Review Summary: Dark ambient is loneliness.
I think most of us remember the first time we were truly spooked by a piece of music. For me, it was as a child browsing the old Flash version of Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music, naively clicking on the "Dark Ambient" button on the site's Downtempo page and being subjected to "Q-Tip" from Tetsu Inoue's Psycho-Acoustic. I was young and had never really been exposed to truly menacing music - the closest I had ever come was the relatively epic thrust of metal classics like Metallica's "Enter Sandman" and Iron Maiden's "Run to the Hills"; undeniably dark songs that broadened the borders of what emotions music could express to me, but not truly scary.
I couldn't tell you for certain when my obsession with horror and ink-black works of art started, but it was without a doubt around the same time. I was sick a lot as a child - first with near constant bouts of strep throat that kept me stuck at home for a frankly ridiculous portion of third grade, and then later with pneumonia that struck me on back to back years, keeping me holed up for weeks, hacking up phlegm and trying to escape the delirium by sequestering myself in the cool, dark guest room we had hidden away in the basement of the house I grew up. At the same time, I began to suffer worse and worse depression, exacerbated by the involuntarily lonely school life I had, with little to no real close friends at most points and an inability to figure out how to connect with my classmates. My loneliness and feelings of being only tenuously connected to the world manifested in what bordered on an obsession with violent, scary, and depressing media, especially video games. Being into creepy games on YouTube around 2010 invariably brought me to Peanut3423, whose Top 10 videos on creepy game bosses and moments eventually funneled me into his compendiums of "Disturbing Video Game Music." Between this and my earlier exposure to Tatsu Inoue's music, dark ambient and other music that seeked to utilize its atmosphere to disturb and unsettle became something exalted in my mind.
To its credit, the more I digged into the genre when I got a bit older and finally had the means to seek out that music, the more I became genuinely enamored with its techniques and the emotional depths it could plunder. For a time, it was not only my favourite genre of music, but even what I was most known for making myself as a solo artist. And while it continued to be an object of fascination for how scary it could be, eventually I would have to come to terms with the idea that not every dark ambient record needs to be Heresy, if not for artistic reasons then at least for genre tagging reasons as I was becoming more and more of the unimpeachable genre nerd I am today.
Dark ambient is loneliness.
Morals and Dogma is the fourth solo full length record from Deathprod, the solo project of Helge Sten, best known outside of it for his work with free improv supergroup Supersilent and indie-psych juggernauts Motorpsycho. It is, one a base level, a simple work. There is no underlying concept, no greater theme, only a collection of four tracks, each as minimal in construction and drawn out in structure as the last. If any dark ambient record should capture my mind, it should not be this one.
And yet, in the four years since I first listened to it, I have been unable to forget about this album even a little bit. It has so thoroughly infiltrated my mind that my entire concept of dark ambient has been redefined in its image. When I think of this genre, this the music I imagine.
Dark ambient is, by definition, a fairly amorphous and open to interpretation genre. There are no true universal techniques or textures, and each musician is free to come up with whatever sound will convey the atmosphere they wish to implant in the listener's psyche. For that reason, it's a genre very fascinated with timbre and the way that sounds can be combined and manipulate to create something new. In this regard, Morals and Dogma is a masterful exercise in simplicity. Each track features on a few sounds, eked out through a combination of field recordings, violins, and more esoteric instrumentation such as pump organs and saws. Despite the relatively small pool of sounds, Morals and Dogma is diverse in both its actual sound and the moods it channels. Opener Tron and closer Cloudchamber are both oppressive, atonal texture exhibitions that make use of Ole-Henrik Moe's violin and saw to create low, rumbling soundscapes, but they convey almost entirely separate concepts. Tron resembles the rumbling of an engine machine - it hums in an unnatural way, rumbling with the turning of unseen gears and hissing with steam. It constantly builds in intensity, threatening to break apart but never quite doing so. Volume and the frequency spectrum are used masterfully here - the drones and wind recordings that make it up not only increase in volume as the piece gets more intense, but also expand from the midrange into the extremes of pitch, layering the abyssal rumbling of crushers and pistons with the constant nervous squeak of creaky machinery and air rushing through rusted pipes. the mechanics of the machine are eldritch and implicitly hostile - one can only imagine what kind of hideous act it was built to perform. Like the Thresher from DUSK, it's huge and labyrinthine but also rusted, stained red with time as a decidedly non-futuristic affront to life.
Cloudchamber is similarly edritch but in a much more natural and primordial way. Where Tron feels like a walk through constructed machinery that invites you to imagine what horrors it contains, Cloudchamber is the descent into an abyss that simply defies human comprehension. Its grinding drones and monolithic low hum are the jet black stone walls that both trap you and push you away, simultaneously claustrophobic and agoraphobic. Though the piece derives its name from Harry Partch's cloud chamber bowls, a deeply beautiful and meditative instrument characterized by a complex but crystal clear tone, it is anything but serene. Every layer of sound design crammed into it only heightens the simultaneous feelings of repulsive, constrained horror and deep, unsettled curiosity. The air within swirls, not in the sense of steam being pushed out of a machine but in the sense of deep clouds of fog and plumes of wind dancing through a cavernous abyss.
Dark ambient is loneliness.
Much like how Morals and Dogma's bookending tracks are bound by dense atonal soundscapes, the two tracks that make up its middle are similarly bound by their own tonal and melancholic sound. Featuring Hans Magnus Ryan's violin and harmonium as driving elements, Dead People's Things and Orgone Donor both define their atmosphere around the intersection of texture with melody and harmony. Orgone Donor is the brightest and most alive-sounding of the tracks - its beginning almost gives the impression of respite from the impenetrable darkness of the rest of the record, with a shimmering and resonant E major chord that expands into an almost folksy ambient melody. Inevitably, though, it is subverted, and while the resulting landscape is still undeniable pastoral, it's a tainted pasture, reeking of death and violence and only narrowly holding onto its natural identity. Ryan and Moe's violins duet not in clear tones but in scratchy tremolos and squeaked out high notes that sputter and gasp for air. There's a menace here, but it isn't one borne of being blind to the horrors within, but of the subversion of something peaceful and sacred. This land still exists - the plants grow, the water wheel spins, the sun shines - but what should be a beautiful and safe place is perverted not only by the rot subjected to it, but by something much deeper and more insidious - crushing solitude.
In fact, this whole album is artfully and masterfully empty. Tron and Cloudchamber hint that they might contain something eldritch within but they never deliver on that premise, instead gleefully tormenting you with soundscapes that never climax, only hold you in a state of discomfort that you never get the comfort of having resolved. It's a lot deeper and more existentially terrifying, knowing that you're never going to get the answers or know if the horrors of your imagination resemble reality. None of these tracks even really have a proper ending - they fade away, or in the case of Orgone Donor, end sharply. They mostly don't really have a strong, concrete beginning either, preferring to fade in in medias res to an already existing drone. To give them a satisfying structure like that would be, in some sense, missing the point. You aren't meant or able to get the whole picture, and to place bookends on these pieces would be to make them into something designed for you to experience and thus reduce their scope, giving away the ghost that these are the singular creations of one dude and some of his friends making music rather than echoes of a place and time that really exists. The horror comes not from what you experience, but from what you don't, and Morals and Dogma is fundamentally structured around projecting the illusion of something much bigger than itself. To truly be in solitude, you need to believe there's something out there to miss.
Dark ambient is loneliness. Not a tender and fragile loneliness as expressed by the willowly singer-songwriters of the world, but a deep, ontological loneliness that burrows into your mind and changes how you see the world around you. Nowhere is this more apparent than on Morals and Dogma's second and longest track, Dead People's Things. While it mirrors Orgone Donor's commitment to melding tonal pitch and texture to create its atmosphere, it stands in contrast to the rest of the album by embracing something no other piece does - coherent and consistent melody. Its construction is seemingly even more simple than the rest of the album - a low drone, the muted bristling of Ryan's violin, a simple synth line playing a devastatingly haunted melody that weeps with a sadness that is exceeded in how unsettled it is only by how beautiful it is - but across the span of over 18 minutes it manages to feel like the most emotionally complex selection this record has to offer. Unlike the others, I can't readily identify the single atmosphere being most clearly conveyed here; there is no machine, there is no abyss, there is no tainted pastoral landscape. All there is is a deeply destabilizing nostalgia. Dead People's Things remembers the past in uncertain but certainly melancholic terms. It views the world through unclear focus but with a determination that something has been lost, something has been left empty. It rocks me to my core - I try not to let myself feel empty and mournful, but this piece makes me feel the weight of a kind of loneliness that can't be sated, only delayed and distracted from. It's a loneliness that has haunted me to some degree my whole life, and will probably continue to haunt me until my (hopefully much delayed) grave. It is existential and pulls you away from the earth itself, leaving you shivering and unable to grasp at anything that might drive it away for good. At the end of everything, Morals and Dogma says, it is cold, it is empty, and it is deeply, beautifully, achingly, crushingly lonely.
