Lustmord is the long-running project of Brian Williams, a Welsh-born musician who came up through London’s post-punk and industrial circles around 1980 and worked for a time with the Australian group SPK. His records are often treated as the cornerstone of dark ambient: slow, subterranean masses of low frequency, with little melody and a strong sense of physical space.
The defining example is Heresy, released by Soleilmoon in 1990. Its liner notes describe material taken from location recordings in crypts, caverns, mines, deep shelters and catacombs, together with sounds of seismic and volcanic origin, worked on between 1987 and 1989 with a modest Atari computer whose samples lasted barely a second. In the early 1990s Williams moved to California, where he worked as a composer and sound designer on dozens of Hollywood films while collaborating with artists including Tool, Robert Rich and the Melvins.