Dark ambient is the branch of ambient music that trades light and calm for shadow, using deep drones, distant rumbles and vast reverberant spaces to suggest caves, ruins, outer space or the inside of a machine. It grew out of the industrial underground of the 1980s, inheriting that scene’s tape work and taste for unsettling sources, while borrowing the slow, immersive forms of Brian Eno’s ambient records.
The British artist Lustmord, who adopted that name in 1980 with encouragement from Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti of Throbbing Gristle, is widely credited with defining the sound on his third album, Heresy, the result of years of experiments with field recordings. Labels such as Cold Meat Industry and, more recently, Cryo Chamber have given the genre a home, with acts including raison d’être, Kammarheit and Atrium Carceri; Cryo Chamber describes part of its output as cinematic ambient, soundtracks for films that do not exist.