Black metal ambient (Part I)

What does the metalhead do on their day off and why is it ambient? I listened to all the “black ambient” releases from the 90s to find out. If you were to press me on a pithy definition of metal, I would say it’s music written through the organisation of riffs. This means it can choose to bypass the traditional verse/chorus structure, but doesn’t always do so. This focus on the riff makes it distinct from equivalent genres that eschew the traditional song format such as jazz, which does so through extensive improvisation, or ambient/electronica through elaborate experiments in tone and texture. There you go. Over fifty years of music discourse disposed of in a few sentences no I won’t elaborate. This makes black metal as conceived in the early 90s so curious. It was, in some respects, metal’s first attempt at moving beyond the riff. An attempt that never reached fruition precisely because very few people were alive to this potential at the time. Namely, in taking the leap from…

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