Dark ambient is like a marriage between ambient and industrial. Is naturally dark and much more interesting than regular ambient. Doesn'
t feature any cheesy synths, unless made by an ex black metal musician (that oftenly makes people bitch about whether the music is dark ambient or not; it usually is not). Usually doesn'
t feature any guitars. On those rare cases when it does (like in drone
doom), it's definitely non-conventional use.
Much influenced by "musique concrete", dark ambient features recorded sounds, oftenly of non-musical nature.
Dark ambient can have various esthetics. Moaning and chanting, chain rattling (no, that's no ghost) raison d'etre-like
stuff, radioactive droning of Fallout soundtrack,
heavy pounding sounds of mechanisms,
crazy shamanic drum-machine sounds, abrasive noise fragments - all these can make up different moods in dark ambient.
People who
don'
t get dark ambient music, are found scrolling through the tracks in their desperate attempt of finding "where does at least SOME music start?"
There's also a tendency among some cultist freaks to puke up some really lousy synth pads and moans, put runes or pentagrams and some pseudo-religious texts on an album cover and call it "dark ambient", or "pagan/ritual/black dark ambient", or "
neo-satanic
nazi anti-nazi superficial industrial death dark ambient". Trust me, you
don'
t wanna listen to that crap.
