Dark Ambient

Dark ambient music is much as one would expect from the name: ominous, droning ambience that evokes a sense of solitude or loss. Born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, dark ambient has had loose ties with industrial, noise, neo-classical and black metal, more through connections of the artists who have contributed to it than any overt musical similarities. As with all ambient music, composition is inspired largely by found sound sources and incidental noises of the world around us--the monotonous hum of machinery, radio telescope or natural field recordings, crowd noise. Samples are often garbled and distorted beyond recognition, overlaid with electronic atmospherics and other elements to complete the desired mood.

Dark ambient artists covered on Darktronica are most likely to fall in the ambient industrial category, full of metallic droning, bass rumblings and white noise static. While dark ambience rarely contains typical rhythmic patterns or beats, songs are frequently of a repetitive, ritualistic nature; visual themes, in performances and on album artwork, often deal with the abstract, the occult, or minimalist motifs.

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