Halloween is a holiday, and as such, someone decided it would be a good (if not profitable) idea to create specific music to soundtrack it. “Monster Mash” is inarguably the best designated Halloween song—can you even name others?—but of course, novelty songs can only get you so far, even for holidays that revolve around fake blood and candy. Think of Halloween’s tenets—creepiness and haunted stuff—and tell me there isn’t a lot of music that translates, even if it’s not “Halloween music.” We asked our staff which albums spook them the most, and here’s what they said.
Mark Richardson: Maryanne Amacher’s Sound Characters
Scary music is physical. It’s sound that not only reminds you of emotions like dread and anxiety, it actually causes you to feel those things in the pit of your stomach. The late Maryanne Amacher may not have set out to make frightening music, but she did think of sound in intensely physical terms. She was so focused on how sound is received by the body, in fact, that she almost never released commercial recordings, preferring instead to work with installations, where she had ultimate control over the presentation and, above all, the volume.
Sound Characters is Amacher’s only widely available full-length. Drone pieces here like “Synaptic Island (VMS 3) - (excerpt)” are positively sinister, churning clouds of black sound that recall a swarm of locusts buzzing around an alien planet where the air has been replaced with rubber cement. But it’s the tracks where Amacher directly manipulates the physiology of the ear, as on “Head Rhythm 1,” that are perhaps the strangest of all. She calls these pieces “Third Ear Music,” explaining how it works in the liner notes: “When played at the right sound level, which is quite high and exciting, the tones in this music will cause your ears to act as neurophonic instruments that emit sounds that will seem to be issuing directly from your head.” It works just as she describes it, and though the “Third Ear Music” on its own is not creepy, it does cause you to question your own senses, which is disturbing on its own.
Jenn Pelly: Pharmakon’s ‘Deserve It’:Live in Chicago
How could you top this? For half an hour, ‘Deserve It’: Live in Chicago gnashes into your skull and screams into your heart. Recorded at the Empty Bottle in October 2012 and released by Chondritic Sound later that year, the album was the first time I’d heard Pharmakon’s industrial clangor on tape, prior to 2013’s Abandon and 2014’s Bestial Burden. It is all pulp noise, raw and bloodcurdling and nauseous. Wherever you are, this tape will transform it into your personal horror film. In summer, I have reveled in cranking it on my fire escape to drown out the basic AF music my neighbors blast at their parties.
(Honorable mention: the new MV Carbon record.)
Jayson Greene: Kreng’s L’Autopsie Phénoménale de Dieu
“Kreng”—it just kinda sounds evil. It is the chosen moniker of a Belgian recording artist named Pepjin Caudron, which—just one stray “L” away from “cauldron”—has a slightly sinister ring as well. His L’Autopsie Phénoménale de Dieu is a horribly upsetting thing to listen to, particularly the two-minute sample of Chopin’s “Prelude No. 20 in C Minor” that plays while a woman sobs into a phone on “Meisje In Auto (Naar Prelude No. 20 in C Minor).” It doesn’t feel “scary” so much as just wrong, something you should not be privy to, which is of course the deepest and most authentic scare there is.
Kreng has gone on to record literal horror-film soundtracks, but none of them had quite the poetic undertow of L’Autopsie Phénoménale de Dieu, which I still keep around when I need to feel that the night is long and full of terrors.
Matthew Strauss: Wyrd Visions’ Half-Eaten Guitar
On the cover of the original 2006 pressing of Wyrd Visions’ lone LP Half-Eaten Guitar is a heavily blurred photograph of Bohemian Grove. Since the 19th century, the Bohemian Club—a private group comprised mainly of powerful businessmen and politicians—has met at the remote California location annually. Though shrouded in mystery, first-handaccounts have revealed that it is more frat party than occult gathering. Nevertheless, dark imagery pervades, as in the photo, which depicts a man on the verge of a (likely mock) ritual sacrifice. The Bohemian Club members may not have any intentions to kill, but a fascination with the debaucherous and depraved certainly exists, and that allows minds to run wild that just maybe there are still nefarious secrets hidden somewhere on the grounds.
Half-Eaten Guitar plays with the same proximity to evil. On the opening track, “Sigill,” Wyrd Visions mastermind Colin Bergh plucks his guitar for what feels like forever and chants in a language that can’t be pinned down. It’s a beautiful and restrained song, but it gives the feeling that something worse looms. Minimalism, however, prevails throughout the record, which makes it all the more harrowing, as if Bergh’s mesmerizing melodies are simply a warning of imminent danger. He’s brought the listener into the woods, but there may be something worse further into the forest. Half-Eaten Guitar taps into the power of the imagination–that little bit that we don’t know is made far scarier by the ominous bits that we do. As Bergh sings on the final track, “What is to come?”
Marc Hogan: Excepter’s Alternation
Since forming in Brooklyn in 2002, Excepter have defined themselves by their restless imperviousness to easy definitions, so it feels slightly reductive to recommend them to you for their creepiness. Led by John Fell Ryan, a former of New York freeform improv music collective No-Neck Blues Band, the group wander across noise and bleary techno in its open-ended, experimental jams. But their 2006 album, Alternation, immediately sprang to mind when I heard this prompt, and it fits. The stuttering drum machines and creaking synths, beneath what Excepter expert Marc Masters has described as Ryan’s “zombie moan,” suggest a dance party at a haunted house. “He walks like his legs are broken,” Ryan intones, and the lumbering figure he describes doesn’t sound like someone you’d want to meet in a dark alley alone. Anyway, being reductive isn’t such a bad price to pay if a few more listeners are introduced to a project that has endured a tragic loss and gone on releasing albums as recently as 2014’s Familiar. Who needs clowns when there’s the “Ice Cream Van”?
Kevin Lozano: Archy Marshall’s A New Place 2 Drown
Archy Marshall’s cracked voice is so caustic yet so unusually pretty, it leaves a haunted imprint with every listen. On A New Place 2 Drown, he moves between a guttural howl, a booming bass, and a helium drawl borrowed from Disney’s Quasimodo. He’s done away with hooks and melody, and chooses to paint the world he sings of with hiccuping drums and vaporous hiss. It’s a London lit by harsh lights that flicker, draped in fog, and pockmarked by the fallout of breakups and personal failure. Haunted houses always get it wrong because they rely on artifice to produce a mood; buckets of fake blood, dry ice, and cobwebs don’t get to the heart of actual horror. A few minutes spent in the peccant world of A New Place 2 Drown finds horror in the experience of the everyday.
Quinn Moreland: CocoRosie’s Grey Oceans
The first time I heard CocoRosie, as a high schooler in my friend’s car, I was spooked. I had never heard voices like the Casady sisters’ before, and until I saw what they looked like, I imagined them as the evil twins in The Shining. Their baroque and macabre worlds continue to haunt me, particularly those of 2010’s Grey Oceans. JD Samson onceremarked that calling CocoRosie “haunting” is inaccurate. I understand her point insinuates that “haunting” is too easy of a term for what the sisters accomplish, but I truly believe that Grey Oceans is haunting in that it shoots directly into your soul and stays there. The record is full of strings that cut like knives, sounds that seem unnatural, and mystical lyrics (“We climbed the rocks, in snow and rain/In search of magic powers/To heal our mother’s pain”). Surprisingly, the song that always gets me is their bonus cover of the Beach Boys’ “Surfer Girl.” Led by the Casady coo, the classic tune of desire sounds as if it has been sung by Sirens for centuries.