Zak Kiernan, 37, moved to Chicago in 2012 and has worked for eight years as a video editor and sound designer at Leo Burnett. He makes ambient black metal as Adrasteia, which has a split with Celestial Sword coming later this year on Greek label His Wounds. His dungeon-synth project, Alkilith, will release The Shores of Evermeet this week on Chicago label Wrought Records, and will appear in April on the second volume of the Dungeon Synth Magazine cassette compilation series by Italian imprint Heimat der Katastrophe. Kiernan is also about to make his debut in the young genre of comfy synth: his project Derbyshire will appear on a split with local Redwall-themed comfy-synth act Cherry Cordial.
Around 2016, I had taken a break from making music and was really focusing on my career. I just felt this lack, you know, of creativity. So I decided to just start a project—I called it Z.K. (you’ll find it under that Doom Cult banner), and I did a sort of dark ambient album called A Sea of Stars. That’s really what started the train toward dungeon synth and black metal. Then I got a guitar, and that’s when Adrasteia and Alkilith began.
For most people, at first, dungeon synth is, like, a funny thing. The first time you hear some of those old dungeon-synth recordings, where it’s just like a guy screeching over some keyboards, you might find yourself laughing—although if you ask those guys, they probably were very serious at the time. I think there’s now definitely a sense of humor involved in dungeon synth—and I think that’s prevalent with the rise of comfy synth.
You’ll notice when it comes to black metal and dungeon synth, a lot of it’s run by the same people—there’ll be, like, ten projects, and you’re like, “Oh, that’s all one guy.”
My first comfy-synth release will be a split with Cherry Cordial, which is a Redwall-themed comfy synth project. Redwall was a series of books by Brian Jacques—anthropomorphic mice and small critters go through this beautiful, huge, mythical, epic story. I definitely read all those books when I was young. My project’s called Derbyshire. Derbyshire is named after a type of cheese that’s used in a tabletop game called Mice and Mystics—you’re basically a bunch of mice who go on this epic quest. You use wheels of cheese as a sort of hit-point system, and the kind of cheese is called Derbyshire.
This sense of—especially last year—having to let go of what is happening in the world, how it affects you, was a big part of it. Sometimes you just feel so powerless to see all this hatred and this ugliness brewing up, and it was important to have an outlet. And my outlet’s always been music. So now I’ve streamlined everything, and I can basically make music whenever I want. It’s a part of my routine to practice and make something once a day. Just this last year, I put out at least ten different albums.
