Dark drone ambient. I wasn’t interested in this movie at all, but if this is the soundtrack (wtf?) I should really give it a shot.
Lustmord – First Reformed (Extended Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Loscil – Endless Falls
Fantastic atmospheric ambient. Mostly beatless but still has a pulsation feel to it. Great for walks, thinking, and working.
Evigt Mörker - Krona
For the first listen I was hooked on this. For the second listen I found it boring. It’s totally up to mood and state of mind, but it’s a good minimal techno album. Also it shows that it’s a debut, some way to go, but worth keeping an eye on.
Johanna Knutsson – Tollarp Transmissions
Relaxing ambient. The album, honestly, is nothing special. But it’s a great asset on a day like this when I want to enclose myself in my shell and wish noone talked to me. Headphones on and listening to this feels protective.
Robot Koch - Sphere
Slow moving, bass heavy, moody, atmospheric, ambient electro. For me it’s not that kind of dark to be dark ambient, but it has a gloomy scifi vibe for sure. Could be an alternative soundtrack to Moon.
Oliver Koletzki – The Arc Of Tension
Deep-tech house with an ambient vibe. Soothing and conveying energy at the same time. Great for work.
Tim Hecker – Anoyo
Hecker’s Japanese trip is an elegantly spaced ambient composition. Negative space, Japanese instruments, digital noise, ritual, calm, sacral scents.
RX-101 - Dopamine
I like that they call this braindance.
Daniel Thorne – Lines of Sight
Modern composition melting acoustic and electronic. The saxophonist background comes through at certain points. Has the vibe of some power noise but it is still atmospheric ambient.
The Black Dog – Black Daisy Wheel
Ambient dreamscapes with occasional thumping rhythms. Atmospheric soundtrack to slowly panning images of motion frozen in still frames.
“The mindset is beyond paranoid, the discourse so far post-fact that only opinion and assumed identity matter. […] The impact on mental health is corrosive: fear, uncertainty and doubt multiply and replicate until the most ridiculous theories are invented to explain the most basic things: tarmac, banana skins, duvets. […] The distinction between the real world and the world of an auto-hoaxer is so blurred that reality melts away; you’re only ever one personal detail away from being doxxed, at which point reality bites back, hard.”
Interesting to see that almost all moody ambient music lately are released with sleeve notes about a dystopian present, social degeneration, meaninglessness of communication, an evaporating trust in anything or anyone, and so on. One thing to note here is that these are not about dystopian futures anymore, but a dystopian current state. The other thing is that there are no megacorporations, alien intruders, getting lost in seventeenth dimensions, or black magic, all the various tropes of dark ambient are gone today, and everything is just a large blur of resignation, pointlessness and disappointment of people, our lives, the world.