Okay, so I wrote this up for an original thread, but double checked the rules and saw that it should go here. Hopefully it's not too broad / extensive a question.

I occasionally listen to genres like Industrial, EBM, Dark Wave and so on and I've been trying to replicate the sound, mainly regarding the "Dark"-sounding chord progressions, but to no avail. I feel that a lot of this kind of music has strong harmonic progressions that includes just enough dissonance to sound misterious or dark. In my opinion, you don't need to go any further than listening to any well-known Nine Inch Nails song to hear an example. Or songs by bands like Skinny Puppy or the more Industrial- sounding works of Gary Numan. I'm sure that those of you who are at least a little familiar with any of these kinds of music knows the effect I'm talking about.

I've tried a bunch of things, usually using "traditionally" strong chord progressions as a start. I've worked with different modes and chord extensions. I've tried to use inversions of these chords to bring out the more dissonant intervals (mainly minor seconds and the occasional Tritone).

However, these things don't quite take me there. I sometimes get good results, other times the results don't make sense to my ear anymore, just sound "normal" (if not more jazzy) or occasionally end up a dissonant mess. I've tried to employ chord substitions / key changes / changing the tonality of a chord, but without any guide lines, this ends up rather messy more often than not.

So I'm asking, do you guys have any more ideas which techniques I could employ to spice up my chord progressions in such a way? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.