Lustmord

Lustmord
Lustmord playing at Norbergfestival, 2011.
Background information
Birth name	Brian Williams
Origin	North Wales[1][2]
Genres	Dark ambient
Occupation	Musician
Instrument(s)	Synthesizer, programming
Years active	1980–present[2]
Labels	Hydra Head, Soleilmoon
Website	lustmord.com

Brian Williams is a Welsh musician, sound designer and film score composer.^[3] He has released albums under the name Lustmord starting in the 1980s and through the present.

Williams began as a recording artist within the industrial genre, working with Chris & Cosey and SPK. Shifting his work to Lustmord, Williams continued to employ the threatening aesthetics of industrial, 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 infamously included field recordings made in locations such as crypts, caves, and slaughterhouses. Williams now downplays the sinister connotations of these locations and says they were picked for "acoustics".^[6]

The influence of Williams 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."^[7]

Williams was raised in the town of Bethesda, Gwynedd in Wales in a family of working class origin. He moved to London, living in a Lambeth squat.^[8] There he befriended Throbbing Gristle members Cosey Fanni Tutti and Chris Carter, who urged him to make his own music.^[1]

Williams began releasing records as Lustmord with a self-titled debut (as "Lustmørd") in 1980.^[9] "Lustmord" in German translates literally 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.^[10]

Williams released Lustmord's sophomore album Paradise Disowned in 1984 on which he continued to refine his sound. Critics and Williams himself considered his Lustmord third album, 1989'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.^[7] In retrospectives of Lustmord's work and the dark ambient genre, critics have called Heresy a milestone.^[7][11][12]

Lustmord has extracted field recordings made in crypts, caves, and slaughterhouses, and combined it with occasional ritualistic incantations and Tibetan horns. His treatments of acoustic phenomena encased in digitally expanded bass rumbles have a dark-ambient quality. Some of Lustmord's most notable collaborations include Robert Rich on the critically acclaimed^[13] Stalker, Jarboe, John Balance of Coil, Monte Cazazza, Clock DVA, Chris & Cosey, Paul Haslinger, and experimental sludge group Melvins on Pigs of the Roman Empire. He worked with Tool again in 2019, providing the ocean and wave sound effects on the track "Descending" on their album Fear Inoculum.

Williams collaborated with Graeme Revell and Paul Haslinger to contribute as "musical sound designer"^[4] and occasionally as an additional composer on 44 Hollywood film soundtracks, most notably on The Crow and Underworld.

Black Star

Sample of "Black Star", from Strange Attractor (extended play – 1996) also on the compilation album Purifying Fire (2000)

---

Problems playing this file? See media help.

Lustmord worked on Tool's DVD singles and remixed versions of "Schism" and "Parabola," which were released on 20 December 2005. Lustmord also contributed to Tool's 2006 album 10,000 Days with the atmospheric storm sounds on the title track, "10,000 Days". He later worked again with Tool vocalist Maynard James Keenan, collaborating on Keenan's project Puscifer debut album "V" is for Vagina, as well as providing several remixes for "V" is for Viagra. The Remixes. 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. The nine-track LP was released as a digital download on 17 October 2008, available directly from the Puscifer website. He also did some additional music including the track "The Western Approaches" feat. Wes Borland on guitar for the documentary Blood into Wine.

Lustmord released the album [ O T H E R ] on California-based label Hydra Head Records in July 2008. It features guest appearances by Adam Jones, King Buzzo, and Aaron Turner.

Lustmord appeared live for the first time in 25 years as part of the high mass observance by the Church of Satan. The ceremony took place on 6 June 2006.^[1][14] A recording of the performance titled Rising was released. Lustmord himself noted that the offer was "one of those things that was just too funny to say 'no' to".^[15]

Lustmord performed for the second time in 29 years at Unsound Festival Kraków on 22 October 2010.^[16]

Lustmord performed at Art's Birthday celebration (initiated by Robert Filliou) at Södra Teatern in Stockholm, Sweden, on 15 January 2011.^[17] He performed in New York for the first time on 9 and 10 April 2011 at the Unsound Festival, coming to the attention of the New York Times.^[18][11] Lustmord's first performance in the Netherlands was in September 2011 at the Incubate Festival.

Lustmord played for the first time in Moscow, Russia, on 8 April 2012, at Cinema 35mm. Bad Sector played the first act of the show.

Around 1999, Lustmord was also involved with the video game Planescape: Torment—his work eventually went unused when the project changed direction.^[19] He provided music and sound design for a variety of other projects since, such as Far Cry Instincts, Underworld and NVIDIA demos, many of which include collaborations with Haslinger.^[20] He was also involved with the 2003 game Master of Orion. In 2015 he composed the soundtrack for Evolve with Jason Graves.,^[21][22] and composed the soundtrack of the horror game Scorn together with Aethek.

Lustmord composed the soundtrack of the 2017 film First Reformed^[23] and the 2020 film The Empty Man.^[24]

Lustmord had two songs used in the TV show Vikings: Valhalla seasons one and two: “Babel” and “Y Gair.”

In early 1990s, Williams relocated to California from London with his wife Tracey, who is a fabricator at Legacy Effects. He is an atheist^[1] and has noted that while his ominous music gives an impression to some people that he's "somehow dark and [he] live[s] in a castle or in a dungeon", and that although he's "very serious about certain aspects of [his] work", he's "not that serious about [himself]".^[15]

• List of ambient music artists

• Official website