One of the many enigmas of humankind is our propensity for willingly seeking out media that is unsettling, unpleasant and even gruesome in nature. We huddle in our sofas and hide our eyes at the sight of the graphic images of a slasher movie and the bone-chilling descriptions of horror novels keep us awake at night listening intently for potential horrors lurking in our closets. There are many theories as to why this is, but the fact remains that there is a sizable market for media, that is made to make us not feel good, but to instill a sense of unease. While there are plenty of blogs discussing the merits of horror movies and literature, the topic of horrific and scary music is something that is explored much less. However, discussing music is what I do, so let me take you on a journey through what I would call scary or unsettling music
Trent Reznor, also known as Nine Inch Nails is an institution within the industrial rock and dark ambient genres for more than three decades. While his choice of musical style means that he only very occasionally popping up in the mainstream consciousness, he briefly rose to prominence last year when Lil Nas X sampled his Ghosts IV - 34 for his big hit Old Town Road. While his discography is large and varied, I would like to mention his work with the official soundtrack for the 1996 iconic first person shooter Quake by ID Software. Where previous ID Software shooters like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D were still very much still steeped in the garish and somewhat cartoonish aesthetics of early 90’s computer games, Quake is drab, rusty and gothic, with an otherworldly Cthulhu-esque feeling to it. The soundtrack by NiN is a huge part of that, filled to the brim as it is with fading screams, ambient whispering and what sounds like the heaving breath of ancient sleeping horrors. The high point for me of the OST is Parallel Dimensions: The sound of a relentless industrial piston-like bass builds an eerie tension that is then accompanied by what sounds like the moans and growls of some unknown eldritch horror. The sound is muffled, like the sounds are being conveyed from another dimension only held back by a thin layer of reality, that extra-dimensional horrors are slowly chipping away at, struggling to break free
Khanate
Metal is probably the music genre in the world that has given birth to the largest amount of explicit subgenres, and while metal by its nature is a genre designed to push musical boundaries, none pushes said boundaries more than the genre of drone doom also known as drone metal. Drone metal is characterized by extremely long almost amelodic compositions, slooow time signatures and droning, deeply tuned guitars. While the most known band is this genre (by which I mean only marginally unknown) is Sunn O))), my exposure to the genre came through the now defunct doom metal supergroup Khanate, which has the brutal, droning compositions characteristic of the genre combined with lead singer Alan Dubin’s torturous shrieking vocals, which creates some very unique, stripped-down, visceral soundscapes that instills a sense of dread in the listener. The topics explored in the lyrics is more or less what you can expect from a band operating in this genre of music and their only music video is for a song titled dead that is a very explicit depiction of a man committing suicide by shooting himself. However, I think their most evocative piece is the 25-minute composition Release from the album Capture & Release, which features a long intro of near silence where only eerie clicking guitars and subdued screaming can be heard only to explode into brutal, droning crescendo, in a well… Release, of the most visceral kind I have yet to experience in any other piece of metal music.
While the genres of music in which the two previous entries come from can be considered extreme in their own right, or at the very least can claim to be the home of extremist music and subgenres, the next entry is easily what you could refer to as an extremist artist.
The American vocalist and avantgarde composer Diamanda Galás is known for her extraordinary vocal abilities (referred to by some critics as sheer vocal terror) and her tackling of controversial topics such as the Armenian genocide and the AIDS crisis in 1980’s America. None of her music can be considered even remotely mainstream – her first album, for example, was called The Litanies of Satan, but it is on her album The Divine Punishment, which is the first installment in a trilogy dubbed The Masque of the Red Death, and is a scathing critique of the indifference of the Catholic church during the AIDS epidemic towards those inflicted with the decease, where Galás puts her talents to work in the most brutal and haunting way. Deliver me from Mine Enemies opens with eerie cultish chanting that builds and builds while Galás, like the demented high priestess of a plague cult, in her characteristic keening voice recites passages from Leviticus describing the ‘Law of the Plague’ separation of the ‘clean’ from the ‘unclean’. The disturbing feel of this first part that is equally horrifying due to the arguably disturbing passages from Leviticus and the context in which they are recited and equally (and paradoxically) uplifting as the cultish chanting builds and builds and then crescendos, filling your mind with a quasi-religious frenzy. The album ending is what I can only describe as one of the most brutal pieces of media in existence. A true embodiment of musical horror, the composition Free Among the Dead is hard to describe in words, but Galás’ vocals has changed from the religious keening of a demented high priestess to disturbing, almost demonic throaty whispers, screams and moans. The track ends with Galás screaming ‘Sono L'Antichristo!’ (I am the antichrist) and her otherworldly, demonic throaty screaming.
Diamanda Galás - photograph by Chad Batka / The New York Times / Redux
Thank you for reading through my journey of what I consider legitimately unsettling music! If you like my content, please leave an upvote and a comment and please consider following me as well!
