The Otherworld with MHLee:
Playlist
from May 21, 2026
The Otherworld explores music that seeks to conjure images of distant lands and fantasy ambiance through dreamy dungeon-synth, acid folk, neo-folk, and more. Featuring work primarily from small projects, it's an ambiance to which you can drift off and imagine yourself in another land.
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May 21, 2026: The Otherworld: Episode 43
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Album |
Year |
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New
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Four o' Cups
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Beyond the Beaten Path, I Stumble into The Wood
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Don't Whistle in the Wood
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2026
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A short tale of a journey into an old forgotten wood.
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*
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Blood Tower
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Grey Heavens (Summoning Cover)
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Posture Magic Redux
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2022
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Wistful and forlorn dungeon synth from Nebraska with an adventurous spirit and emotive archaic atmosphere. To those following the dungeon synth scene closely, Lord Bill's Blood Tower project will need no introduction. While this solo dungeon synth project was started in 2016, his involvement with the genre goes further back to a keyboard-oriented lofi black metal project in the mid-00s.
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In Autumn 2018, the 'Posture Magic' album was released on a tape run by his Moonworshipper Records label. Arguably the strongest manifestion yet of the multifaceted expressions of the Blood Tower project, and well-received at the time, but today somewhat faded in the collective memory. This expanded reissue edition collects the original on the A-side. The B-side holds the Blood Tower tracks on the 'Bestiaries of Uncommon Realms' split from the same period as well as three previously unreleased tracks.
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Isegrimm
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Frost und Feuer
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The Heathen Kingdom [Split]
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2020
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In Gowan Ring
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A Silver Week of Sundays
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Compendium
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2019
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Francis Roberts
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The Shores Of Lake Saltsword
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Songs Of The Dragon's Neck
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2024
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OST album for the Murann region of "Maps Of The Dragon's Neck" which you can download here:
f-c-r.itch.io/maps-of-the-dragons-neck
This is part of an ongoing D&D/tabletop gaming interactive soundtrack project. Hope you like it and can find some use from it at your table!
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Arch Cape
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Moon Bounce
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Arch Cape
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2020
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This record has been a long time in the making. it has traveled through time and space to land in this time and this place in this form.
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eleven years ago i was on tour playing drums with m.ward, when i started writing songs with my computer on the tour bus and in hotels to pass the time, and to do something productive. when I returned home i started recording songs in my basement and realized the way i wrote best was as part of the recording process. i realized that i write much the same way that i paint, layer by layer, bit by bit, adding and reducing until the final form emerges.
i wrote pop songs back then. new wave dance hits i called them. eventually i put together a band of dear friends. we played the songs live. i called us arch cape after the very small town (one church, one post office, one general store) on the oregon coast where my family owns a cabin and where i spent a good part of my childhood. arch cape version number 1 never did make a proper record, and then i decided to form a different version of arch cape, one with a focus on percussion and vocals and keys, and that version played many more shows in portland, oregon, but we never recorded.
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i moved to providence, rhode island in 2012, and not long after i moved, i started trying my hand at playing my songs solo with a looping pedal. i did a short east coast tour with my dear friend and beautiful cellist lori goldston, but my music still didn’t feel settled for me, and i felt like i was searching for a settled form. and still no record, even though i had been promising folks that i would make one. it is easy to start things, and record a million beginnings, and so much harder to finish them. one day i had the idea to improvise to my stop motion films for a show. i had been booked to open for a fellow solo percussionist and wanted to focus on playing free form rather than songs, and i finally realized that the un-settled was where i preferred to dwell.
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these songs are not the only form of the songs that exist, and indeed you might come to a live show and not hear many of these at all, for at each show, the music changes form. i keep trying to pin the songs down but they don’t really want to be pinned down. these songs are influenced by water, which is always moving, always changing. I now live near the coast again, though one on the other side of the country, in a small town called portsmouth, in an even smaller community called island park. i walk on the beach every morning and observe that the water is always a different color and texture. and that is also this music.
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Haunted Realm
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The Genesis of Tragedy
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The Genesis of Tragedy
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2022
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Black Hekate
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Mediolanum
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SEPULCRUM
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2022
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A path of your death.
Three moments: the entrance , the path, the exit...
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Sporcerer
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The Last Sporcerer
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Sporcery
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2026
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In the Fulgen Prisons just outside of newly-occupied Psittacinia, mushroom people are tortured in experiments in the hopes of discovering how to harness power over their spores. During an age when Orchid dominance threatens to extinguish the lives of those who oppose them, those who seek to wield the power of the Fulgen Kingdoms may stand a chance to fight back.
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Coil
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Teenage Lightning (10th Birthday Version)
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Black Antlers [remaster]
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2006
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In the late-1990s, after a successful career as an MTV-era music video director, Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson moved with Jhonn Balance - his partner in life and in Coil - from London to the rural Weston-super-Mare, creating an environment for all things "musick, musick, musick!" with a revolving door of new members, including Thighpaulsandra. This eruption in activity saw Coil's discography nearly double, and during this fruitful period, Thighpaulsandra asked the simple question: why doesn't Coil play live? After a 16-year wait, thanks to the rapid technological advancement in the form of MacBooks, DAWs, VSTs and plugins, Coil were able bring their music to the stage as always envisioned. In live performance, they could embrace the risks and freedoms of real time sonic manipulation, as noted by Sleazy: "Reshape the show minute by minute... the direction is very spontaneous, not so much in the way of like jazz improvisation but in a kind stream of consciousness… Thighpaulsandra brought us his wisdom, and he was able to convince us we could do it."
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From 1999 to 2003, Coil was "like a snake shedding its skin," transforming every six months into something "completely different." Their evolution was documented in real time through the recent advent of lower-cost CD-R manufacture, on limited edition albums including 'Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil' and 'Queens of the Circulating Library.' In preparing for 2004’s "Even an Evil Fatigue" live series, Coil began work on their next period-defining masterpiece, 'Black Antlers.'
'Black Antlers' showcases late-period Coil at their purest: stripped down, tighter, and leaner. The music became more rhythmic, with a greater emphasis on beats: "the songs we did tend to be more... not rock in any sense of a word, but you know, more conventional in terms of structure, but now what we're doing is sort of within an 'electronic' genre." The sound of 'Black Antlers' is of an intoxicating energy, combining Thighpaulsandra's advanced synthesis, Balance's poetic lyricism and Christopherson's flirtations with jazz and Ableton-aided PowerBook maximalism. Rounding out the trio were renowned hurdy-gurdy player Cliff Stapleton on a "specifically commissioned" electric variant, to merge into the band’s "strange and other-worldly music"; Royal Academy of Music trained percussionist Tom Edwards (who also appeared with Thighpaulsandra in Spiritualized’s live band); and European and Near East winds specialist Mike York on pipes, bombarde, duduk and balalaika. Initially released as an "album-in-progress" in June 2004, a post on the Threshold House website noted, "Please remember that September will see Coil recording the album "Black Antlers (Proper)"." Jhonn Balance passed away that November; Christopherson would reunite with 'Love's Secret Domain' collaborator Danny Hyde to complete 'Black Antlers' by May 2006.
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Revitalized energy marked 'Black Antlers''s recording, paired with the group's signature wordplay and humor (the name came from a series of imagined adult film titles). At their "Evil Fatigue" tour opener in Paris, Jhonn Balance presented the revised "Teenage Lightning (10th Birthday Version)" as, "an updated version of one of our older-never 'hits.'" The song, about the energy generated by "two teenagers, or old age pensioners" rapidly pulses, with Edwards's marimbas electronically modified and arpeggiated by Christopherson. Album opener "The Gimp (Sometimes)" is hypnotic and hallucinatory, recalling Coil's 90s period, with a potentially uneasy air, filled with repetition, distorted vocals, and Thighpaulsandra's modulated drone. "Sex With Sun Ra (Part One - Saturnalia)" reveals the potentials of the 2004 lineup, as it writhes and glides through an imagined conversation with the legendary composer, building into overdrive. On the complementary piece, Christopherson & Hyde's "Sex With Sun Ra (Part Two - Sigillaricia)", the song evolves into a throbbing ouroboros of glitches and free flowing energy, with York's pipe samples reverberating almost filmically. One highlight is "The Wraiths And Strays Of Paris", an expansion of the song's first release (as "Wraiths And Strays (From Montreal)", available as a downloadable bonus track). "Of Paris" takes Thighpaulsandra synthesized warmth and Christopherson's PowerBook manipulations & stylizations from the original, adding samples taken from multi-track recordings of the full live band - including Balance's vocals from the Paris show - fully realizing Christopherson's desire of "taking the (electronic) genre to a place that people would find unexpected, and more challenging." Adding to the unexpected, and building upon their own uncompromising legacy, Coil delicately cover the traditional African American lullaby (and "friend's song") "All The Pretty Little Horses", with Balance's vocals soothing the listener in an almost hushed whisper.
For Christopherson, following Jhonn's death, the relevance and power of Coil's creative output changed. He had one goal in mind: "to maintain the availability of the archive for future generations." In original form, 'Black Antlers' represented the possibilities of a new era for the group, built from the momentum of live performance, new sounds and ideas. For the final version, 'Black Antlers' reunited Coil members from over the decades, collaborating across the boundaries of fixed time. There would be no more new Coil, only the completion of unfinished projects, bringing them to a standard which Balance would "have loved and approved of."
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Dais Records would like to thank Thighpaulsandra and Danny Hyde for their collaboration on this reissue.
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The Dais reissue presents Coil's 2006 version 'Black Antlers' with 2004's "Wraiths And Strays (From Montreal)" available as a downloadable bonus track.
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ETVRNE
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MEMORIES LEFT BEHIND
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CHRONICLES OF FUTURES PAST
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2022
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Michael Weeks has been composing music since 2000 in projects such as THE WRETCH, ETHERINE, ZER0DIVIDED, and others. Now he lets the burgeoning neoclassical influences that have been surfacing in his other aliases have full rein on this epic Neoclassical Dungeon Synth album. Lush orchestration collides with electronic drums on a battlefield of the soul, recalling the likes of In The Nursery, Stoa, and In Slaughter Natives.
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Ashleigh Bridges
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Soul Fall
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RuneScape: Land of Kourend
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2013
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Thurnin
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Særa
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Útiseta
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2023
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The old Icelandic word 'Útiseta' means the practice of sitting out in the open air, possibly at a significant site for a magical purpose. THURNIN mastermind Jurre Timmer interprets this numinous act as a way to commune with nature, to find peace, and to gain spiritual wisdom in a time of introspection and transcendence. The Dutch acoustic music progeny has spent years in a contemplative mode to create his sophomore full-length entitled "Útiseta" and a collection of poetry to stand alongside the album. Very much feeling like a natural progression from the debut album "Menhir", Timmer is adding dashes of vocal colour and flute to the acoustic guitars on "Útiseta". While THURNIN remains tied to the world of dreams and visions that take the listener to otherwordly realms filled with magical wonders, "Útiseta" offers richer textures, and a more matured and warmer sound. Little was known about THURNIN when the mysterious Dutch solo-project of mastermind and sole musician Jurre Timmer emerged with the dark folk debut full-length "Menhir" in 2021. Before THURNIN, Timmer had released an album with his death doom project I, FORLORN. He also created 2 albums and 2 EPs for a project under the name of ALGOS. When "Menhir" found its way from Timmer's home studio in the town of Soest by the Dutch city of Amersfoort, the album became an instant hit on YouTube that has long passed the milestone of 1 million views. Now THURNIN's eagerly awaited follow-up album "Útiseta" is ready to embark on a journey around the globe. Find yourself an ancient burial mound, a sacred well, or a grove in a forest, and sit on the ground listening to the new songs. "Útiseta" will send you the most beautiful visions from the dream-world.
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novemthree
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waxing gibbous
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of my mother's weary wanderings
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2006
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Hewer of Caves
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Barricade of Green Needles
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Book of One Hundred Chapters
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2020
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Ilúvatia
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Dreamrain Chambers II
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Amaranthine Hollow
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2024
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Lore Master
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Underdark
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Through Realms Forgotten
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2025
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Skuggriket
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Omnious darkness
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2025
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Taurwen
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In the Arms of the Night (Remastered)
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A Wind Blows from the Mountain of Death (Remastered)
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2022
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The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.
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Mythráen
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Dreams in the Darken Wood
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Wings Beneath Krynn's Moonlight
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2025
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Hole Dweller
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With Dreams of Hereafter
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2023
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This album is dedicated to all those who have suffered through loss and heartache.
"Up and Over" is dedicated to Neil Peart.
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