Thoughts on Ambient Music Part 2 - Dark Ambient
Let´s line out the basics in this article. If you prefer watching a complete practical project of making Dark Ambient you will surely like this video:
This way you will find out in what e.g. Mickey Mouse Rock ´n´ Roll is different from Mozart´s “Kleine Nachtmusik”. You´re going to find out what makes a good piece of Mickey Mouse Rock ´n´ Roll, and what you should not do when producing Mickey Mouse Rock ´n´ Roll.
Before you start searching the Internet: Mickey Mouse Rock ´n´ Roll doesn´t exist. I´m using this term only as a virtual example here.
Listen to a lot of pieces and make up your own mind, find your own opinion about the characteristics of the style or genre you´re aiming at. And don´t blindly follow “experts” (not even me!), but trust your own mind, your own musical understanding, your own judgement.
Then start like most pieces of Mickey Mouse Rock ´n´ Roll start, but continue according to your own musical taste, your own ideas (and eventually your own queerness), and your own musical skills. Don´t just copy. You may even change the (probably stereotype) beginning I mentioned at the beginning of this sentence after working on your piece for a while.
And so did I.
Dark Ambient, here I come!
Even the sub-genre “Dark Ambient” doesn´t come along as a coherent block of music, but contains a spectrum of musical styles and approaches with e.g. works of Taphephobia, Heljarrúnar or Lamia Vox etc. at one end, and e.g. Aegri Somnia, Throbbing Gristle or Lustmord etc. at the other end.
So, what do pieces of Dark Ambient music have in common?
What enables us to look at them as members of a certain style or sub-genre?
How can we tell apart Dark Ambient from e.g. Space Ambient, or even from Cinematic Ambient?
Not all of the following musical ingredients are found in every piece of dark ambient, but these are the techniques and components making Dark Ambient (in no special order):
1)
Short pitch successions, rather shreds of a melody than a real melody, which melodically don´t lead anywhere. There´s no melody nor harmonic solution. It´s an extreme short musical question without an answer.
2)
Human voice (or just a hint of a human voice) over brass-like sounds with industrial noises in the background.
3a)
Long reverb tails with a lot of different echoes (different echoing short sounds, often percussion like – not different kinds of echoes), and rather long time spans between the individual echoes.
3b)
The way of using reverb makes it (the reverb) a fully-fledged building element of the piece rather than simply being only an effect. The reverb builds an emancipated voice of its own quite often.
4)
Very far away and faint 2-tone (sometimes 3-tone) melodic snippets over pure drone noises, sometimes even very similar to simple white noise.
5)
Sounds with spectra that don´t contain partials belonging to the natural overtone series. Therefore, even when the pitches (fundamentals) of the played interval or the tones of a short melody snippet might be harmonic and “consonant”, the whole sonic experience is a rather dissonant one. It´s like detuning certain partials in additive synthesis by a halftone or even by only less than a halftone.
6)
Using high quality sounds with Lo-Fi character (I was tempted to say “making a Lo-Fi sound in Hi-Fi quality”).
7)
Using rather minor intervals or chords (if chords at all), using intervals of tension, but embed them in a rather “calming” sonic environment, so that they sound kind of fatalistic, depriving them from the urge to resolve the tension.
8)
Using processed (sometimes extremely processed) nature and animal sounds.
9)
Repeated (again and again) 2-cord (rarely 3-chord) progression that reminds of an endlessly turning wheel of a machine.
10)
Usually no rhythm, but if there is a kind of rhythm, then it´s rather the sound/timbre of the rhythm building instruments than the rhythm itself what´s important.
11)
Quite long and only slightly changing sonic situations.
In my book “Making Ambient Music With Cherry Audio Synths and Effects” there are 2 complete projects of making Dark Ambient, step-by-step explained.
See https://www.dev.rofilm-media.net/node/672 you don´t have to use exactly those Cherry Audio synths which I´m using in a project. You don´t even have to use Cherry Audio synths at all to follow my steps – but it makes things easier if you use the synths and timbres of my examples when you want to reproduce each of the following chapters step by step.
… to be continued
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