After black metal arose from hybrids of black/thrash and melodic death metal, some of its more visionary musicians began looking toward melody alone as the conveyance of meaning in song. In this they were similar to phrasal death metal bands, who by using melodic phrases changing over a fixed background beat, redefined rhythm from its nature in rock music as emphasizing what the guitars were doing, toward something more like what occurs in the more extreme ambient music like Tangerine Dream or Brian Eno, where if percussion is used at all it is to keep a constant sense of time for purpose of contrast with the tempo emphasized by changes in phrase. This technique allows composers to write in multiple cadences according to each part of a melody they are constructing, subsuming all other factors of songwriting to that need. As black metal grew and defined itself, many artists chose to go as far from conventional metal as they could, and, using this ambient method, produced music that tolerated longer melodies and thus escaped from the recombinant configurations of three to five notes required to cooperate with the demands of rock/jazz percussion. Taking cues from bands such as Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, ambient black metal bands orchestrated moods through layers of complementary melodies. Not surprisingly, these are among the most enduringly popular black metal bands, and many black metal musicians have gone on to create ambient projects (Burzum, Neptune Towers, Suuri Shaamani).
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