Darkest Atmosphere

CWs: Nazi mentions, suicide mention (not personal), death mentions, horror movies

I’ve mentioned my love for dark ambient music elsewhere on here, I’m sure, but I wanted to write a post about when I first got into it, and I guess explain what I love about it. First, I am thinking back to arond 2008, which is when I first got into what is commonly called “dark ambient” music. At its core, dark ambient is just that, a darker version of ambient music, with unsettling noises, like something out of a horror movie soundtrack. I personally have a pretty expansive definition of the genre, which others may disagree with, however. It’s a genre which also defies genre, arguably. Note: I’ll try to provide Discogs, or perhaps YT, links for the albums I mention, wherever possible.

Between 2006-2008 is when I first played the Silent Hill series, namely 1-3. I remember being struck by how much I loved the music in those games. It was wildly discordant, grating, terrifying, but also… lovely. I loved how much more unsettling it made already-unsettling games. It really set the mood and cranked up the terror, infusing the atmosphere throughout with deepest dread. I did some digging and found out that the composer Akira Yamaoka’s soundtracks for the games were available. I was already an avid collector of game soundtracks, having collected Final Fantasy and other soundtracks for at least a decade at that point. I thought Yamaoka’s work was a one-off, but no, he was part of what I found out was a long tradition of people making similarly discordant, terrifying music, which I found out was called “dark ambient.” A whole genre of this? What wonderful news!

Imagine my delight when one day, poking around on The Pirate Bay, I found a huge torrent of dark ambient music. Honestly, it was like “Dark Ambient 101” for me, with a massive sampling of tons of albums from the genre. I was floored at the variety and the timeframe. I honestly wish I had a copy of that torrent still, just for the albums list alone, since it was staggeringly large. Some of the highlights included Lustmord, originally a member of seminal industrial group S.P.K., who later struck out on his own and became a pioneer in dark ambient music, doing recordings underground and in other liminal, terrifying spaces. There were a ton of confusing artists on that list I’d never heard of before. Honestly, this looks like the one, but I am not seeing Lustmord on that list, strangely, so I don’t remember where I found out about his stuff.

I always liked the idea of ambient music in general, music more devoted to atmosphere, something that could be put on in the background, or simply luxuriated in, a calmative balm for the mind and soul. I remember buying an album of nature sounds that was meant to evoke being near a river, with animal sounds and everything, and while I generally loved it, I wanted something more than just that. Of course, one can go out in nature and experience that, but it was still nice to have that available to play any time I wanted. I think that partially inspired me to get into ambient in general, as I loved the idea of relaxing music in general, often without vocals, something to just soothe the mind ideally. But dark ambient is really the opposite of that, meant to unsettle and unnerve. Nonetheless, I love horror movie and horror in general, so being scared and unnerved was the point. A way to experience that through music alone.

Unfortunately, delving into the darker corners of the musical world, unsurprisingly, involves Nazis. I remember listening through the whole torrent systematically, checking each album out, and some of it was more unsettling than usual, but not for the right reasons. The group Wappenbund, for example, an Austrian “martial music” project, liberally sampled what appeared to be Nazi speeches, and many song titles referrred to Nazi-adjacent themes such as Heimat (“Homeland”) &c. I can’t remember the other instances with that band but they were very icky. Kriegsfall-U, Derniere Volonte (“Last Will,” a French project, which had a track “Arbeit Macht Frei,” IIRC), and Allerseelen (“All Souls”) were a few particularly egregious examples. I think this tends to come with the territory, especially in “black metal” and industrial circles, and that’s why I stay away from that sort of thing. So if you check out that torrent, you can safely avoid those bands IMHO. It’s a shame that darkness begets darkness I suppose.

With those concerns in mind, there is plenty of dark ambient that doesn’t fall into those particular issues. Lustmord, again, is the gold standard for dark ambient, IMHO, and I have most of his discography. I think Heresy (1990) was the first album of his I heard, and I remember being astonished at the vast sense of emptiness all of his music evoked, just a deep dark void. I loved dark ambient so much for a while that I did some “sleep experiments” here and there. These consisted of filling a VLC playlist with hours of dark ambient albums, and playing it all night at low volume through my speakers. I had hoped it would generate nightmares, but I don’t think it ever did anything. A great album for this would be Robert Rich’s Somnium (2001), which was an 8hr (?) “sleep concert” intended for just that: listening all night, and perhaps generating interesting dreams. I don’t think I’ve ever tried that one, though.

I lived in San Francisco at the time, and I very clearly remember filling my iPod with albums from that dark ambient torrent and systematically going through them. Listening on the bus en route to/from school, listening on the BART, whatever, y’know? For some reason I remember taking the BART way down south to Fremont or so with my girlfriend at the time, and spending a lot of that long trip (we lived in San Francisco proper) listening to the iPod, thinking about what I would keep and what I’d get rid of. In terms of music, I’ve pretty much always operated that way, “reviewing” albums and deciding what stays and what goes, especially back in the day when we all had much less HDD space. At the time, I was finishing up my MA in Classics, and worried about getting into a PhD program; in some ways the dark ambient music intensified that existential dread, but it was also weirdly comforting.

I gotta say, I buy almost all of my music these days, since much of what I listen to ends up being indie artists on Bandcamp vel sim., but the internet was instrumental in forging me into a music fan. I always liked music, but found out about tons and tons of albums via the internet that I would never (or only very belatedly, if at all) have heard of otherwise. Recommendations from friends, my own explorations, and all of that, coalesced to aid me in developing my music tastes. And even if I’d pirated an album in the past, that would often inspire future purchases of the same artist’s work. And I’d tell others about their work, and it goes on and on. As many problems as the internet creates, I know my music taste would be much less varied without it; so many artists have a platform these days, thanks to things like Bandcamp, who would not necessarily be able to get their music out on a major label, and would perhaps even have a difficult time with physical distribution on a large scale such as the internet provides.

So I got into Lustmord and his various side projects (Isolrubin BK’s Crash Injury Trauma (1993), the aural equivalent of multiple car crashes, a collaboration with Andrew Lagowski; his collaboration with Robert Rich on a “soundtrack” for Tarkovsky’s Stalker; his searingly haunting early work A Document of Early Acoustic and Tactical Experimentation (1991); his earlier collaboration with Lagowski on the project Terror Against Terror), and I still consider Lustmord’s work a high-water mark in the genre. Robert Rich, as I mentioned a bit earlier, also did some fantastic stuff, but tends more on the dreamy than dark side, but I still highly recommend his work, especially the lovely 2CD Trances and Drones (1994).

Another work, which may be a stretch, is Delia Derbyshire & Barry Bermange’s Inventions for Radio: Dreams (1965). This was a BBC production where Delia, almost universally-acknowledged as a pioneer in electronic music, first set up an eerie background of electronic noise. Over that were deftly laid samples from a BBC documentary on dreams, with various people talking about not only terrifying but also lovely drewams they’d had. Some of the lines continually haunt me from that album. It’s terrifying but also amazing and I highly recommend it. I have it under the dark ambient umbrella, personally, but again, I mentioned I have a fairly broad definition of the genre. I found out about this particular album from the legendary MP3 blog “Mutant Sounds,” which AFAIK is still up, but the links are probably rotted to hell, unfortunately. But if you come across it, it’ll give you album titles at least so you know what to seek out.

Speaking of Mutant Sounds, another “dark ambient” album I really love is Lutz Rahn’s Solo Trip (1978). More properly, this is a synthy electronic album. Rahn was part of the group Novalis; I don’t know a lot about their work, but apparently they were reasonably successful. This is his “solo trip,” his only (to my knowledge) solo record. It’s short but powerful. “Galaxy Taxi” is probably my favorite track on the album. I don’t know how to categorize it other than dark ambient; it’s electronic, for sure, but has a dark melancholy to it. And the album cover has Rahn in a terrifying clown mask. Yikes.

One of the albums in that first batch from the torrent is Staruha Mha’s excellent and terrifying Rusali (2003). I remember first hearing “And the Trees Woke Up,” and being astonished that it literally sounded like being in the middle of the forest, with sounds almost like trees walking around and rustling branches. That and the follow-up, Fires (2004), are both excellent. Unfortunately, the artist behind the project killed himself (so the Discogs page says), but we have these two excellent albums at least, and I am grateful for them.

Jeff Greinke is another, I’d argue, dark ambient artist, mostly active in the 1980s. His album Cities In Fog (1985) is a trippy one, and I have two others. I don’t know a lot about him, but I think his music would fit the traditional definition of “dark ambient.” I’m pretty sure that particular album is one of the earlier ones I have in the genre.

So where am I going with all of this? I honestly don’t entirely know. I wanted to share with y’all some of the albums I love, and why I love them, and how I got into the genre in general. I’ve mentioned a lot of what I’d consider seminal albums in the genre, but I want to talk about some newer entries that are entirely worthwhile as well.

One of the great practitioners of dark ambient these days is, IMHO, BLAKMOTH. IIRC, I found out about BLAKMOTH via the Black Artist Database (formerly Black Bandcamp) site. I’d link to the page, but it appears to be down, unfortunately, at least for me. I’ve been slowly collecting BLAKMOTH’s discography over time and I imagine I’ll keep doing so for awhile; he has a ton of albums! BLAKMOTH’s work reminds me a lot of early Lustmord, but of course he makes it his own, and crafts some truly terrifying soundscapes. Highly recommend checking his work out!!

Disparition, most famous, arguably, for contributing music to the Welcome to Night Vale podcast, also does some fabulous work. I’ve been slowly collecting his work over time as well, and highly recommend starting with Transmutations (2007), although there are earlier albums. His output is extremely varied, but pretty much always unsettling, IMHO, and that is a positive thing!

I gotta say, Library of the Occult Records is putting out some fabulous stuff. I first found out about them from a friend, IIRC, and much of their output is by artists producing soundtracks for films that don’t exist. The first album of theirs I got was The Unseen’s The GOATMAN (OST) (2021), a “soundtrack” to what would be an excellent folk horror movie, if it existed. Similarly excellent is Grave Owl’s The Solar Crypt (2022); I get some serious Abominable Dr. Phibes vibes from this album (but played deadly serious, without the camp), and it’s full of dread. Other highlights include Dream Division’s Lumarian (2023) (which I have in my Electronic folder for some reason, though), and, most recently, Traffik Island’s Ghost Notes (2024) and Witchboard’s *Incidental Goth Club Music for Television and Film (2024. Pretty much, I get emails from the label every once in awhile and look for something I want to check out, and rarely am steered wrong.

I also want to mention PILOTPRIEST’s music here. Most of his output is firmly electronic, but his soundtrack for the movie COME TRUE (2020) is utterly terrifying and absolutely deserving of the dark ambient moniker. I have it listed under Soundtracks, though, and his other work mostly falls under Electronic, at least for me.

Another great album is Dani Mari & Johnny Butler’s The Three Mothers: Le Tre Madri (2016), which is inspired by Dario Argento’s “Three Mothers” horror movie trilogy (Suspiria, Inferno, and Mother of Tears). It’s a lovely tribute to a terrifying series. Speaking of trilogies, there is another great Library of the Occult album called The Beyond: Music Inspired by the Lucio Fulci Death Trilogy (2021). This is, as the name suggests, inspired by Italian low-budget horror maestro Lucio Fulci’s “Gates of Hell” trilogy (City of the Living Dead, The Unseen, and House By the Cemetery). Those movies are ridiculously bizarre, gory, and scary, and definitely worth watching, but not for the squeamish. This album very much evokes the unsettling, creepy vibes of that trilogy.

That’s about all I’ve got. Just wanted to share my love of dark ambient with y’all and who knows, maybe you’ll find an album or two you like in this bunch! Thanks for reading <3