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.

Angoscia e nausea (Anguish and nausea)

I stumbled upon this while gathering the url’s for couple of other videos that are available on the Samples page. Had no idea about, looks like it went up within the last month. The soundtrack is a song from my 2002 release Chronicling The Famine called “Underneath The Luminous Poison”

sound and fear

Scientific American ran a story about a month ago regarding the brains reaction to “scary music” when paired with visuals and then without visuals. They looked the way music is used to heighten fear in movies and how the brain reacted when watching the scene, and when closing your eyes during the scene. The result was that those who closed their eyes had greater reactions in the emotional centers of their brains than those who didn’t. It was scarier not to see it.

Chalk one up for the imagination.

This was interesting to me with regards to listening habits of dark ambient and experimental music. I’ve always gotten so much more from a release when I dim the lights and just absorb it. It’s a canvas for the imagination. It’s something, probably the primary thing, I always hoped to achieve with Gruntsplatter and some of my other projects. It’s why I rarely use vocals or samples. I didn’t want anything that made the music too concrete.

Everything I have done has a theme or implied story behind it, but I hope that by leaving it abstract the listener has been able to fill in the blanks with their own ideas of what was going on. I’ve gotten some nice emails over the years that have related some of those visions, or from people who have used Gruntsplatter to augment their create processes while painting or writing. It’s about the best compliment I can think of.

I wonder with the way that ingesting music has evolved just how many of the secret stories hidden in atmospheric music will go untapped. Will people continue to turn out the lights and listen attentively or will it all just blend into the background din of life. Even I don’t do it as often as I used to.

Science has now documented the emotional charge the pure sounds can evoke without the distraction of other outside stimulus. Make a point to experience that with some of your favorite dark releases.

Dream Long Dead – Water

I intended on having a couple other things written for this space in the last few days, but I got that doo-hickey that lets me burn cassettes into the computer so I have been fixating on that. Until I have something better to say,  here is another short film where someone used my music for the soundtrack. I didn’t have anything to do with this one either.

John Hillcoat and Nick Cave

John Hillcoat is a director that has worked with Nick Cave in a number of ways over the years. He directed Ghosts Of The Civil Dead which Cave co-wrote, acts in and provided music for. I have not been able to find this movie, and would very much like to see it, yeargh!

Hillcoat directed the epic video for “Babe, I’m On Fire” off the Bad Seeds Nocturama album, a special edition of the release came with a DVD of the video.  I was going to link it, but it’s so long it’s broken up into two chunks on You Tube. So, if you care, find it yourself. It’s pretty funny.

Then Hillcoat and Cave worked together again on the brilliant, filthy Outback Western The Proposition. Nick Cave wrote the screenplay and did the soundtrack with Warren Ellis. The performances and tone of this movie are just great, it is ugly and dirty and mean. Here is the Australian version of the trailer.

Hillcoat and Cave are teaming up yet again. This time for the adaptaion of The Road. I haven’t read the Cormac McCarthy book yet but it’s on the list of stuff I want to pick up based on Jon Canady’s glowing review here. Nick Cave will be doing the soundtrack for this, and here is an in depth article on the production from Esquire I found today.

After this Hillcoat and Cave have planned a project called Death Of A Ladies Man which is also from a script by Cave. It’s listed as in pre-production now with no cast attached, but it sounds like it may be a bit more on on the humorous side than the dark and violent side of Cave’s work.

Godfish Collective

This video was posted on the old site for some time. It’s a no budget short put together by a film team that goes by the name Godfish Collective out of Canada. I didn’t have any involvement in this project, they just happened to use some of my music for the score. I didn’t find out about it until well after it was done. According to them they layered the tracks ”The Fraternal Order of Hypocrites and Zealots”, “The Redundancy of Procreation” and “Where the Fearful Eat Their Young” on top of each other and them mixed them all in and out of one another for the soundtrack.

“I Thought I Was Right, I Wasn’t” a short film by Godfish Collective

The news that has transpired since that was put on the old site is this… Godfish Collective is working on a feature length film under the working title “Stop” and have asked me to contribute about half of the soundtrack. It’s still in the writing stage, and isn’t expected to begin shooting until sometime in 2010. The only details I know really are that its a horror film that is drawing some influence from the feel of films like Funny Games, Bully, Kids and Elephant. I know the basic premise of the story. However, last I knew it hadn’t been scripted yet so I’ll leave that in the bag in case it should evolve.

I’m excited at the prospect. I hope it works out. I will keep you posted as anything new comes up, but it may be awhile before I have anything additional to add.