Lustmord

This article is about the Welsh musician. For the crime, see Lust murder.

Lustmord
Lustmord performing in 2011
Background information
Also known as	Isolrubin BK Arecibo Dread
Born	Brian Williams
Origin	North Wales[1][2]
Genres	Dark ambient industrial
Occupation	Musician
Instruments	Synthesizer programming
Years active	1980–present[2]
Labels	Hydra Head Soleilmoon
Formerly of	TGT Terror Against Terror
Website	lustmord.com

Brian Williams is a Welsh musician, sound designer, and composer.^[3] He has published music under the name Lustmord since the 1980s as well as individual album releases as Isolrubin BK, Arecibo, and Dread.

Williams began as a recording artist within the industrial genre, working with Chris & Cosey and SPK. Adopting the moniker Lustmord, he continued to employ the industrial aesthetic while employing reverb and similar effects to evoke an atmosphere of cosmic horror.^[4][5] Starting with the 1989 album Heresy, Lustmord albums have been centered on manipulating sampled recordings with a computer. These samples included field recordings made in locations such as crypts, caves, and slaughterhouses. Williams downplays the sinister connotations of these locations and says they were picked for "acoustics".

The influence of Williams's work on subsequent artists has led critics to call him "a reluctant pioneer of the dark ambient genre who regards his music as neither dark nor ambient".^[6]

Early life

Williams was raised in the Welsh town of Bethesda, Gwynedd, in a working-class family. He moved to London,^[when?] living in a Lambeth squat.^[7] There, he befriended Throbbing Gristle members Cosey Fanni Tutti and Chris Carter, who urged him to make his own music.^[1]

Career

Williams began releasing records as Lustmord with a self-titled debut (as "Lustmørd") in 1980.^[8] The name in German translates as "lust murder" and alludes to a painting tradition in Weimar-era Germany, in which artists like Otto Dix and George Grosz painted scenes of rape and mutilated female bodies that captured the amorality of the interwar period.^[9]

Lustmord's second album, Paradise Disowned, came out in 1986. Critics and Williams himself considered his third Lustmord album, 1990's Heresy, to be his breakthrough work. Williams has attributed Heresy's success to his use of an Atari computer as a digital audio workstation.^[6] In retrospectives of Lustmord's work and the dark ambient genre, critics have called Heresy a milestone.^[6][10][11] In 1995, he collaborated with the American ambient musician Robert Rich on the critically acclaimed album Stalker.^[12] His 2008 record [ O T H E R ] features guest appearances by Adam Jones (Tool), King Buzzo (Melvins), and Aaron Turner (Isis).

Lustmord has worked with the progressive metal band Tool since the early 2000s, notably on remixes of their 2001 singles "Schism" and "Parabola", which were published in December 2005. He also contributed to the band's 2006 album, 10,000 Days, with the atmospheric storm sounds on the title track. He later worked with Tool vocalist Maynard James Keenan, collaborating on his project Puscifer's 2007 debut album, "V" is for Vagina, as well as providing several remixes for "V" is for Viagra. The Remixes (2008). Lustmord eventually generated a collection of dub remixes of several tracks from "V" is for Vagina, known as "D" Is for Dubby – The Lustmord Dub Mixes, also released in 2008. He worked with Tool again in 2019, providing the ocean and wave sound effects on the track "Descending", from their album Fear Inoculum.

Lustmord has extracted field recordings made in crypts, caves, and slaughterhouses, and combined them with occasional ritualistic incantations and Tibetan horns. His treatments of acoustic phenomena encased in digitally expanded bass rumbles have a dark-ambient quality.^[13]

Video games

Around 1999, Interplay Entertainment hired Williams to create the musical score for the video game Planescape: Torment.^[14] He worked on the project for four months, writing over 40 original pieces.^[14] However, just six weeks before the game was released, one of the producers had a change of heart on the game's musical direction, and Williams's compositions went unused.^[14] His first time working on a video game project, Williams considered the experience "terrible", eventually reusing some of the elements from the score in his 2001 album, Metavoid.^[14] He has since provided music and sound design for a variety of other projects, including Far Cry Instincts (2005).^[15] In 2015, he composed the soundtrack for Evolve with Jason Graves,^[16][17] and in 2022, he wrote the score to the horror game Scorn, alongside Aethek.^[18]

Film and television

As Lustmord, Williams has collaborated extensively with composers Graeme Revell and Paul Haslinger on film soundtracks, most notably on The Crow (1994) and Underworld (2003).^{[4][better source needed]} He wrote the score to the 2017 film First Reformed^[19] and the 2020 film The Empty Man.^[20]

The series Vikings and Vikings: Valhalla make use of music from his 2013 album The Word as Power.^{[citation needed]}

Personal life

In the early 1990s, Williams relocated to California from London. He is an atheist.^[1][21]

Discography

As Lustmord

Year	Title	Label
1981	Lustmørd	Sterile Records SR 3
1986	Paradise Disowned	Soleilmoon
1990	Heresy	Soleilmoon
1991	A Document of Early Acoustic & Tactical Experimentation
1992	The Monstrous Soul	Soleilmoon
1994	The Place Where the Black Stars Hang	Soleilmoon
1995	Stalker (with Robert Rich)	Fathom/Hearts of Space
1997	Lustmord vs. Metal Beast (with Shad Scott)
2001	Metavoid	Nextera
2002	Law of the Battle of Conquest (EP, with Hecate)
	Zoetrope	Nextera
2004	Carbon/Core
	Pigs of the Roman Empire (with Melvins)
2007	Juggernaut (with King Buzzo)
2008	[ O T H E R]
2013	The Word as Power
2016	Dark Matter
2020	Trinity
	The Fall (Dennis Johnson's November Deconstructed) (EP, with Nicolas Horvath)	Sub Rosa
2021	Alter (with Karin Park)	Pelagic Records
2024	Much Unseen Is Also Here
Remix albums
2008	"D" is for Dubby – The Lustmord Dub Mixes (by Puscifer)
2009	[ THE DARK PLACES OF THE EARTH ]
2009	[ T R A N S M U T E D ]
2009	[ B E Y O N D ]
2009	[ O T H E R D U B ]
2010	Heretic
2015	Vampillia Meets Lustmord (with Vampilia)
Live albums
1982	Lustmordekay	Sterile Records cassette SRC 6
2006	Rising (06.06.06)
2013	Kraków (October 22 2010)
2014	Stockholm (January 15 2011)
2017	Hobart (June 12 2011)
2017	Maschinenfest (October 2 2011)
2020	Lublin (December 10 2016)
2020	Berlin (March 25 2018)
2025	New York 2011
Soundtracks
2017	First Reformed
2020	The Empty Man
2022	Scorn (with Aethek)
Compilations
2000	Purifying Fire	Soleilmoon
2011	Songs of Gods and Demons
2013	Things That Were
2022	The Others	Pelagic Records
Appearances
1986	Vhutemas Arechetypi ("Mass", "Permafrost")

with TGT

• White Stains (1990)

with Terror Against Terror

• Psychological Warfare Technology Systems (1992)

as Isolrubin BK

• Crash Injury Trauma (1993)

as Arecibo

• Trans Plutonian Transmissions (1994)

as Dread

• In Dub (2017)

See also

• List of ambient music artists

References

1. Needham, Alex (16 March 2013). "Lustmord: ambient's dark star". The Guardian. Retrieved 12 March 2014.
2. Neyland, Nick (12 June 2013). "Lustmord – "Chorazin" (Extract)". Pitchfork. Retrieved 12 March 2014.
3. "Brian Williams | Music Department, Composer, Sound Department". IMDb. Retrieved 14 April 2024.
4. Richardson, John; Gorbman, Claudia; Vernallis, Carol (2013), The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, Oxford University Press, p. 367, ISBN 978-0-19-973386-6
5. "The Quietus | Features | Strange World Of... | Mysterium Tremendum: The Strange World of Lustmord". The Quietus. Retrieved 14 April 2024.
6. "Where to Begin with Lustmord's Cosmic Ambient". Bandcamp Daily. 26 March 2024. Retrieved 14 April 2024.
7. Williams, Brian (27 September 2021). "Tone Glow 080: Lustmord" (Interview). Interviewed by Joshua Minsoo Kim. Tone Glow. Archived from the original on 27 September 2021. Retrieved 14 April 2024 – via Substack.
8. "Lustmord: The Last Heretic". Fact. 3 November 2010. Retrieved 12 March 2014.
9. Bender, Stephanie (2011). "Lady Killers and Lust-Murderers: The Lustmord Paintings of Weimar Germany". Athanor. 29: 77–83. ISSN 2690-0181.
10. "Lustmord – Heresy (album review)". Sputnikmusic. 26 October 2009. Retrieved 3 April 2011.
11. "What is Dark Ambient?". Micro Genre Music. 14 January 2024. Retrieved 14 April 2024.
12. Brenholts, Jim. "Stalker – Lustmord". AllMusic. Retrieved 3 April 2011.
13. "Lustmord Discusses Three Decades of Dark Ambient Music". self | centered. Retrieved 14 April 2024.
14. "L U S T M O R D". L U S T M O R D. 31 July 2001. Archived from the original on 4 May 2009. Retrieved 3 April 2011.
15. "L U S T M O R D". L U S T M O R D. Archived from the original on 22 May 2011. Retrieved 3 April 2011.
16. "Lustmord: Evolve". 24 September 2014. Archived from the original on 11 October 2014. Retrieved 6 January 2014.
17. "A Conversation with Lustmord, The Man Behind the Unique Soundscapes for Evolve". 10 January 2014. Archived from the original on 18 March 2015. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
18. "Scorn composers". Ebb Software. 20 January 2022. Archived from the original on 20 January 2022. Retrieved 27 March 2026.
19. Samuel Wigley (19 July 2018). "How experimental musicians are reinventing the film score". Bfi.org.uk. Archived from the original on 21 July 2018. Retrieved 14 March 2020.
20. Gingold, Michael (22 October 2020). ""The Empty Man" Goes to Strange, Unexpected Places". Rue Morgue. Retrieved 23 October 2020.
21. "Lustmord: By the throat". Resident Advisor.

External links

• Official website