Amnor: Dungeon Synth from The Book of Mormon

For a while, I had been thinking about doing a dungeon synth project: I liked the idea of making music on a DiY, lo-fi basis. In the summer of 2023 I had some experiences that renewed my conviction of the truth of the Book of Mormon and my appreciation of it, helped by the Yale edition of the earliest text and Don Bradley’s book The Lost 116 Pages. 

Around the same time, I was thinking about the sword and sorcery aesthetic that I have enjoyed in movies, art, and fiction. In the summer of 2023 I had started doing short improvisations inspired by passages I had read. Then I got a used Yamaha keyboard for Christmas. I wanted to do a dungeon synth project inspired by Book of Mormon themes.

For this project, I chose the name Amnor because it’s one of the money units used by the Zarahemla culture, and it also sounds like it would fit in some kind of sword and sorcery setting. For the first album under that name, I chose the title of Moribund Dominions to refer to one of the main themes I find when I read the Book of Mormon: kingdoms, empires, and civilizations in decline or doomed to a violent self-destruction. Human dominions don't last; human creations don't last; human ability, for all its wonderful achievements, proves unstable and unreliable. The Book of Mormon is shaped by the sorrow and horror that suffuse the blood-soaked history of humanity.  That's one of the evidences of its truth.

I still do some of my songs with acoustic instruments, so Amnor is a blend of dungeon synth with acoustic fantasy ambient or whatever you want to call it; similar to another one-man project called Baerdcyn out of New Jersey. 

Each record I've done so far as Amnor has followed a theme that could be read as chronological, but also thematic. For many of the tracks I wanted to build on themes that play out in more than one instance in the book. For example, “Out by Night in Disguise” can refer both to Nephi in the streets of Jerusalem after disguising himself as Laban, or it can refer to the servant of Helaman infiltrating the Gaddianton Robbers and learning of their assassination plot. “Pursuit in the Wilderness” can refer to the armies of the Lamanites chasing after Limhi’s and Alma’s people, or it can refer to one of the episodes in Captain Moroni's and Helaman's campaigns. 

For In Them Days (quoting the Original Manuscript) I structured the songs chiastically, with "The Inner Tree" as the central point. Therefore the variations of themes between pairs of songs is intentional. "The Old Man and the Burin" could refer to any number of authors engraving on the plates, but in particular I did make it with the last verse of Moroni 10 in mind, the flute suggesting Moroni's apprehension of his impending death and return home, and his hope for resurrection.

I record with a handheld Sony IC Recorder and I edit with Audacity software. For the second Amnor album I also sometimes programmed sequences on Anvil Studio. I record tracks when and where I can: usually at home, sometimes at my office building where I work, once I recorded a drum at Highland Glen Park. Early in 2022 I went on a business trip and the hotel room I stayed in had a drum used as a lamp stand: a hollowed log with two rawhide heads. I improvised some beats on it which I recorded, and later on I edited a couple of them into loops, which I used as the percussion tracks for “Kept and Handed Down,” “Pursuit in the Wilderness” and “Take up Arms in Defense.” In “Take up Arms” the main melody is actually a modification of “Hope of Israel,” while the distorted dulcimer phrase is from a medieval Spanish pilgrims' song.

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About the Author

The Student of Rhythm is Charles Stanford, a Utah native who has lived a few other places and is grateful to be back in a peaceful vale of Deseret with a garden and fruit trees to tend. He composes and records music under the names Amnor and Trebizond, performs at ren faires and with some local folk groups sometimes, and writes cozy science fiction stories.