Writing Vs. Music: Atmosphere

October is my favorite month. The fires of autumn still hang from crooked branches. The sky is flooded with a crisp blue, unique to fall. It’s a reflective time plump with the magic fumes of decaying leaves. The world and I are more agreeable in October. Fear, mood and setting are recognizable more than any other time of the year. It’s the month of the imagination.

So, what scares you? Is “horror” really even scary? What’s worse, being scared or creeped out? Is there a difference? An orchestral stab, a “boo” moment, are they really scary? What is fear? Not what startles or grosses you out, but authentic guttural dread…

Adjectives associated with fear and darkness appear in a majority of the Gruntsplatter reviews I’ve seen, however, I never once set out to make a “scary” record. I don’t see dark ambient in those terms. The Suspiria soundtrack by Goblin. La-la-La-La… triggered more unease in me than any dark ambient record ever has. Whether anyone noticed or not, my records are social diatribes before they are horror shows. With Gruntsplatter I see the themes and fixation on the creeping dystopia as horrific, rather than horror.

Life when things aren’t right, unsettles me. A guy shouldn’t be singing witch lullabies over prog rock, it’s creepy. It’s not right. The movie Tideland is not a horror movie, but it got under my skin. Creepy, awkward, evocative and soulful. A window into something tragic and not right. Right and wrong are subjective obviously, but it’s those things more than monsters or killers and so many of the tropes of horror that creep me out.

The writings of Thomas Ligotti, Simon Strantzas, Steve Rasnic Tem, Mark Samuels, Richard Gavin and so many others that explore the wrongness in a wrong world, those are the contemporary voices of dread. I don’t worry about demons or serial killers. I worry about that guy on the bus that doesn’t feel right. I turn that thing sitting where it shouldn’t be into something diabolical. The dreams that scare me are the dreams of footsteps behind me from someone not concerned I know they are there. They are the voices in a house I thought was mine right up until I heard the voices. The stranger who says “see you later” and sounds like they mean it. The innocuous things that breach the facade of life.

I think about these things more, the more I write. “Weird tales” more than commercial horror speak in the tongue that resonates with me.  It is the subtleties in life that can go unnoticed, the curious juxtapositions, and the quiet shifts in wind and shadow where the genuine unease lurks. Mystery before bombast.

It’s what I have always tried to do with my music, subtlety and detail. It’s what I hope to infuse in my writing. I think that aesthetic is as much me as anything.

Steve Rasnic Tem

Steve Rasnic Tem writes like a free man. That is the simplest way I can say it. Previously, I had read a handful of short stories and knew I wanted more of Tem’s perspective. In the last few months I have read two novels and a collaborative novel written with his wife Melanie Tem. You can find their joint website here.

I started with the collaborative novel. The Man On The Ceiling was originally released as a novella that went on to win a World Fantasy Award,  Bram Stoker Award and an International Horror Guild Award in 2000. The version I picked up was the  expanded novel released by Wizards Of The Coast Discoveries. It is part biography, part fiction and as the authors remind us frequently all of it is true. I believe them. The surreal emotional dread is authentic.

The fluidity of imagination and jagged reality is handled so well, it’s perhaps the thing that best represents what kind of writer Tem is. The visceral fear he strips naked is rooted in parental anxiety.  Our inability to protect that which is most important turns to poison with the glide of a shadow on the wall. Imagination, fear, disaster fantasies and unconditional love wrestle on the cliffs of psychosis when one is open to feel all that there is to feel.

Next I went to The Book Of Days, published by Subterranean Press. The tale again deals with the theme of parental anxiety and personal insecurities. The protagonists flees his family to his familial cabin in the woods.  What follows is a tale told in the framework of a short story every day as the main character struggles to fend off madness. This set up allows Tem to rip wide his vivid perspective on the nature of pain. All the horror in the world is just behind your eyes. Here is a short excerpt available from the publishers website.

Finally, I just wrapped up Excavation released in eBook format by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital, 0riginally released in 1997. Parental anxiety again plays a role in his tale of a man who returns to the isolated coal mining town where he grew up. The town suffered a flood that killed his family and numerous others after he left, but the sickness and rage that led him to flee that life is right where he left it.

That Tem can write about such personal, crippling fear with such freedom of ideas is perhaps my favorite quality in his inspired work. I don’t get a sense of self consciousness in the writing despite the self consciousness and, arguably, even narcissism of his protagonists. He goes where the trapped and paranoid mind goes.

Tem has countless short stories out there as well. With any luck a big, fat collection is forthcoming from somewhere (I haven’t seem any indication of that though). Centipede Press recently released a collection of all of Steve and Melanie’s collaborative fiction titled In Concert that I hope to get my hands on before too much longer.

He’s a writer with enviable skills. If you enjoy emotional, psychological prose that slithers between boundaries into the overlooked crevasses of our internal reality Steve Rasnic Tem is probably for you. He also painted the above piece, you can see more of his paintings on the website linked above. It’s been a true pleasure and inspiration to explore his work.

Editing Playlist

I don’t listen to music that often when I write. I do, however, have a play list of suitable tracks when the mood strikes. I am editing tonight, here’s the sonic accompaniment:

Divinus Baal & Runa – VII
Luasa Raelon – The Keep
Omei – A Single Sickened Cell
Ocosi – <_>
IBurn – Overdone
Atrium Carceri – Escape
Amir Baghiri & Mathias Grassow – Beginning
Of Unknown Origin – Sphered In A Radiant Cloud
Heid – I
Never Known – Dawn Of An Era
Blood Of The Black Owl – Chant Of The Captured Spirit (Movement III)
Memorandum – Where The Dead Lost Their Bones
Sacramentum – The Coming Of Chaos
The Elemental Chrysalis – Caravan Of Ghosts

Writing Vs. Music: Catharsis

Why do you do this? It’s cathartic.

How? Um…

This is something I’ve thought about with music and something I am thinking about again with writing. Is it cathartic?

The process serves a purpose, the process is where the fascination lies. It’s the process that I miss when not engaged. The thinking, the grease fire ideas, the deft needle of Dr. Frankenstein; those are the little joys.

Catharsis is part of the broth, no question. It is a release, it’s a compulsion, it’s what I have to do, so that I can do the things I have to do.

Finishing a record is depressing. It transforms from something only I know, to a product to be hustled. It’s my choice to release it (or not), and I’m ever grateful that some outstanding labels and people have supported what I do. There is, however, a period of time afterward that feels aimless, deflating. The work is more gratifying than the product that comes from the work. As I learn my chops as a fiction writer, I can’t help but wonder when/if a story sells if that same strange void will be waiting.

This is not to say I’m not gratified when people like something I’ve done. It means a lot  when someone actually takes their time to engage with it. It’s a different satisfaction though.

When I finish a record, I deliberately wait to do something new. It lets me rethink (and forget) how I do things so it’s different in some way the next time. There have been compilation tracks and such to take the edge off in between. To do a record I need a concept that I can “chapter out” into a full release to feel driven to start down that path.

I expect momentum with writing will be easier to maintain than with music. There will always be fragmented ideas to nurture, or most of the time anyway. So as I am learning and writing, in the back of my head it’s not publication that feels like the biggest goal to me. I will certainly try to get published, I’ve already made a couple attempts, but the process is where the sense of accomplishment resides right now. That may well change as my confidence improves, but I’m not sure it will.

The catharsis of creation is in the exploration. It is frustrating, fascinating, crippling, and spiritual. It is an altar to revere curiosity. That process is different with music and writing. The details illuminate different things, the puzzles yield different pictures but they are equally vital, equally visceral and I need them whether they are cathartic or not.

Pitch Shifter – Deconstruction

Nice, I forgot about this. I have a leather jacket with the cover of this record, Submit, painted on the back of it around here somewhere.

OSS: “The World More Full Of Weeping” by R.J. Wiersema

The World More Full of Weeping by Robert J. Wiersema

I picked this up based on the title, a reference to a Yeats poem, “The Stolen Child.” The World More Full Of Weeping falls somewhere between a long short story and a novella.

The story follows a young boy from a fractured, loving family as he seeks solace and freedom in the expansive woods behind his house. In the woods, he’s befriended by a young presence who reveals the mysticism of the forest to him. The relationship between the boy and the presence develops like two children slowly becoming best friends. It’s natural and well done.

The mystic parts of the woods are handled simply, focusing on beauty and appreciation rather than throwing back the veil and revealing a wild phantasmagoria. I liked that, that discretion runs through the whole tale.
When the boy fails to return home a search is undertaken and his father  realizes he’d also been befriended by the presence in his youth.

I’m not going to get into the ending, but to say it was multi-layered and satisfying. This is a simple tale of guilt and loss and wonder, made rich by Wiersema’s character development, setting and eloquent prose.

I spent a lot of time in the woods as a kid in a town not terribly unlike the one in this story. It held a certain nostalgia for me that could only be conjured by someone who had the same intimate knowledge of those places and the people that populate them. To that end, this volume also includes an essay exploring how fictional environments become doppelgangers of their real counterparts.

I snagged this for an afternoon read on the Kindle and discovered a writer I will keep an eye on going forward.

“Dark Awakenings” by Matt Cardin

I first became aware of Matt Cardin when  looking up information on Michael Ruppert. Ruppert has spent much of his life  trying to draw attention to the clandestine drug money in the “straight” economy and the approach of peak oil. While Ruppert is an interesting guy, his role in this post is merely as an  absurd gateway to Matt Cardin’s work.

It was a search for Ruppert that led me to Cardin’s blog, The Teeming Brain, the first time. As I combed the archives, it became clear that the intellect and reason with which he wrote was far above the other places where Ruppert’s name turns up. It also became clear that his passion for supernatural literature, creative thinking, religion and a host of other intriguing topics would make it a place I’d return often.

I have yet to read Matt’s first book Divinations Of The Deep, released on Ash-Tree Press in 2002, but when Dark Awakenings was released by Mythos Books this year I snatched it up. 2/3rd’s of the book is short fiction, while the final third consists of three essays.

Cardin’s work is often mentioned along side such pillars as Lovecraft and Ligotti. It is said, that he (among a select few others) is the progeny of the dread those authors have sown. It is a fair assessment, however I don’t feel comfortable directly comparing them. Those writers leave you with a distinct feeling, a feeling that is an abundance of their appeal. Cardin does this as well, but it is unique to that of the above mentioned, to anyone I have read really.

This is intellectual, introspective, shamanistic horror. The black things crawl through the psychic ditches of our world but in Cardin’s writing they are tethered more concretely to a sense of humanity. This is, in part, due to the scholarly inclusion of religion that he weaves through his tales. Let me be clear, these are not religious stories in any sense that would lead readers of this site to be apprehensive. The stories here incorporate undiscussed elements of religion that illustrate both a connection to something bigger and a reminder of the dark things hidden in the heavy language of gods.

While I quite enjoyed the entire collection, if forced to pick a single stand out it would be “The God Of Foulness” (of which you can read a small excerpt here.) The tale explores a growing cult of those who cherish disease, shun treatment and accept their withering as a form of body sacrifice to their God. I’m not going to pore over the details of this or the other stories now though.

The three essays that close the tome deal with the history of angels and demons, the  curious spiritual resonance of George Romero’s Living Dead films, and the reading of The Book Of Isaiah as a work of horror. Each of these was interesting, academic but not cumbersome, and a welcome inclusion.

Dark Awakenings is a very strong collection of work, and I hope it won’t be another eight years before he makes another collection available. I would also encourage you to check out Demon Muse his other blog focusing on “the nature and role of the unconscious mind as symbolized by the ancient Greeks and Romans in the form of the daimon, muse, and personal genius.” Oh yeah, he does music too.