Interview: Towerhouser

Photo: Towerhouser

Eclectic artistry is not formed in a vacuum, nor is it common in an age where a “brand” and a driving thematic style sells records. Yet, dungeon synth is not a genre that is under any pressure to conform, and Towerhouser is an artist who embodies that nonconformity in a most honorable way.

Hailing from Maryland – the land of crab meat and Cal Ripken, Jr. – Towerhouser is an electric storytelling wonder. As good music can and should do, Towerhouser takes us into another place and time. There is beauty, mystery, and even sadness in the melodies that clashes beautifully.

It was a pleasure getting to speak with Srogi Mroczek (aka – Towerhouser) about music, inspiration, and what drives their artistry.

First off, it’s great to have you join us for an interview! I love your music and the atmosphere you create. To get us kicked off, can you tell us where you’re from and a little bit about who you are as an artist?

My name is Srogi Mroczek. “Srogi” is a nickname, but it stuck. I live in Maryland. I’ve been playing music for the better part of thirty-five years as I grew up around music and occasionally played utility roles in bands but only have really leaned into it in terms of working on producing and putting out albums that I think have the kind of qualities I’ve been looking for over the last five or six years. I have a strong respect for lo-fi and home recording in whatever genres, from metal to jazz to bluegrass to ambient. I just feel like lo-fi recording produces a result that sounds like something that someone made with their hands. I love that.

Two years ago, I started up a small label called Srogi Mroczek. I’ve always liked how fashion houses often just get named after the founder. I thought that was a funny idea for a record label. We put out eight releases last year, and we just released our most recent this month. We’ve currently got six more albums from six different acts on the boards for probable release this year.

I also took on the catalog of my brother’s former bands, so that fleshes it out to around twenty releases in different media – digital, cassette, vinyl. This year I’m also working on music that I can take out on the road and perform solo. Some of that will include re-imaginings and new arrangements of songs across the catalog. We’ll see how that goes, because I’d like to travel light.

Your most recent album titled Where Shall You Cast Your Soul was released July of 2024. As the 2nd of your two albums, both of which were released last summer, how do you feel your music has been received by the dungeon synth community?

I have a very limited view of how anyone in the dungeon synth community – or any community, for that matter – has received our music. And I say “our” in that, though Towerhouser is a solo project, we’ve got a group of friends here who’ve known each other for a long time and who work on lots of different projects together. We tend to think about the music that any of us put out as the music that all of us put out. That’s the work that ends up coming out on the label.

I’ve always felt a bit outside any single dedicated music community. I’m more comfortable with the idea of composing and performing music to whatever theme I’m working on or to whomever I’m working with than I am in playing to a specific genre. I tend to think of things maybe more like a film composer – I can compose any type of music. My job is to align the feel with whatever story is to be told or whatever colors are to be illuminated. I’m really just as comfortable playing in a bluegrass setting as I am in playing black metal. And my look, my clothes, my attitude don’t really change when I move from one space to another. I just see everyone as musicians. I’ve been in honky-tonk bands where all the same bullshit that gets talked about in black metal circles gets talked about. There is nothing special or exclusive about any genre. It’s all just idioms to work with.

That said, I really admire that some people can go really deep and own a genre. Granted, I just said that it’s all just idioms, but I really do think that’s exciting. Some people do that really well, and it’s compelling because they, as people, are so compelling. It’s like seeing a great horror movie by a director who has mastered it as an art form - where the style of horror perfectly reflects the director’s thought patterns or philosophy or sense of humor. I have nothing but respect for that. It’s just not in my personality to always hang out at one table in the cafeteria. I’ll go sit with the horror geeks and then another day with the film noir geeks and then the sci-fi geeks and the new wave geeks. I’ve always been like this. And I prefer it, rather than to specialize. 

If I were going to specialize, I should have done it when I was young. But it never appealed to me. My taste was always too eclectic and always shifting. I’d go hard on death metal, and then it was free jazz, and then it was central European folk songs, and then it was Berlin School synth music, and then it was Cuban nueva trova, and then it was Mississippi blues, and then it was club music. I was and always have been just hungry for music. I devour it. And if I don’t get variety, I feel like I’m not getting my vitamins, and I start to feel deficient.

So, I never really put myself out there in the dungeon synth scene because I didn’t see myself as committed as so many of the people doing that - and doing it really well. You sort of have to be committed, and I’m not. Rather, I let it seep in when and wherever it wants to. I don’t really pay attention. I’m sort of like a terrible bartender. So, you might be listening to one of my club tracks and you’ll hear something that sounds like a chromatic dungeon synth movement. Or you might hear something in the context of what is ostensibly a dungeon synth track on a Towerhouser album that sounds like a slowed down Baltimore hardcore punk beat – or like an odd polka or a sea shanty or something from an early 80s TV sitcom. It’s just all there in the musical sponge that is my mind. And it’s no better or worse than anything else; it’s just the way it is.

All that said, there is so much great dungeon synth going on right now. And even more so, I’m interested in all of these offshoots like you get in fantasy synth and some of the new ways people are approaching dark ambient music through free improvisation and the ways that new approaches are getting into film music.

I really like Ithildin. Their recent thing – Arda's Herbarium – has a variety of approaches that blend into something very beautiful. And it’s not like this canonical purity-test sort of genre music. It’s just this very beautiful series of decisions and performances. Likewise, we’re so lucky to be living at the same time as Jim Kirkwood. The Apocalypse of a Soul was my favorite thing to come out last year. I like big dramatic ideas that become things so beautiful or moving that they make you cry and make you appreciate how hard it is to make something – how much time goes into it. Like, talking about favorites, it has nothing to do with dungeon synth at all, but my favorite piece of music so far this century is Everywhere at the End of Time by The Caretaker. That’s the type of thing that makes you glad to be alive in order to experience it.

What inspired you to start Towerhouser?

The project started not as a music project but as a short novel. I wrote this story about a protagonist who becomes obsessed by a vision of a ruin in a distant land. He travels there and becomes immersed in this sort of dark heroic journey.

Prior to Towerhouser, I was working on a black metal project called Evil Will Bless. I’ve always added synth to metal projects, whether EWB or on production work I did on a few of my brother’s albums with Bornwithhair and with Vinterdracul. The former was sort of a death-y, avant-metal thing, and the latter a vampiric black metal band. But synth is my primary instrument, so I wanted to do something where I could focus on it.

The first Towerhouser album was entirely composed. The second album was entirely improvised in a single take. Both followed a conceptual narrative. So, they are both like a lot of synth albums in the fantasy space in that they are telling a story or presenting a musical representation of characters or of a space. But I wanted to treat the approaches of each recording session as something very distinct. I’m working on a third Towerhouser album presently, and much of it is built around these sorts of rough club beats on drum machine. So, everything is similar and yet very different, particularly in how the music is created. Slight shifts in process can produce radically different results.

I’ve always been inspired by process. Like, I write things, but I think of myself more as an editor than a writer. I make music, but I think of myself as more of an engineer or producer than a performer. If I were in baseball, I’d want to be the pitching coach. I just live for understanding the process of how something works and then using that knowledge or skill to get the work done or helping someone else achieve better results. And yes, I am obsessed with baseball – to me, a baseball game is like a statistical symphony. I often tend to see things through the lens of how systems work and in the kinds of optimizations and gaps and anomalies that occur within systems. I think that might feed into my approach in producing music.

Did you have any prior musical projects or bands?

I’ve been playing music for a long time, but my serious contributions started during the pandemic when my brother asked me to help produce music that he and his partner Jean were working on. We worked on three more albums in that space and then he wanted to go in a more black metal direction. So, I worked with him on two albums there – The Murnau Nocturnes and The Lee Variations. I learned a lot from those sessions. Weirding (my brother) has this idea of recording like slabs of sound and then analyzing all of it and breaking it down into the form of songs - really good sessions to be an engineer on. The recording sessions are done in days, and the mixing sessions last for months on end.

Anyway, he split town shortly after that (which is a whole other crazy story) and I started work on the Evil Will Bless EPs. They took a very long time to come together - like months and months. I was thinking in terms of extending some of the recording techniques we used on Vinterdracul into a more linear black metal thing. But I was under a lot of stress at the time, partly because of Weirding having split on us. So, while working on that music, my friend Dirt got this idea that we should just try to blow off some steam and do like a Motörhead-type thing, or something like Venom or Avenger. Neat Records type stuff. So, we cut a single under the name Mephistophilizer.

Anyway, I’m always working in the studio, so I started work writing a new thing, which became the debut Bleak Magician album. Sort of a post-punk sound. And that ended up featuring my brother on guitar, because he actually showed up again on the first day of recording after disappearing for more than a year.

In between all of that, I was playing a lot of synth and writing a lot of dark folk types of things. Eventually the synth work split in two – part became Towerhouser, where the focus was on this sort of program music telling the story of the protagonist from the novel I’d worked on. The second started out as a more ambient thing and has over time grown into a sort of synth-psych project with some minimal club elements. I work with my friend Apples on that – it’s called Bicycle Deck.

I’ve got the basic tracking for the third Towerhouser album on the boards. But I’m also trying to finish up a set of songs in an acoustic setting – more like ballads mostly. If I can finish that up, I’ll probably go out on the road with the dark ballads project and some arrangements of Towerhouser songs for guitar or mandolin. We’ll see.

If you would, explain the thematic elements of Towerhouser, if there are any. Meaning, are your melodies inspired by things like fantasy, literature, lore, etc.?

I can’t really explain anything that’s not already in the text of the program, but the gist of the story is that it is the early 1980s and our very unlikely protagonist has traveled from the microfiche room of the Delaware Historical Society to a remote part of the Caucasus where he has sought a ruin somehow related to his family history. Once inside the ruin, a terrible and remarkable heroic quest begins. 

What artists have influenced your music? This does not have to merely be other dungeon synth or fantasy musicians.

I started out as a kid with hard rock and heavy metal. So, AC/DC, Van Halen, Ozzy, KISS, Judas Priest. Listened to lots of pop on the radio and MTV in the early 80s, like any kid back then. The Clash. Talking Heads. I got really into New Order. They were the first band I remember being attracted to by the keyboards in a real way.

Later hearing like Billy Bragg and wondering where that came from – that got me into a lot of early American music like country blues, and Woody Guthrie, and cowboy music. And then all the songwriter stuff – Leonard Cohen, Dylan, Townes Van Zandt, Sandy Denny. Locally in Maryland, you could not escape Bluegrass – and I did not mind at all, I loved and still love (and perform) Bluegrass. The first J.D. Crowe and the New South – from 1975 – is still a top ten album for me. Tony Rice was the greatest guitarist ever to walk the face of the Earth. Hazel Dickens, she lived in Baltimore, lived in DC. I heard a lot of Bluegrass as a kid on the radio every Sunday.

Sometime in middle school, I happened upon Lou Reed. That sort of “began” things for me. I felt like I had uncovered a secret world. Lou, Iggy, Bowie, Patti Smith. All of the proto-punk stuff. But then there was this other secret world of crazy guitar music my brother was getting into – like Mahavishnu Orchestra, and John Abercrombie, and some of the early Pat Metheny stuff (I’ve seen Metheny three times live, and I’m convinced he is an alien). But my focus was on synth, so I gravitated to the Jan Hammer stuff like on the Timeless album. Check out his stuff on the second half of the song “Lungs” that opens that album.

In high school, my brother and I got into punk and hardcore. I think our first show together was Bad Brains. I saw Fugazi and Lungfish and Shudder to Think more than probably any other bands. That whole D.C. influence was huge. The early 90s was wild with the mix of a dying dirty glam metal scene (which had some of the most amazing musicians in the region), noise rock and indie (which was kinda inescapable), and black metal and latter-day death metal. But I think part of what happened back then just gets glorified in a way that just wasn’t the way things were at the time. It was mostly just hanging out with friends, having few things to do besides play in a band.

Hip-hop was huge in my neighborhood and so I grew up with an ear for the beat – stuff like EPMD, Eric B. and Rakim, BDP. And then you had Baltimore Club Music – the kick patterns of which you can probably still hear in a lot of my music regardless of genre (even if abstracted a bit). A kid in the neighborhood had an older brother who DJ’d at a Baltimore radio station. He had all of these incredible Club records. Listen to Rod Lee, Miss Tony, K-Swift, Rye Rye, Blaqstarr.

I got heavy into free improvisational music and took a long detour, historically speaking, into free jazz. Then I started getting heavy into that sort of latter-day folk psych that was going on in the 90s - guitar players like Jack Rose and folk stuff by Sharron Kraus. 

In terms of heavy music, I was always into whatever seemed weird and lo-fi, whether it was black metal or whatever. Grindcore. Some early Industrial stuff. Whatever would show up at the record store. In terms of metal, I’d been into Thrash and some early death and black metal like Possessed and Bathory. Napalm Death. I immediately liked Ulver (though then they famously changed things up shortly thereafter). And Dark Throne became a constant companion to my ears (and has stayed such for thirty-some years). 

And it was around then that I heard copies of copies of what I guess eventually became known as dungeon synth, but it was just like instrumental weird stuff back then. It was like “music that was around music.” Eventually I heard Jim Kirkwood, and that was like a sort of turning point in terms of thinking about synth more “orchestrally,” for lack of a better word. I think King of the Golden Hall was the first thing I heard. Or parts of it. I remember it had been dubbed by someone who had dubbed it off someone’s dubbed copy. 

But, like at some point – probably due to the influence of David Lynch soundtracks – instrumental music was just like this evocative film music, whether or not there was a film. I was never really into the more classic instrumental synth stuff like Dead Can Dance or Tangerine Dream (except for the Sorcerer soundtrack – that was incredible). I think the most important composer for me, though I had only heard limited amounts of her work, was Wendy Carlos. She had done the main theme for The Shining.

But all of that was like when I was just a kid and through my twenties. I’m not one of those people who stopped listening to new music when I turned thirty. I hate those people. I think we’re living in a Golden Age of music. I love all the funny shit on Grime Stone Records. I have a host of labels that I just watch for new releases – Fiadh is consistently putting out great stuff. Realm and Ritual. Trepanation was a great label while it was going. In terms of dungeon synth and adjacent, I love Vaelastrasz. Wooded Memory. Hermit Knight. I was just listening to Fen Wraith yesterday in the studio. The whole High Mage catalog is like a gold mine.

And then loud music – I love Allfather and think everyone should rock out to them – Weirding got me on to them. I listen to a lot of prog metal, like Opeth, often on account of the keyboards and sense of harmony. Katatonia The Fall of Hearts is such an amazing record. And I’ve probably listened to City Burials ten-thousand times. I listen to a lot of electronic music – Wojciech Golczewski and that sort of new generation of retro-Berlin-influenced soundtrack music. And, like I said, Wendy Carlos has always been a major inspiration – especially to my synth approach – but also in the production of Towerhouser. You can usually hear a tape manipulation of one sort or another in my studio stuff that is a direct homage to her and the ghost sounds on the theme of The Shining.

Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of Mazurka music. I’ve been trying to listen to music that takes rhythmic approaches I’m not used to. I heard a lot of Polka as a kid at family gatherings and stuff. Take that music, slow it down, and shift the accent on the beat and you get something really compelling. I also like that there are so many great artists who are advanced in age and still creating remarkable things. I was just listening to John Scofield earlier today. I’ve seen him a couple times live and he’s always thinking. He’s in his 70s. I saw Herbie Hancock maybe a year ago. He’s in his 80s and blew the roof off the place.

As a person of faith, I like to ask each artist about their own worldview both spiritually and philosophically. Would you consider yourself to have an established lens through which you see the world, or is that under development?

My spiritual life entirely revolves around listening to and creating music. I consider every musical act that I take part in as an intentional act. To me, just paying attention is a form of yoga.

I don’t subscribe to the idea that following rules makes one a good person. And I don’t think there is any reward or punishment waiting for us when we die. I don’t think that some people have the answer. I don’t think there is an answer. There is just music. And the jukebox is bigger than we can ever know. And everything – every possible topic – is ripe subject matter for a song.

Do you anticipate making new music under the Towerhouser banner in 2025? If so, can you give us a hint about what to expect?

I’m finishing up the third Towerhouser album. It will probably come out before mid-year. It is a continuation of the narrative that began with Death of an Amateur Genealogist. This time, the music is fully composed. And it’s a bit more beat driven. I’d love to put this one out on vinyl and am up for a conversation if there are any labels or enthusiasts who would be interested in partnering on something like that.

Last question: If you were to describe dungeon synth to someone with no knowledge of the genre, how would you describe it in your own words?

It’s like reading maps with your ears.

You can follow Towerhouser on Bandcamp.