On February 18, 1980, about 20 people tucked into a compact basement studio in the the Hackney borough of London to spend an hour watching Throbbing Gristle invent an album. One of those lucky few was a fellow by the name of Brian Williams. After this event, he went on to work with SPK for a bit and then created Lustmord. The first LP he did under this moniker in 1981 was decent enough industrial noise, but Brian had something more insidious brewing in the depths. It wasn't until his appearance on The Fight Is On compilation in 1985 that this new direction would start to reveal itself, followed up and more fully fleshed out on his 1986 sophomore release, Paradise Disowned. But it was his third album in 1990, Heresy, which would put into practice the potential he'd been building towards.
The fundamentals of ambient music had been lingering in the alternative music scene for nearly two decades with the likes of Eno and some of the German bands of the 1970s. The KLF brought it into the "rave" scene's emerging "chill rooms" with their 1990 Chill Out album. Lustmord took this moody, spacious aesthetic someplace else, however. He took it into the netherworld, someplace dark and deep and resonating with subsonic looming and dooming frequencies that could conjure the most ancient Mephistophelian deities.
Heresy wasn't so much released as it emerged from the darkness and the deep. It barely contains anything even identifiable as "musical". It's mostly a sensation of moving air and vibrations so low and deep, they're almost imperceptible while making you feel like the ground is swelling beneath you. You can feel the hot, slow breath of Satan himself exhaling from these depths. This is a soundtrack for lost souls, forever doomed to wander the catacombs of eternity. In other words, it's fucking HEAVY shit, but it doesn't need distortion or thundering drums to pull you down into itself. You can just let go and fall into the infinite abyss.
Heresy set the pace for pretty much every Lustmord album that came after it. Brian would go on to refine his approach to give it even greater breadth and scope in releases like my personal favorite, The Place Where the Black Stars Hang. But it was Heresy that staked out that territory first and deserves the credit for inspiring so many of us to grab a torch and go spelunking into these caverns of sounds for ourselves.
The fundamentals of ambient music had been lingering in the alternative music scene for nearly two decades with the likes of Eno and some of the German bands of the 1970s. The KLF brought it into the "rave" scene's emerging "chill rooms" with their 1990 Chill Out album. Lustmord took this moody, spacious aesthetic someplace else, however. He took it into the netherworld, someplace dark and deep and resonating with subsonic looming and dooming frequencies that could conjure the most ancient Mephistophelian deities.
Heresy wasn't so much released as it emerged from the darkness and the deep. It barely contains anything even identifiable as "musical". It's mostly a sensation of moving air and vibrations so low and deep, they're almost imperceptible while making you feel like the ground is swelling beneath you. You can feel the hot, slow breath of Satan himself exhaling from these depths. This is a soundtrack for lost souls, forever doomed to wander the catacombs of eternity. In other words, it's fucking HEAVY shit, but it doesn't need distortion or thundering drums to pull you down into itself. You can just let go and fall into the infinite abyss.
Heresy set the pace for pretty much every Lustmord album that came after it. Brian would go on to refine his approach to give it even greater breadth and scope in releases like my personal favorite, The Place Where the Black Stars Hang. But it was Heresy that staked out that territory first and deserves the credit for inspiring so many of us to grab a torch and go spelunking into these caverns of sounds for ourselves.
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