Warthur Era I Mortiis - to use the troll's own term for his early dungeon synth works - might just qualify as outsider art. Along with the lyrics Mortiis penned for Emperor, these albums (up to and including The Stargate) seem to take place in the same cosmos and tell the saga of one particular figure - the Emperor Mortiis' band took their name from, in fact. The general concept of this part is outlined on this first album, in mumbled narration buried deep towards the end of the second half of the composition (so deep, in fact, that unless you knew it was there you'd think it was just part of the atmospheric background voices): a loner realises that in a different life he was the dark lord of a fantasy world, and recreates that world in his imagination. The Era I Mortiis albums in general seem to revolve around that general concept, and you can see it in the older Emperor material if you read it with this in mind.

On top of the devotion to an eccentric thematic concept, the Era I albums like this one also have a decidedly unusual musical approach. Making a clean break from his black metal past, Mortiis goes for an entirely keyboard-based approach, going further even than the material on Burzum's Filosofem (which, bear in mind, wouldn't come out until some years after this one's release). The keyboards clearly aren't especially expensive or modern, but Mortiis shows a knack for getting the absolute best sound of them he can, and the compositions themselves have kicked off a little microgenre of dungeon synth works. The general idea seems to be to compose melancholy medieval-sounding works which act nicely as background music for D&D games, and as far as examples of that sort of thing goes this release is better than many.