Isolationism is term coined by British musician Kevin Martin

Kevin Martin (British musician)

Kevin Martin is a London-based British musician, record producer, and journalist. He moved to London around 1990, and he has been active for over a decade, in the genres of dub, jazzcore, industrial hip hop, dancehall, and dubstep. His main projects include God, Techno Animal, Ice, Curse of the...

, used to describe a darker breed of ambient music

Ambient music

Ambient music is a musical genre that focuses largely on the timbral characteristics of sounds, often organized or performed to evoke an "atmospheric", "visual" or "unobtrusive" quality.- History :...

 that came to prominence in the mid-1990s. It had been described as "ambient's sinister, antisocial cousin".

Origins

The term "Isolationalism", as a music genre, first appeared in print in a September 1993 issue of The Wire

The Wire (magazine)

The Wire is a British avant garde music magazine, founded in 1982 by jazz promoter Anthony Wood and journalist Chrissie Murray. The magazine initially concentrated on contemporary jazz and improvised music, but branched out in the early 1990s to various types of experimental music...

magazine, describing a form of fractured, subdued music that "pushed away" listeners. The author of the article was British musician Kevin Martin

Kevin Martin (British musician)

Kevin Martin is a London-based British musician, record producer, and journalist. He moved to London around 1990, and he has been active for over a decade, in the genres of dub, jazzcore, industrial hip hop, dancehall, and dubstep. His main projects include God, Techno Animal, Ice, Curse of the...

, then known for his projects GOD and Techno Animal. John Everall, owner of the Sentrax label, places the origins of "Isolationist" music in early industrial

Industrial music

Industrial music is a style of experimental music that draws on transgressive and provocative themes. The term was coined in the mid-1970s with the founding of Industrial Records by the band Throbbing Gristle, and the creation of the slogan "industrial music for industrial people". In general, the...

 groups, krautrock

Krautrock

Krautrock is a generic name for the experimental music scenes that appeared in Germany in the late 1960s and gained popularity throughout the 1970s, especially in Britain. The term is a result of the English-speaking world's reception of the music at the time and not a reference to any one...

, ambient music and experimental composers such John Cage

John Cage

John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...

, Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...

 and others.

James Plotkin

James Plotkin

James Plotkin is an American guitarist and producer, famous for his role in bands such as Khanate and OLD, but with an extensive catalogue outside these bands. He has performed guitar duties for bands Phantomsmasher and Scorn and continues to remix tracks for bands such as KK Null, Nadja, Sunn...

 identifies Brian Eno

Brian Eno

Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , commonly known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno , is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex,...

's ambient works as the greatest influence on the isolationist scene, along with European experimental music such as Illusion of Safety. As Plotkin says,

External links

• Chill: the new ambient