'Creepy' ambient music

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check out GAS. creepy, bubbly and dark. i have it on soulseek. my user name is doom23. i have all their releases on the mille plateaux label, when they were good.

― doom23, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 01:04 (seventeen years ago) link

Does GAS stand for anything?

― Drooone, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 01:10 (seventeen years ago) link

no.

the dude behind the band is wolfgang voigt, he has so many other aliases but under the name GAS he makes this really dark muted techno with beats that are soft and in the background. the overall feeling is of utter despair and bleakness.

― doom23, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 01:19 (seventeen years ago) link

Sounds good to me.

― Drooone, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 01:21 (seventeen years ago) link

Pop music albums as radical as the first album of Wolfgang Voigt's project GAS are scarce. Comparable extremes coming to mind are Napalm Death's "Scum", the self-proclaimed "end of music as we know it" by virtue of being the fastest music ever released on a commercial CD, or Earth's "Earth 2" for being the slowest.

"GAS" is also excessively slow; simply put, it's drone music. In the first track, all your ear can latch on to is a few heavily down-tuned, backwards-played samples of Disco guitar. But actually it took me a backwards playback at 75 rpm to discover that. The resulting texture is so smooth, soothing, subdued, it can almost be felt as a physical presence in the room. And contrary to New Age musics that try to achieve that effect through big production and effects claptrap, "GAS" shines with a very moderate production, the worst thing about this being the frequent clicks as artifacts of sample editing, the best being that it will sound great on any system, at any volume, at any time of the day.

It's interesting to look at the development of GAS' sound. The debut EP on Profan contained four tracks that were very different from each other (more on that to come in a seperate review). The self-titled album takes up where the EP ended, with a very plastic-y and synthetic sound: track 1 is an enlengthened, reduced version of the EP's track 4; track 2 is basically track 1 with a beat added; etc... the whole album basically is a handful ideas stretched out to a whopping (actually, soothing) 77 minutes. All Later GAS albums (I followed through until 2000's "Pop") sounded very different from it, mostly deploying samples from classical music like Schoenberg and Wagner, so "GAS" remains unique and unchallenged to this day.

The album is usually put into the "ambient" drawer. I don't know... Okay, the term "ambient" itself has become pretty vague by today, but the synthetic, monotonous "GAS" is the complete opposite of the sountrack-ish and, well, ambient quality of classics like Eno's "Music For Airports". It's far more abstract (not structurally, but as in "the contrary of concrete, recognizable, image-evoking sound material") and, forgive me, musical than that. When I last read an interview with Wolfgang Voigt in 1999, he insisted that all of his music would be seen simply as pop, and as strange and radical as "GAS" may appear, Voigt's claim makes sense.

― doom23, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 01:24 (seventeen years ago) link

those Gas albums on MP are truly amazing. such a shame that label is out of print.

― sleeve, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 01:26 (seventeen years ago) link

yes, indeed. i have them all on mp. i even bought the first one, the ugly looking one, used here in toronto. the stuff just stood out. the same with vladislav delay.

― doom23, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 01:28 (seventeen years ago) link

ENVENOMIST

tor lundvall, too.

― GOTT PUNCH II HAWKWINDZ, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 06:18 (seventeen years ago) link

nine months pass...

eric michael place's list does not contain NECROPOLIS, whose re-issued 'NECROSPHERE' i have just bought. terrifying stuff. i don't think it's been mentioned on ILX before. some dude from Irkutsk playing drones over field recordings from disused missile shafts.

― Just got offed, Wednesday, 19 December 2007 18:54 (sixteen years ago) link

Nothing, Cordell Klier, Veil of Secrecy, Veiled Illusions, Tribes of Neurot, Toy Bizarre, Bad Sector, Northaunt, Tidal, Bardoseneticcube, Kammarheit, Caul, Bestia Centauri, Heath Yonaites, Amongst Myselves, Amon, Never Known, No Festival of Light, Where, Voice Transmissions With The Deceased, Asmorod, Seth Nehil, Chris Hutton, Negative Thought, Atom Infant Incubator, Ex.Order, Aeolian String

― am0n, Wednesday, 19 December 2007 19:00 (sixteen years ago) link

actually it really has to be said: that list is probably the most crushingly unfathomable I've ever seen on ILM

― Just got offed, Wednesday, 19 December 2007 19:09 (sixteen years ago) link

Maybe ten or twenty of us can divvy up that list and do research?

I want to add the Super Metroid OST Soundtrack. Lots of great 16-bit creepy ambiance there.

I want to hear that Lull record...

― Nate Carson, Thursday, 20 December 2007 01:36 (sixteen years ago) link

Excellent call on Super Metroid, that's some awesome shit! Someone should put that out.

― myopic_void, Thursday, 20 December 2007 16:06 (sixteen years ago) link

And the Eraserhead soundtrack.

And Small Cruel Party!

― Michael Dudikoff presents Action Adventure Theatre, Thursday, 20 December 2007 16:56 (sixteen years ago) link

More good stuff:

. Rapoon (former :Zoviet France: member)
. Terra Sancta - "Aeon" (barren industrial soundscapes, from Australia)
. Rod Modell's "Waveform Transmission", recorded live and allegedly containing sounds of paranormal origin.

― no-nonsense, Thursday, 20 December 2007 17:07 (sixteen years ago) link

"Excellent call on Super Metroid, that's some awesome shit! Someone should put that out."

I ordered mine from Japan. So I can't read the liner notes.

It includes 5 orchestrally arranged versions of Super Metroid tunes, then the entire game soundtracks from the first two games. Also a short sound fx library.

The mastering on the old NES songs (my favorites) is not so great.

I guess it's way out of print now so I'm glad I sprung for it back when I did.

― Nate Carson, Thursday, 20 December 2007 22:01 (sixteen years ago) link

eight years pass...

That massive block of band names from Eric Michael Place brings me to this thread via searches pretty much all the time. Delving into Lustmord and Jeff Grienke lately, The Word As Power and Cities in Fog 1 and 2. Must be the weather (just kidding, it's still like 96 degrees here)

― erry red flag (f. hazel), Sunday, 25 September 2016 05:41 (seven years ago) link

no mention of the caretaker or the stranger (both are james leyland kirby) but he's/they're pretty essential to the genre of *creepy* ambient imo

― davey, Sunday, 25 September 2016 20:28 (seven years ago) link

greinke's cities in fog is stunning; hard to believe it's from the mid 80s.

― clouds, Sunday, 25 September 2016 20:32 (seven years ago) link

https://soundcloud.com/pluver/ingwermix

― Wes Brodicus, Sunday, 25 September 2016 21:16 (seven years ago) link

Creepy ambient >>>>>> emo ambient

― brimstead, Sunday, 25 September 2016 22:14 (seven years ago) link

Nice timing. GAS BOX, 10 LP retrospective from Kompakt, will be released next month. :)

― Allen (etaeoe), Sunday, 25 September 2016 22:17 (seven years ago) link

http://loveallday.com/metal-ambient-vol-1-eternal-infernal/

― tylerw, Sunday, 25 September 2016 22:28 (seven years ago) link

hyped for that gas box, holy shit

― clouds, Monday, 26 September 2016 00:42 (seven years ago) link

i feel like i post this everywhere, but no kevin drumm mentioned itt?

imperial distortion, imperial horizon, tannenbaum

i'll have to look for i mean slsk cities in fog

― savvinesslessness (map), Monday, 26 September 2016 00:51 (seven years ago) link

you'll dig it, it's up yr alley

v murky and churning and gauzy

― clouds, Monday, 26 September 2016 01:44 (seven years ago) link

woah, love it.

― savvinesslessness (map), Monday, 26 September 2016 02:34 (seven years ago) link

tangerine dream 4 lurking clowns

― savvinesslessness (map), Monday, 26 September 2016 02:36 (seven years ago) link

haha, post apocalyptic mutant clowns maybe

― clouds, Monday, 26 September 2016 16:04 (seven years ago) link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6fRK_g8Phs#t=15m

Released in 1981, recorded in 1978 (incredibly)

― 3×5, Monday, 26 September 2016 18:27 (seven years ago) link

It starts getting ambient at about 9:15.

― 3×5, Monday, 26 September 2016 18:28 (seven years ago) link

Robert Ashley "Automatic Writing"
― sherm, Thursday, June 24, 2004 11:57 PM (twelve years ago)

Is this the earliest example?

― sarahell, Monday, 26 September 2016 19:10 (seven years ago) link

creepiest music for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1V4VN6pp5I

― dan selzer, Monday, 26 September 2016 19:14 (seven years ago) link

one year passes...

Some of the creepiest stuff I've heard is Tertium Non Data's first album, 'The Third is Not Given.' A couple of others (Dark Ambient and some not so):[...]

― Eric Michael Place, Friday, June 25, 2004 12:45 AM (fourteen years ago)

man idk, I listened to that Tertium Non Data album and it sounds like one of those video game soundtracks that gamers hype up as "sOmE oF tHe GrEaTeSt AmBiEnT oF aLl TiMe", but when you actually listen to it turns out to be a bunch of cheap dungeon synth jump scares, so you shrug and write it off as a "you had to be there" thing. ilx user ☆ seems to feel the same way, so I feel vindicated. Apophasis by Caul (ex TND member) was also underwhelming. I guess I should spend the next 20-30 years digging deeper into Eric's list?

two recent-ish dark ambient albums that deliver on their promise are Isobel Ccircle's The House in Harbour Park and Thomas P. Heckmann's Ghosts

― the yolk sustains us, we eat whites for days (unregistered), Tuesday, 10 July 2018 17:17 (five years ago) link

Things were different in 2004. Hell was further away.

― com rad erry red flag (f. hazel), Tuesday, 10 July 2018 19:01 (five years ago) link

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