New Memory: The Wood between Worlds originated with Aaron French’s academic paper The Mandela Effect and New Memory and an exploration of the “retrospective” development of the musical microgenre Dungeon Synth.
Most genres and microgenres are, to greater or lesser degrees, retrospective: diverse works are grouped together by fans and critics based on shared formal and conceptual characteristics. In the case of Dungeon Synth the genre tag was notably slow to develop, the name being coined around 2011 and applied to albums released as early as 1991 (UK artist Jim Kirkwood’s Master of Dragons (1991) is regularly cited as an early example). There are also instances of the coalescence of the nascent genre reviving long-dead projects: the album The Sleeping Green by Lunar Womb, recorded in 1999, went unreleased and stored on a hard-drive until 2015, its “sleeping beauty” quality reflected by its cover :
Henri “Trollhorn” Sorvali, the auteur behind Lunar Womb, writes:
Lunar Womb was a ambient/ folk/ electronic project of me started in 1995 with a couple of friends. After the first demo I continued alone and released another demo in 1997. In 1998 I got myself some better musical equipment to fulfill my visions and this cassette demo was planned to release in the turn of 1998/1999.
Due to other band-related things, It took me some time to finish it properly but when it was finally ready I felt it was so outdated I didn´t want to release it anymore.
I found the tracks and the layout- files from my backups in 2015 and after careful reconsideration I decided to finish what I had once started and remastered it from the original pieces. All the artwork and layout was originally intended for a cassette release and the music is 100% original except for remastering for a bit more better listening experience. […]
Recorded in 1999. Mixed in 2001. Mastered in 2015. – Lunar Womb, bandcamp.com
The album’s retropective release and accompanying backstory places it neatly in the formative (and correspondingly prestigious) First Era of Dungeon Synth.
Retrospect functions somewhat differently in instances of The Mandela Effect. In genre-formation, new connections are discovered and differences glossed over while in instances of ME, a sense of unheimlich, of disruption, sometimes of crisis and loss, is the order of the day. In “New Memory” Aaron French writes:
The ME (Mandela Effect) came to my attention in 2015 when I came across a blog post from 2012 written by “Reece,” who claimed to be a “graduate student of physics.” The blog was called the Wood between Worlds and the post was entitled “The Berenstein Bears: We Are Living in Our Own Parallel Universe.” It discussed the idea that the spelling of the name of a popular children’s series — a series originating in the 1960s — had been altered from its original spelling of The Berenstein Bears (spelled –ein) to an alternate spelling of The Berenstain Bears (spelled –ain).
“Reece” was certain, as a result of childhood memories and familiarity with the series, that the former spelling was correct, and a number of others commenting on the post agreed with him. The spelling change coincided with the death of the last member of the couple who had created the series, Jan and Stan Berenstain. In fact, it was the “misspelling” on Jan’s obituary in 2012 that drew the blogger’s attention to the name change of Berenstein to Berenstain. When the blogger looked up the name on the Internet, not only was it spelled Berenstain everywhere, but all the old book covers the blogger personally owned revealed the alternate spelling. “Reece” came across more people who remembered the –ein spelling, some of whom ran home to their parents’ houses to dig up old books from the past, only to be shocked by the supposedly “new” spelling. 1
In their 2024 paper The Visual Mandela Effect as evidence for shared and specific false memories across people, Deepasri Prasad and Wilma A. Bainbridge of the Department of Psychology, University of Chicago suggest that certain images elicit false memories, pointing to a perceptual/psychological basis for visual instances of the Mandela Effect. From the Abstract:
The Mandela Effect is an internet phenomenon describing shared and consistent false memories for specific icons in popular culture. The Visual Mandela Effect (VME) is a Mandela Effect specific to visual icons (e.g., the Monopoly Man is falsely remembered with a monocle) and has not yet been empirically quantified or tested. In Experiment 1 (N=100), we demonstrate that certain images from popular iconography elicit consistent, specific false memories. In Experiment 2 (N=60), using eye-tracking-like methods, we find no attentional or visual differences that drive this phenomenon. There is no clear difference in the natural visual experience of these images (Experiment 3), and these VME-errors also occur spontaneously during recall (Experiment 4; N=50). These results demonstrate that there are certain images for which people consistently make the same false memory error, despite majority of visual experience being the canonical image. 2
French argues that wider cultural forces are at work in the ME phenomenon, that the sense of of disorientation and dislocation at the heart of ME has been primed within experiencers by forces of radical epistemic disruption within both the mainstream culture and the “undergrounds” or “fringes” rapidly multiplying and syncretizing online. French thus ties ME to both Colin Campbell’s Cultic Milieu and online fundamentalist Christianity:
With the emergence of the Internet, websites like Wikipedia, and social media sharing platforms like YouTube, the cultic milieu now encompasses more than Campbell’s “occult” and non-Christian elements (i.e., “occulture”), and appears to be merging, to some degree, with the fundamentalist Christian milieu (for example, Hillary Clinton’s reference to “dark conspiracy theories drawn from ... the far, dark reaches of the internet” in her so-called “alt-right speech”) and the underground conspiracy theory community (such as people who self-identify as “red-pilled” Christians). The spread of the Internet and smartphone technology has wrought a transformation in society, including what Campbell has called the “cultural underground of society.” It is important to note that persistent secularization might be relegating aspects of the institutional religions into the cultic milieu, especially when it comes to CERN, the Mandela Effect, and panic over “fake news.”
Campbell certainly never would have included elements of fundamentalist Christianity when theorizing his underground milieu, yet this seems to me to be a potential mistake. More extreme forms of Christianity have sometimes existed in tension with mainstream society, beginning at the outset in ancient Rome and later in modern societies that operate (at least organizationally) along rationalist and materialist principles. In the current “hyper-normal” and “post-truth” world in which we find ourselves, heavily mediated by technological information flows, the cultic milieu theory needs reconfiguring. A phenomenon such as the ME illustrates that the institutional “un-fungible” beliefs of Christianity can exist alongside esoteric knowledge and New Age wisdom, oriented around conspiracism and directed at something as highly specialized and scientific as CERN. Campbell anticipates this when he concludes his essay, arguing that “the imputed processes of secularization may be creating circumstances favorable to the growth of the milieu and the further expansion of cultic beliefs” and that “a growth in the prestige of science results in the absence of control of the beliefs of non-scientists and in an increase in quasi-scientific beliefs.”
Dungeon Synth Primer
Per Kaptain Carbon of synthdigest.com:
Dungeon Synth is a style of at-home made fantasy synth. Despite it being a modern incarnation, its history is rooted in the 1990’s black metal scene, when its members created ambient synth projects and circulated those releases through tapes. These black metal side projects laid the groundwork for dungeon synth’s atmosphere and ethos regarding aesthetics, production, and distribution. Dungeon synth is primarily a solo endeavor with one person writing, playing, producing, and distributing the music. Today, it has become a diverse genre and cottage industry with tape labels, forums, festivals, and an international fanbase devoted to its history and development. Branching out from its beginnings to include a spectrum of sound, dungeon synth has transitioned beyond its dark ambient beginnings to a sound that includes neoclassical, new age, medieval, and even chiptune music. The space between fans and creators, since its beginning, has been small, leading to an intimate scene that exists today almost entirely on the internet.
This aspect of a virtual community and scene has shown itself unintentionally resilient within the 2020 Covid pandemic. The process of creating music in isolation and sharing it with an international fanbase through virtual albums and mailed media is something that has been unaffected since the wake of a global pandemic. Livelihoods of the creators and parcel service interruptions aside, dungeon synth, along with other virtual genres thrived while live music was suspended for a few years. In the early 2020’s dungeon synth began branching out into live performances ushered and supported by the success of the Northeast Dungeon Siege along with other festivals internationally. 3
Unlike self-named genres or near-contemporaneously-assembled movements within, say, the historical avant-garde (Cubism, Futurism, Dada, et al.), the designation Dungeon Synth is itself a function of something like New Memory, a retrospective fan/archivist-assembled genre:
Classic dungeon synth just existed collectively and independently in the mind of its musicians with their releases, which were then resurrected by fans and archivists decades after their original releases. Before 2011, dungeon synth as a concept and even name did not exist; rather it was a nebula of likeminded music under the name “dark dungeon music,” “neoclassical,” and/or “medieval” that was sorted with other dark ambient, darkwave, and experimental electronics. Dungeon synth did not begin as a named genre until one of its fans, Andrew Werdna, started “The Dungeon Synth Blog” in 2011 to promote the type of music made by Mortiis, Wongraven, and related artists. The creator of that blog coined the name and collected the material he found interesting and fit his view on what the genre should be. This arcane way of genre creation lays at the foundation of dungeon synth and its existence would not be if not for fans like Werdna archiving and connecting the dots.
Dungeon synth, in its classic sense, exists due to the will of its fans who are uncovering more and more releases, which in turn, reshapes its history over and over. One of the releases that will be discussed, The Sleeping Green by Lunar Womb, is a construction of a late 90’s release that was shelved and lay dormant on a harddrive for almost 20 years.
The impact of digital culture is near-omnipresent in the discourse surrounding both ME and Dungeon Synth. In their introduction to The Microgenre, A Quick Look at Small Culture, author/editors Anne H Stevens, Molly C O’Donnell suggest that the existence of the microgenre itself is an outgrowth of digital culture with a long pre-digital prehistory:
In many ways, popular culture has always relied on hyper-specific formulas and subgenres. Jonathan Goodwin asserts […] that microgenres are inherently digital, but he does identify several usages of the term “microgenre” in critical works of the 1980s and 1990s, where writers use it as a way to characterize subgenres of a high degree of specificity. Even earlier, a French article about historical fiction from 1975 distinguishes “microgenre” and “macrogenre”: a microgenre is a more narrowly defined group of texts connected in time and space, whereas a macrogenre is more diffuse and thus harder to generalize about, for instance, historical novels of the era of Walter Scott versus historical novels more broadly construed or the female gothic novels of the 1790s as compared to the long-ranging and multifaceted tradition of the gothic writ large. 4
The microgenre has been assembled with a significant grafting over of differences. While much early Dungeon Synth is an ambient electronic outgrouth of black metal, Jim Kirkwood was coming from a completely different cluster of influences:
Jim Kirkwood – Master of Dragons (1991)
One of the more popular early dungeon synth releases (one that is even tagged as dungeon synth) is 1991’s Master of Dragons by electronic composer Jim Kirkwood. Kirkwood was a UK musician who made a series of fantasy ambient records in the early 90’s. Master of Dragons would be an interesting starting point for dungeon synth as it has the aesthetics and sound for an origin story. As far as I know, Jim Kirkwood had no connection to the 90’s black metal scene, rather his self released fantasy ambient records were just an extension of Berlin School electronics. It is my belief that dungeon synth in 10 or 20 years will have a more formalized history and for now exists as a genre that is being written as we speak. Its history is being constructed almost simultaneously, which makes writing about it strange if not incredibly exciting.
As of now, we have a roadmap of black metal musicians who made synth albums that were a long form version of the interludes that would prelude or act as an epilogue to many black metal demos. Additionally, we have dark ambient musicians who would release synth based records in the same trading circles as black, death, and thrash metal records. These are all well known parts of classic dungeon synth and is the sound tagged as “Old School Dungeon Synth.” It is a world of gloom where there are instances of wonder and magic but it is all cast in a haze of morose shades.
Kaptain Carbon goes on to hymn an early emanation from this “haze of morose shades”:
Mortiis – Født til å herske (1994)
Håvard Ellefsen, better known as Mortiis, is a project which is almost synonymous with classic dungeon synth, or at least the history of dark medieval synth. Mortiis to few was the bassist for the black metal band Emperor from 1993 to 1994. Mortiis to many more was a milestone in the development of what was then called dark dungeon music and a waypoint for future composers to model their sound. While Mortiis would make a variety of music, it is his “Era I” records or the releases that span from 1993 to 1999 that would become the center of reverence. Født til å herske (Born To Rule) is a 53 minute song split into two parts ,which brings the listener into a world of cold and uncaring passages that snake around the undercroft of a long abandoned castle. Between shadows and sunlight, Født til å herske is dramatic in its approach to cast emotion and atmosphere in a macabre play.
Finally, the genre, like black metal, has its examples of works elevated retrospectively by the impact of tragedy:
Enchantment of the Ring has become iconic for its production and sense of wonder which creeps across the ground like fog. For most, Secret Stairways would reach a wider audience decades after its initial release and years after the suicide of Davis in 2011. Both Secret Stairway releases now stand as a shrine to its creator, who seemed to be a mage capable of marrying melody with a lingering sense of loss and grief.
Between Worlds
Reece, of The Wood between Worlds blog, offers up some possibilities for the magic at work in the Wood:
The Alcubierre warp drive engine is a device that stretches the spacetime around a spaceship, forming what is known in scientific literature as the "warp bubble" (really, that's what we call it). Within the warp bubble, the ship is moving at "normal speeds", but outside of the bubble, the ship is moving faster than the speed of light. The geometry for this is known and well understood, and the means of producing it are also fully understood.
You're probably wondering, if we know how to make a warp drive, why we haven't actually... you know... made a warp drive. And that's a wonderful question. We haven't made a warp drive because it requires a lot of stuff that probably doesn't exist, namely negative energy mass. It requires a whole lot of it. Like, ten times the positive mass of the entire universe in negative mass.
Van den Broeck proposed an idea to get around this, one elegant in both its simplicity and apparent absurdity.
Here's what you do: Take a bag. Distort space, so that the inside of the bag is bigger than the outside of the bag. The inside is big enough to hold a spaceship, and the outside if around the Planck length. Now stick your spaceship inside of the bag, and then put a warp bubble around the bag. It requires a lot less negative energy. Voila! Crisis avertedNow, warp drives are cool of themselves, but what I really want to talk about is the device that distorts space so the inside of the bag is bigger than the outside of the bag. This is sometimes called a "van den Brocek bubble", or, somewhat more appropriately, a Bag of Holding.
We've gone from warp drives to the bag of holding, and we're not even done yet. We're going all the way to Narnia. 5
CERN
Regarding the presence of CERN within ME spheres, French writes:
Although a variety of explanations are exchanged among self-identifying ME researchers, the most prominent theorizing about the source of the parallel reality is divided into two separate but interrelated camps. Both camps overlap in that they believe that the LHC at CERN — which has been openly trying to discover extra dimensions and the particles that make up dark matter — has succeeded in either punching a hole in space- time, contacting an alternate dimension, or altering the timeline through experiments which have resulted in the past becoming switched, changed, or deliberately edited. The concept of constructing a people’s history and its direct effect on them is nothing new to historians, but what may be new is the extent to which people in the public sphere are discussing the idea as a real possibility for explaining feelings of global anxiety, confusion, disorder, and postmodernity. In addition to the CERN connection, both camps cite the development of the D-Wave system quantum computers as partly responsible for tampering with the fabric of reality through its complex computational processing operations. According to the D-Wave website:
To speed computation, quantum computers tap directly into an unimaginably vast fabric of reality — the strange and counterintuitive world of quantum me- chanics. Rather than store information using bits represented by 0s or 1s as conventional computers do, quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits, to encode information as 0s, 1s, or both simultaneously. This superposition of states, along with the quantum effects of entanglement and quantum tunneling, enable quantum computers to consider and manipulate many combinations of bits simultaneously.
Both camps of ME researchers believe in a conspiratorial hidden hand of scien- tists, politicians, corporations, “globalists,” and neoliberal financiers working to create a New World Regime in which billions of unconscious, materially distract- ed political subjects are manipulated, oppressed, and dominated. Admittedly, the development of advanced technologies are frequently funded by government security agencies and “D-Wave’s first customer was Lockheed Martin, one of the world’s largest aerospace, information systems, and defense contractors.
[…]
Where the two ME camps differ is on the evangelical front. The first camp subscribes to a mostly secular conspiratorial worldview filled with corrupt busi- nessmen and politicians trying to enslave humanity, with the theories of quantum mechanics and the work carried out at CERN and quantum computers allowing for the possibility of an alternate dimension. However, not all the ME believers in this camp are atheistic, and many subscribe to a type of New Age spirituality with blends of esotericism, quantum mysticism, and Asian religion and philosophy.
The second camp colors their language with biblical references, the dawning apocalypse, Satanic magical rituals, and the rise of the Antichrist, signs for which they locate in all the various aspects of the ME. For this camp, the direction of the world away from God has resulted in these subtle reality alterations, which they interpret as fulfillment of biblical prophecy, citing Daniel 7:25 which states that the Antichrist will “change times/seasons and laws.”
Someone on reddit posted this picture. The picture is definitely photoshopped. The person posting it has denied responsibility for the shop job; allegedly, he downloaded the picture from the internet years and years ago and had it saved in a folder and didn't think about it until the controversy sprung. Photoshop diagnostics show exactly where the image has been altered.
But looking at it... suddenly, everything seems so right. That's what the name used to look like, back in Universe E. That is the name that was on the books. That's what the books should say. – Reece
French lays out a litany of examples of ME, emphasizing the online, digital nature of the discourse around the Effect:
There are, incidentally, hundreds of examples (of M.E.) circulating online.
The movie (and novel) by Anne Rice called Interview with a Vampire has been changed to Interview with the Vampire. The name of the television series Sex in the City is now Sex and the City. The title of the cartoon series Looney Toons is now spelled Looney Tunes. The old TV series Johnny Quest is now spelled Jonny Quest.
The famous line from the TV show I Love Lucy, “Lucy, you’ve got some ‘splaining to do,” was never said on the show. In The Empire Strikes Back (1980) the Star Wars film, the famous line “Luke, I am your Father” has been changed to “No, I am your Father.” The character C-3PO from the Star Wars series is now thought to have a silver leg that it never had before. In Forest Gump (1994), the line “Life is like a box of chocolates” has been changed to “Life was like a box of Chocolates.” In Field of Dreams (1989), the line “If you build it, they will come” has changed to “If you build it, he will come.” The line “Mirror, Mirror on the wall” from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) is now “Magic Mirror on the wall.” In the first Jaws movie (1975), the famous line “We’re going to need a bigger boat” has been changed to “You’re going to need a bigger boat.” Several things have been altered in the original version of The Wizard of Oz (1939). The first is that the line “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore” is now “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” The second is that during a scene in the movie in which the main characters are lost in a scary wood, the Scare- crow now wields a pistol that appears entirely out of place. The memorable opening lyrics of the song from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1968–2001), “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood,” has changed to “It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood.” Another song lyric alteration is the final line from the Queen song We are the Champions (1977), in which Freddy Mercury sings “... of the world” at the end. Now he doesn’t sing that line; the song just ends.
The monkey from the children’s series Curious George (2006–2015) no longer has a tail. Two obscure television shows starring The Brady Bunch from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s called The Brady Brides and The Brady Bunch Variety Hour Show are thought only to exist in this new parallel universe. In the 1980 film The Elephant Man, the ending is no longer sad but uplifting, with a ghost appearing that people seem not to remem- ber. The 1984 Toyota Van, the so-called “terrorist van,” from the first Back to the Future (1985) movie has been changed into the iconic VW Bus. The character Dolly, who is Jaws’s girlfriend in the 1979 James Bond movie Moonraker, no longer has braces. There have also been many changes to names of various actors and famous persons, such as Peanuts creator Charles Schulz (remembered as Charles Shultz), stuntman Evel Knievel (remembered as Evil Knievel), country singer Reba McEntire (remem- bered as Reba McIntyre), and Sally Field (remembered as Sally Fields).
In addition to TV, film, and music changes, a whole host of product logos are thought to have been altered, including Coca-Cola, Yoo-hoo, Cup Noodles, Depend, JCPenney, Oscar Mayer, Totino’s, KitKat, Reddi-wip, Froot Loops, Chick-fil-A, Oxi Clean, Vicks VapoRub, Scott, Skechers, Double Stuf Oreos, Bragg, Febreze, Curad, Johnnie Walker, Ford, Volvo, Volkswagen,and many others. Curiously, most of the corporations behind these brands claim never to have changed and/or updated their logos.
Changes cited in the Holy Bible are too numerous to mention, but I will include a few of the most popular. These pertain to the King James Version, and they are found changed in the physical copies of old, owned KJV bibles, as well as in online versions. One is to be found in Isaiah 11:6. This passage used to begin “The lion and the lamb will lay down together” but now it says: “The wolf will live with the lamb.” In Matthew 9:17, the word “wineskins” here has been changed to wine bottles. Luke 5:24 no longer says bed or mat, but now says: “I say unto thee, Arise, and take up thy couch, and go into thine house.”
Proponents of the ME also believe that the Earth’s geography has been altered, with South America now being too far east, and Australia being much closer to Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. There are many other examples, as well. Human anatomy has also undergone some changes, including the size of various organs such as the liver, as well as the shape, size, and position of floating ribs at the bottom of the ribcage, and the heart is now located in the center of the chest, rather than at the left breast. As with Nelson Mandela’s misremembered death, many changed historical events are frequently cited. Some people believe the “Tank Man” who stood before a column of tanks on June 4, 1989, in Tiananmen Square was killed and run down by the tank, but the man simply halted the line of tanks and was ushered out of harm’s way. Another change is the 1963 Lincoln four-seater that drove John F. Kennedy on the day he was assassinated. Now there are six seats in the Lincoln, and six people too, in the famous video footage and photographs of the assassi- nation. To top things off, Hitler now has blue eyes instead of brown eyes, and one of the spaces you used to be able to buy on a Monopoly game board was called Ventura Avenue but now it is called Ventnor Avenue. And Rich Uncle Pennybags, the mascot of Monopoly, never had a monocle.
And so on, and so on.
Something is shifting in our collective and individual experience of the past. That something seems intimately tied to the digitization and algorithmization of culture. Google New Memory and you get ads for RAM and explainers of the latest innovations in digital memory:
New memory types include:
FeFET or FeRAM: A next-generation ferroelectric memory.
Nanotube RAM: In R&D for years, nanotube RAM is targeted to displace DRAM. Others are developing carbon nanotubes and next-generation memories on the same device.
Phase-change memory: After shipping the first PCM devices, Intel is readying a new version.
As we retrospectively reconfigure or attempt to reclaim the past, new assemblages come into being while certainties are lost. Repeat. And so on and so on…
Aaron French, The Mandela Effect and New Memory, Correspondences 6, no. 2 (2018) 201–233 ISSN: 2053-7158 (Online) correspondencesjournal.com
Deepasri Prasad and Wilma A Bainbridge, The Visual Mandela Effect as evidence for shared and specific false memories across people, Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 2022 prepress for Psychological Science
Kaptain Carbon, Dungeon Synth Primer, synthdigest.com/primers, nd.
Anne H Stevens, Molly C O’Donnell, eds. The Microgenre, A Quick Look at Small Culture. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.
Reece, The Wood Between Worlds blog, www.woodbetween.world, nd.