Dark Ambient

In the eighties and the nineties, the dark ambient music genre emerged along with the introduction of the new sampling and synthesizer technology. Overall, dark ambient is considered to be a very diverse music genre that is related to noise, industrial music, black metal and ethereal wave, generally it is yet still free from the connections and derivatives of the other styles or genres.

Brian Eno:
From the man who first coined the phrase ‘ambient music’, comes albums that wander to the fringe and experiment with the dark ambient genre. Partially, the dark ambient music genre evolved based on several of the early collaborations of Brian Eno that had a discordant or distinctly dark edge, most notably “An Index of Metals” which was a collaboration that was done with Robert Fripp which incorporated very harsh guitar feedback. Eno’s On Land is probably his darkest and you will find that there are acoustic sounds mixed together with the electronic ones. However, these are sounds that have been treated and sometimes it is almost unrecognizable. What the music does evoke is a very alien scary landscape.

Other Dark Ambient Artists:
Aphex Twin or Richard James is yet another dark ambient musician and his Selected Ambient Works also treads the dark pathe but is not as scary as Eno’s. However, all of the mystery abounds. Robert Rich and Steve Roach too have experimented with dark ambient music. There are also a couple of black metal bands like Mortiis and Burzum that were able to produce ambient music, but it didn’t always consist of a dark atmosphere.

The ambient industrial projects such as Lustmond, Coil, Lilith, Nocturnal Emissions and Zoviet France, all evolved out of the eighties industrial music and were known to be some of the earliest artists to consistently create dark ambient music. During the latter part of the eighties and the early part of the nineties, there was an ethereal wave trend that was able to emerge within the movement of the dark wave music, which has a tendency of having atmospheric moody pieces instead of minor key jangly rock. The ethereal wave was associated mainly with the record label Projekt, with bands such as Black Tape for a Blue Girl which was music that ranged into the moody soundscapes of ambient music.

By the middle of the nineties, there were several artists that were working together within the ambient noise, ambient industrial, ethereal wave, isolationism, illbient, and other emerging styles of dark ambient music. Among all of these artists, you will find Vidna Obmana, Autopsia, Lull, Daniel Menche, and Shinjuku Thief.