Dark Wave

Dark Wave, also written as Darkwave, is an umbrella term which refers to a movement that began in the late 1970s, coinciding with the popularity of New Wave and Post-punk music. Building upon the basic principles of those musical movements^[1], Dark Wave evolved through the addition of dark, thoughtful lyrics and an undertone of sorrow. Dark Wave is inseparably connected with the stylistic developments of the late 1970s and the 1980s. In the 1980s a versatile subculture developed within the Dark Wave movement, whose members were called "wavers"^[2][3] or "dark wavers".^[4][5] In many countries, the Dark Wave movement also included the early Goth subculture (trad goth).

History

The 1980s

The first usage of the term appears to have been in the 1980s, to describe the dark and melancholy variant of New Wave and Post-punk music, e.g. the early Gothic rock (in those days the genre wasn't frequently called "gothic" outside of the UK), the French Coldwave or dark Synthpop (also called Electrowave in Germany), and refers to the dark and moody music of bands such as Bauhaus^[6], Joy Division^[7][8], The Cure^[9][10], Siouxsie & the Banshees^[11], The Chameleons^[12], Cocteau Twins, Anne Clark, Fad Gadget, Gary Numan, Bauhaus or Depeche Mode^[13]. In the course of time, different Dark Wave genres, especially Coldwave, Gothic rock and others, blended up with electronic music (Synthpop, Ambient and Post-industrial). Attrition, Clan of Xymox, Die Form, Psyche, In The Nursery and Pink Industry were some of the main bands playing this music in the 1980s and, while associated with the Gothic, Dark Wave and Post-industrial scenes, they had previously been something of an ill-fit in the those scenes.

The 1990s

German flyer from 1993

After the New Wave and Post-punk movement faded between the middle and the end of the 1980s, Dark Wave survived and experienced a fresh impetus through the music of bands such as Deine Lakaien, Love Is Colder Than Death, Corpus Delicti, The Frozen Autumn, the early music of Love Like Blood,^[14] The Garden of Delight, Wolfsheim and Diary of Dreams. All of these bands followed a straight-line path, based on the New Wave and Post-punk movement of the 1980s. At the same time, a number of German artists, including Das Ich, Goethes Erben, Relatives Menschsein and Lacrimosa, developed a more theatrical style, interspersed with German poetic and metaphorical lyrics, called Neue Deutsche Todeskunst (New German Death Art). Other bands, such as Silke Bischoff, In My Rosary, Engelsstaub, Annabelle's Garden and Canticum Funebris mingled dark Synthpop or Goth rock with elements of the Neofolk or Neoclassical genre. A curious act is the German artist Sopor Aeternus & The Ensemble Of Shadows, which combined Gothic rock elements with Folklore and medieval sounds. Since 1993/94, in the United States, the term Dark Wave became (as the one-word variant Darkwave) largely associated with the Projekt Records label because it was used as the name of their printed catalog and was used to market and promote German products of artists like Project Pitchfork in the US. The Projekt label features bands such as Lycia, Black Tape for a Blue Girl, Love Spirals Downwards, Tearwave and Autumn's Grey Solace, all characterized by slow, moody ethereal female vocals, which had been an element in the music of some of the 1980s bands like Cocteau Twins. This music is often referred to as Ethereal Darkwave.^[15] The label has also had a long association with Attrition, who appeared on the label's earliest compilations. Another label in this vein was Tess Records in the US, which featured This Ascension, Trance to the Sun, Faith and the Muse and, from 1997, Clan of Xymox, who had returned to a sound more like their 1980s sound following almost a decade as the more Synthpop Xymox.

Wave-untypical influences

A number of other US bands mixed elements of Dark Wave and Ethereal Wave with more modern electronic music to a high level of popularity. Love Spirals Downwards and Collide, for example, incorporated large elements of Trip hop, while the The Crüxshadows have combined a range of contemporary Dance music elements with their synth-based Alternative rock style.

Samples

Clips

References

See also

• Ethereal
• Gothic rock
• Neoclassical
• New Wave
• Post-punk
• List of Darkwave releases