John Debowie is a dungeon synth project that began in Milan in March 2020, in the first days of the lockdown. The earliest recordings were made at night, and at night everything since has been made too: slow keyboards, long reverbs, a room on the upper floor and the city silent around it.

No school, no teacher, no previous musical training. Only listening and practice. Passion, in the absence of anything else, was enough.

The project grew out of a long and unbroken habit of fantasy tabletop gaming — a terrain the author knows from having lived in it, and one he still inhabits when, away from music, he designs games for the pure pleasure of it. Every release is a descent: a Quest, a cycle, one level deeper down. The music and the table are the same place looked at from two different angles.

An imaginary precedes all of this — and perhaps explains it. Piranesi's Carceri d'Invenzione: galleries with no exit, staircases that lead nowhere, arches over arches over arches. Prisons that no one ever lived in, spaces that exist only to exist. They were dungeons before we had the word for them.

The covers explore different imaginaries from one release to the next. A common thread runs through them, even when it isn't immediately visible: the prevalence of space over character. Architectures, thresholds, depth.

The project releases on the JDREC productions label, in numbered editions. Cassettes, CDs, digital on Bandcamp. Vinyl will come, when it comes, for the releases that deserve it.

The work happens at night, slowly, and considers silence a material on equal footing with the keyboard. Each release closes on itself before the next one begins — no two are ever recorded at the same time.

→ Full bio, setup & influences