Heresy

Heresy is the record that invented dark ambient and the reason it still works is that almost nothing on it was made by an instrument.

Williams had come out of SPK, the Australian industrial group, and his method here is documentary rather than compositional: he took DAT recorders into places with the acoustics he wanted — crypts, caves, tunnels, slaughterhouses, empty industrial buildings — recorded what was there, and then processed those recordings until the source was gone and only the space remained. What you hear across the album's hour is reverberation with things moving in it, pitched down, with a sub-bass bed underneath that is below the threshold of most domestic speakers.

That is why the record is genuinely difficult to listen to in a way that intentional horror music usually is not. There is no melody, no pulse, no development and no human presence. There is a very large, very cold space, and it has something in it.

It is a record about volume and equipment

Heresy is the clearest case in this index of a work that changes completely depending on how you play it. On laptop speakers it is close to silence with occasional rumbles. On headphones it is claustrophobic. On a system that reproduces below forty hertz it is physically oppressive — the low content is the composition, and most listeners have simply never heard the album. Williams has been explicit about designing for that register.

Where it leads

Williams spent the following three decades as one of the most-hired sound designers in Hollywood, and the lineage runs directly from this record into mainstream horror and science fiction sound. Almost every rumbling, bottomless, sub-bass-driven dread cue of the last twenty years is a descendant, and a great deal of what Hereditary (OST) and Under the Skin (OST) do was made available by this album.

Where it is less interesting

It is an hour long and it does not vary much. Heard as music it is formless, and the distinction between its sections is a matter of degree. There is no entry point, no hook and nothing to hold, and for a very large number of listeners there is simply nothing happening.

For the same abandonment of music for mass, Black One and Time Machines; for the piece that established the vocabulary thirty years earlier, Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.

The short answer: it fades. Heresy is constructed as a continuous movement through a single enormous space rather than as a sequence of pieces, and it resolves by withdrawing — the upper material thins out, the moving elements stop, and the low bed decays until it is below audibility. There is no final gesture, no cadence and no silence that announces itself; on most systems the record is still playing after you think it has finished, because the last few minutes are almost entirely sub-bass. The album has been issued in different configurations, including a version divided into numbered parts and later remastered editions with different durations, but every version ends the same way: by draining out rather than stopping.

What are the field recordings on Heresy?

Williams has described recording in crypts, caves, tunnels, slaughterhouses and derelict industrial buildings, chasing specific acoustic properties rather than specific sounds. The recordings were then pitched down and processed until the source is unidentifiable — you cannot hear a slaughterhouse on this record, you hear the reverberation of a very large room with hard surfaces, and something in it. The provenance matters to how the album is discussed and is not audible as content.

Who is Lustmord?

Brian Williams, a Welsh musician and sound designer, formerly of the industrial group SPK. Heresy is his third album and the one that defined the genre. He went on to one of the most prolific sound-design careers in Hollywood, and his later records — The Place Where the Black Stars Hang, Purifying Fire, Dark Matter — continue the method, with Dark Matter built from recordings of radio-telescope and space-mission data.

How should I listen to Heresy?

On the best low-frequency reproduction you have, loud, in the dark, in one sitting. This is not an affectation: a large proportion of the record's content sits below the range of laptop speakers, phone speakers and most headphones, and listeners who report that nothing happens on Heresy are usually correct about what they have heard. On a capable system it is one of the most physically uncomfortable records in this index.

Is Heresy the first dark ambient record?

It is the one the genre was named around, which is a slightly different claim. There is earlier work in the territory — Williams's own, Nurse With Wound, Zoviet France, Thomas Köner — and Heresy is the record that consolidated the vocabulary into something recognisable and repeatable: sub-bass bed, processed field recording, enormous reverberation, no rhythm, no melody. Everything marketed as dark ambient since is measured against it.

Is Heresy scary?

It is oppressive rather than frightening, and at the right volume it is one of the few records that produces a physical response. We score it 088 on reality anchor and 006 on tone: there is no human presence in it, nothing to orient against, and no consolation at any point in the hour.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Pace 004 is near the floor of the scale — only 2 works are slower. There is no rhythm anywhere on the record and changes occur over minutes.

Tone 006 is bleak — 7 works score lower. Nothing on the album is warm, resolved or inhabited; its register is an empty cold space and the things in it.

Reality anchor 088 is high — only 8 works score higher. The sources are unidentifiable, the space is impossible, and there is no metre or key to hold.

Viscera 020 is very low — 16 works score lower. The slaughterhouse provenance is not audible as content; what you hear is architecture.

Era bias 036 reads analog — 45 works score lower. 1990, DAT field recording, analogue processing and tape, mastered for vinyl and early CD.

The threat at 020 is well into the supernatural — only 18 works score lower. There is no human agency in the record's sound at all.

On shocks: none. Nothing on Heresy is designed to startle, and there is not a single transient on it.