Viscount is a project by a man named Eric, based in Boise, Idaho. This is music most simply categorized as ambient music, but it’s not for the background. This is stuff most concerned with how palette and structure can tell an actual story; how modern music can exist in the context of myth.

Do you recall the ‘dungeon synth’ micro genre that emerged in the 90s from Kosmische and Black Metal? Well while I wasn’t paying attention, the genre quietly flourished, and Eric seems to have been part of some of that over the past decade or so. Eric is half of Brutus Greenshield, whose records you ought to check out too. Their work is probably more easily identifiable as dungeon synth than Viscount’s solo material, but neither is by any means the kind of harpsichord-driven medieval cosplay that some 90s metal kids might remember when they hear that term.

Viscount’s 2022 LP, Divine Points, is less overt in its stylistic references than the Brutus Greenshield material. There’s a subtle vein of pre-baroque dungeony-type aesthetic that gets revealed at times throughout the record, but largely this is not kitsch music whatsoever. To the extent those references do appear (and I’m not knocking them when they do), they feel like a sincere expression of Eric’s personal sensibilities.

Viscount is a project that succeeds in crafting something sincerely escapist. I don’t throw around the term cinematic lightly, especially when I’m writing about ambient or ambient-adjacent music, but Divine Points really scratches the same itch for me that a good film would.

Divine Points is available for whatever you’d like to pay on bandcamp, so no excuse not to go grab it there. Apparently new music is due in the spring.

Viscount – “Cirrus” (bc)

Viscount – “I Saw How the Planets Gathered” (bc)