosion of blinding white light filled the black palace, cowing even the grim death lords. The angelic messenger was gone, the message delivered, and outrage soon broke among the ranks of the defiled, cacophony of blasphemy and cursing that announced the arrival of dusk and the beginning of a... HELL NIGHT".

this is a design i made based off of nanoray’s DesktopBuddy :3

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moot tags :3 @appleviines @plum-at-sea