Isolationism

Isolationism is the dark, estranged wing of 1990s ambient music, named by journalist and musician Kevin Martin for music that used ambient's space and stillness to evoke emptiness, non-communication and entropy rather than bliss. Practitioners including *Thomas Köner*, *Lull*, *Main* and *Final* suspended sparse, static-filled events in vast reverberant voids, drawing on industrial music, dub and minimalism. Documented by the #Virgin# compilation "Isolationism" (1994), the tendency recast ambient as a music of solitude and cold distance, and it remains a reference point for dark ambient practice.