With Halloween just around the corner, what better time is there to share with our good readers a bunch of our favourite scary music? I know a lot of you are thinking "how the fuck can music be scary?", and trust me, once you are done reading this you will know true auditory terror.
So turn off the lights, crank up your speakers and get ready....
Sluncho's Picks
Whitehouse - Dedicated to Peter Kurten
Without exaggeration, this album is probably the closest music comes to making the listener feel like they've been raped. The intense treble and squealing feedback combined with the howled and shouted vocals can turn anyone's stomachs. The subject matter of the band's lyrics (fittingly, rape and other degeneracy) walks an uneasy line between extreme satire and serial killer idolizing insanity. Out of an entire career built on the backs of shocking antics and noise terror, 1981's Dedicated to Peter Kurten stands out as one of the most extreme examples of their "power electronics". Sampling everything from the sounds of urine sloshing around to news reports about infamous killer Peter Sutcliffe, the entire album plays out over an unending hiss that fades in and out of prominence, but never quite goes away. It isn't the loudest Whitehouse album, but is certainly the most jarring and eerie.
For full-effect, you can make the fool mistake JB and I did and try to listen to the album while watching E. Elias Merhige's Begotten at five in the morning. It's an experience you will never forget.
Swans - Greed/Holy Money
Another profoundly noisy, rape-obsessed act. Swans tones it down on the long, slow droney nature of their sound on this disc, but to compromise they've added face-smashing drum machines and a louder vocal mix to their sonic repertoire. One of the most musical but also one of the bleakest entries in the Swans discography, it's a bit of a shock to hear piano and female vocals on a Swans' track after their long series of guitar-driven albums where songs felt like they lasted hours and melody was nowhere to be found. The more dynamic sound greatly enhances the terror, where barks and shouts once would have been instead are Michael Gira's now famous emotionless intonations, chanting and whispering for minutes without stopping as the band bangs on in the background. Horns factor heavily into this disc, and give it some of its biggest jump moments (the opening to "A Screw" in particular could jar Rip van Winkle out of his sleep).
Lustmord - Purifying Fire
One of the most famous names in dark ambient, even if you don't know him, you've certainly heard the music of Brian Williams at some point in your life. With 28 years worth of recordings, spanning at least 26 records, 33 films and countless other credits in both the film and music world for sound mixing work, his brand of haunting field recordings and slow, gothic dirges has invaded the public consciousness anonymously and will likely continue to for quite some time. His solo albums are utterly mortifying exercises in the extremes of ambient music. Recordings of crypts, blood-chilling screams and other "straight from a horror film" audio experiments blend with very dark, sparse instrumentation to make listening a distinctly unpleasant experience.
Runhild Gammelsæter - Amplicon
With a PhD in cell physiology and about as much underground metal cred as you can get, Runhild is one of the strangest female vocalists around these days. This scholar and entrepreneur's first solo disc combines her loves of extreme metal and science to make one of the most haunting albums of the decade. Combining frogthroat vocals, some straight singing, incredibly unpredictable and noisy production and experiments with audio textures, Amplicon is thinking man's black metal without being too heavy-handed on the experimental, intellectual side. If you don't shudder at least once listening to the fucking creepy opener "Collapse/Lifting the Veil", then you are clearly Satan himself.
JB's Picks
Sonic Youth - Bad Moon Rising
The first time I listened to this album, I happened to be alone in a dark room. Make no mistake, I'm usually pretty good for this kinda thing...many a horror movie I've watched in similar setting with no effect. But this...this unnerved me. Fresh out of their No Wave period, SY are still very unstructured and horrifyingly noisy here; most of the album bleeds together as one nightmarish soundscape. There's a hypnotic quality to it; pounding tribalesque drums and churning guitars with all the rhythm and warmth of a decaying factory. The guitars sound like they're being abused; they howl and wail, squeal and screech, creak and groan. Melody is scarce, and when present, usually lost in the tide of droning feedback. The lyrics are pretty spooky in their own right; check out the collage-horror of "I'm Insane". It says something of the general tone of the album that the love song is an 8-minute drone/noise jam and the most listenable song is about Charles Manson.
Khanate
Khanate are quite possibly the most harrowingly fucked-up, soul-dead thing on this list, and that's saying something. They are heavier than you can fucking imagine. The guitars and bass hit with force of a natural disaster, and vocalist Alan Dubin sounds like he's coming live from the deepest part of Hell. This is usually dragged out over at least 9 minutes, sometimes up to nearly 20. It's like pure evil in sonic form.
Cranes - "Lilies"
This track is far subtler than most of the other stuff on the list, but in its own way, just as unsettling. I'm rarely really caught off guard by music anymore, but the first time I heard "where am I? where am I?" followed by those crashing guitars (about 1:30 in) it hit me in the gut. There's something a little creepy about Alison Shaw's childlike vocals on their own (a memorable Youtube comment said "she sings like the ghost of a 7 year old girl"), but when those guitars slam down it's straight up horrifying. NME said it best when they described Cranes as sounding like "a beautiful siren being slowly strangled on a spiral staircase of hammer-horror guitars".
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment