Illbient

Illbient is an experimental electronic music style that emerged in Brooklyn, New York, in the early 1990s, fusing ambient music with hip hop, dub and industrial sound. The name joins the hip hop slang 'ill' with 'ambient', and the music answers ambient's serenity with urban unease: cavernous dub basslines, fractured breakbeats, film dialogue, sirens and layers of processed noise arranged in loose, drifting structures. *DJ Spooky* and *DJ Olive*, who contested the coinage of the term, defined the style through the #Asphodel# and #WordSound# scenes, alongside *Spectre*, *We™* and *Sub Dub*. Illbient functioned as the dark counterpart of trip hop and downtempo.