- Brian Williams first made reference to Dark Matter back in 2001, and even then it was "long-delayed." The album's concept is still promising 15 years later: music made from recordings of deep space and cosmic activity between 1993 and 2003, collected from a variety of sources, including NASA. What does deep space sound like? It's foreboding and impossibly huge, enveloping and empty all at once. In other words, it sounds like a Lustmord record, albeit a near-impenetrable one that makes his previous albums sound like a walk in the park.
"Dark matter" refers to an unknown material estimated to make up about 27% of the universe, and this album is similarly implacable. It's droning and all-encompassing, coating any environment it enters with a sense of dread and wonder. If outer space is thought of as a vacuum with no life or sound, then Dark Matter paints a more fanciful picture. Here, deep space is a never-ending vista of the unknowable, saturated with the humming and buzzing of the universe.
From the first moment of "Subspace" you're suspended in Williams' severe world, a stage-setting that dwarfs and immerses the listener. Trying to pick out details in the audio is like squinting to see shapes in a pitch-black room. As your ears adjust, you notice things: pockets of static, a high whooshing that's somewhere between whale cries and sonar pings. The latter sound repeats irregularly throughout Dark Matter, disappearing during the formidable rumble of "Astronomicon" and then surfacing again later. It's one of the only recognizable motifs on a record that otherwise feels like a wall of atmospheric noise.
Though the mood is no different from previous Lustmord records, Dark Matter is more opaque. Williams is largely credited with inventing dark ambient, but Dark Matter toes a line between that genre and regular ambient music. A Lustmord classic like Heresy made use of guitar and other instruments in a way typically associated with rock music, while his last album, The Word As Power, prominently featured vocals. They had unnerving melodies and progressions, tension and release. Dark Matter has nothing of the sort. It's just the lonely sound of outer space, manipulated into formless, 20-plus-minute compositions.
Tracklist01. Subspace
02. Astronomicon
03. Black Static