This Halloween sees me (somewhat reluctantly) abandoning my usual routine. There'll be no carving of turnips,1 no careful choosing of monster movies, and no poisoning of local children with cheap & nasty sweeties. Instead, I'll be performing best-man duties (and swanning around in my fanciest dress) at the brother's Halloween-themed wedding party.
Though there will (as is customary at such human functions) be generous amounts of music and dancing on the night, I'll be secretly pining and longing for the pure pleasures that only "60 min [sic] of terrifying sound effects" can produce. Behold the 2 Euro wonder that is "Sound of Horror CD".2
I expected it to be harmless and charming. Full of cartoony creaky doors, cuddly booing ghosts, and rattling (zoinks!) Scooby Doo chains. The kind of thing they might sell to beaming, rosy-cheeked chiddlers at Disneyland.
I was terribly, terribly wrong…
Panting, Shrieking, Grunting, Moaning, Thumping hearts fit to burst, Brutal industrial rhythms - all these things and more are present (on one gruelling hour-long track). It's a festering, Satanic potpourri where slices of David Lynch (or Angelo Badalamenti) mix with bloody chunks of Guantanamo Bay style sonic torture. Have a listen to the first 3 minutes…
Now imagine an hour of that. On your headphones. With the volume turned up to 11. You'd be straight out the front door with the hedge-trimmers in hand, ready to shred the neighbours' kids into a fine gooey paste.
Is it all part of a giant, Silver Shamrock-esque mind-fuck designed to highlight the vacuousness of consumerist Halloween by generating mass carnage? The answer is - almost certainly yes.
You've been warned.
oh, that wasn’t very scary
speaking of D.Lynch, have you ever seen The Grandmother, his short film of 1970 ?
it has an amazing pre-electronic heavy metal soundtrack (personally, I think Badalamenti’s music is TOO beautifully eerie, I enjoyed watching Twin Peaks, it was very innovative tv, but it bordered on camp, where the ODD becomes a NORM, such that there is none of the unexpected psychological horror in the midst of ordinary life that to my tastes is the best kind)
fustar, did you get a chance to watch the OTTO THE ZOMBIE trailer? that’s another good soundtrack
October 29th, 2008 at 12:00 amThe effect is gradual and cumulative. Try listening to an hour of it. You’ll be reduced to a gibbering wreck.
Have never seen The Grandmother alas. Keep meaning to buy Lynch’s Short Films DVD but haven’t go round to it yet.
Thanks for the link but I try and avoid seeing something for the first time on YouTube, Daily Motion etc. Don’t want that reduced experience to be my first (and lasting) impression - weird nerd that I am. Besides, Lynch went mental (and fair play to him) at the notion that watching Inland Empire on an iphone could be described as properly experiencing the film. I don’t want to upset him further!
Get what you mean about Twin Peaks but I sort of view it as more of a Soap Opera than a straight (or even twisted) horror. The campness and beautiful, stylised, doomed romance are pretty appropriate as soap elements (same goes for the score).
It even has a soap within its soap - Invitation to Love (with camp corniness cranked up to the max).
October 29th, 2008 at 12:34 amDang it. Ruth, if you’re reading this I’m afraid my over zealous spam bots have blasted your last comment. Could you please repost it (or similar)? Want to “approve” you lest the spam tag attach itself to your good name!
Sorry.
October 29th, 2008 at 1:32 amThat’s brilliant! As a fan of experimental noise music, I need this novelty to adorn my record shelves (and wouldn’t it sound awesome with a techno beat?) I think it would be a shame to confine its use to Halloween, though. Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries; bring the chill atmosphere of the unquiet grave to all major celebrations!
October 29th, 2008 at 10:02 am(On the topic of poisoning children, have you tried pickled onions dipped in chocolate? They look like maltesers, and teach the tikes not to trust grinning grown-ups.)
yes, that is weird and nerdy
as a 76 year old man, who has watched many short b + w art films in dark basements via noisy film projectors, I guarantee you that your dailymotion experience of The Grandmother will be quite AUTHENTIC
anyway, Lynch is just posing as some sort of God — as if his preferred scale of experience is somehow more real !!
some of my best (or really, one should say worst) horror experiences have occurred on the inside of my eyeball as I have walked down an ordinary street
(the PSYCHE has no sizes, it is ever re-shifting, size-wise, position-wise, frame-of-reference-wise … to me that is the essence of horror)
enjoy your brother’s wedding, what does a groom’s brother wear to a Halloween wedding ?
I am in the midst of helping my 17 year old son finish his costume.
He’s going as a Surveillance Unit, with a cardboard video camera on his back, surrounded by printed slogans like Facebook wants You and a USA flag where all the stars are replaced by tiny corporate logos.
The idea was entirely his. Very 2008 conceptual, not very gothic or macabre in the slightest.
October 29th, 2008 at 2:08 pmHi
October 29th, 2008 at 5:40 pmIt’s ok I was just saying I never realised this blog was you, ie brother of brian (not sure if you want to remain nameless on your blog, some people are funny about that). So I’ll see ya Saturday,I’ll be the one in the big dress and white wig. My costume will make it difficult for me to fit into the bathrooms, or sit, so I’ll be standing in the corner looking stylish.
Doubtful, Email me your address and I’ll send you on a copy. It is indeed crying out for a techno beat, and you sound like the man who could (and should) make that a reality.
“Onions dipped in chocolate” sounds like a fair description of the CD itself. An apparently jolly little but of spooky fun that hides a disturbingly freaky core.
Ira, I’m not convinced and will stick to my fussy, nerdy guns. And in fairness to Lynch, he was offering a sober (and needed) corrective to the “Up with new stuff!” enthusiasm of tech-evangelists. You just can’t lose yourself in a film when watching it on the way to work on an iphone (or whatever). It’s just not the same as sitting in a darkened room or theatre with no other focus than the screen. I want intimacy (ooer!) when I watch a film - and I can’t get that on a tiny screen in a public setting.
As for what I’m wearing…I’m keeping it secret, but will happily reveal all after the weekend (even though it’s not particularly exciting). I wanted to go as “a vague sense of nameless dread” but couldn’t find an appropriate wig.
Ruth, It is I alright, the nameless one (who is funny about that sort of thing…for some reason). Looking forward to seeing your frock and your stylish standing.
October 30th, 2008 at 1:37 amOh and Ruth, I have occasionally mentioned the ould (or young) brother on here. His love of jam sandwiches was a popular topic:
http://www.fustar.info/2007/01/02/199/
http://www.fustar.info/2007/01/16/208/
October 30th, 2008 at 10:16 ammy point is that horror is independent of art and technology and consumer styles, it is a private experience of “odd” alignments of scales of psychological reality (a sense of “off-centeredness”)
It can creep into one’s soul anywhere, occasionally while viewing art (but most times for me it is intertwined with the textures of my daily mundane life).
Anyway, at this point, I watch movies or read books not to “lose myself”, but mainly to observe cultural tropes (in the words of Copernicus) and to pick up technical tricks re narration, etc.
I saw The Grandmother for the first time on DailyMotion last year … and it had a strong effect on me. Not so much because it was D.Lynch or because it was “horrible”, but simply because it reminded me of the year 1970 and lots of my own adolescent feelings + art work at the time (ja ja ja, I am not 76, I am 52)
have fun at the wedding, Maestro F. ^^
October 30th, 2008 at 1:05 pmand thank you, thank you for this marvelous feature of 30 minutes editing
and F., I respect idiosyncracies,
October 30th, 2008 at 1:50 pmthey’re not nerdy, it’s how we all maneuver through this complex maze that is called - - - -.
Seriously.
As I’m in Limerick for a few days (my family hail from this fine town) I must pop up to Your More Store and get a CD of my own (thereby financing the unsung artiste who concocted the aural nightmare; and why does it not surprise me that such an artifact would be found on William Street?)
October 30th, 2008 at 9:20 pmAlso, I would agree with Fustar on the YouTube experience, but sometimes it’s a great way of sampling and sharing curiosities (one example: I’ve been unable to find copies of the very odd Thomas and Nardo cartoons anywhere else). It’s like looking at a bad colour reproduction of a very large painting; a useful reference, but no match for the real thing. As for films on phones: arse, I say! Enjoy the party!
guys, david lynch need not worry, I don’t even own a cell phone, much less an Iphone (when I walk down the street, I entertain myself the old fashioned way — with home-grown psychic hallucinations !!)
anyway, when one’s mind is its own film production company, who needs David Lynch ?????
(actually, in my fiction writing, I’m trying at the moment to describe human minds with advanced sensory-perceptual systems who “telepathically” experience “fields of other minds” in a manner that we’d call CINEMATIC)
((such that subjective reality would not metaphorically be ‘like a movie” but actually, “be a movie”))
first time I’ve tried to describe this to others in print
October 30th, 2008 at 10:17 pm(uh oh, this is all being written in EDIT mode, how much time left on the clock, uberseer F, you do see + hear everything on this blog at every moment, right?) :-)
Ira, I’m beginning to think you actually are David Lynch! And I mean that in a totally complimentary way.
And yes, I “see + hear everything on this blog at every moment”. At first it used to drive me mad (like his vision did to Ray Milland in X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes) but I’ve learned to process and control it. Now I just feel a pleasant sense of minor power.
Doubtful, I’d meet you on William St (home to all things cheap and splendid) for a bargain basement experimental music hunt if it weren’t for my prior commitments. Come Saturday morning “Sound of Horror” may be even further reduced. Bad news for the (possibly Chinese) composer(s) but good news for vulture-like consumers.
October 31st, 2008 at 1:12 amyou’re welcome, I’ll take it as a compliment
but … oddness and horror isn’t all of life (though at times it does seem that way, unfortunately)
October 31st, 2008 at 1:57 pmI’m just as interested in the “anti-horror genre” — how a soul unexpectedly, serendipitously can experience lightness and ease of psychic flow. Just by being alive, interacting with the variety of being.
To me, that is just as “unbelievable” (and “otherwordly”) as the macabre.
The YIN / YANG of the heart requires both perspectives.
Have you read The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James ? (It was a pleasure years ago to come across WJ’s mind while I was in college)
http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/JamVari.html
This is from the concluding paragraph:
“I seem to myself” — such brilliant humility
and I love William’s late 19th Century phrasings, here’s no. 3 of his 5 “characteristics of religious life” (and since you are a footnoter, I herewith give you the page number — 475)
“WORK is really done”
The American pragamatist spirit at its best !
well, I also like no. 4
actually, I like them all !!!
October 31st, 2008 at 2:08 pmsee ya
it’s yooooo tooooob
it’s yoooooo tooooooooob
it’s yoooooooooo toooooooooooooob
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jOU3m_tHtQ
a little cyber ghost show for halloween … ( Will he watch ? )
tho ya prob’ly already seen it, irish, damian mccarthy, cyber-scale horror, methinks it’s clever
October 31st, 2008 at 6:48 pmThat could be an early Nurse with Wound album, like maybe they took ‘Homotopy to Marie’ and repackaged it as innocuously as possible.
November 4th, 2008 at 10:22 pmIra, Watched He Dies at the End (hadn’t seen it before) and thought it a most effective and “tight” little gem. Clearly this is an example of a film being better served sitting at a desktop PC while watching. I nearly shat myself.
Jason, I’d no idea that 2 Euro shops were so avant-garde. In the bargain basement world chances and risks can be taken.
November 6th, 2008 at 2:03 amI wanted to post this video on GREETINGS EARTHLINGS, but the site’s comments section has been invaded by SPAM.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cvYVXAOaW4
This is a brilliantly creative work (and was uploaded to youtube just a month ago). Its creator is Dovetastic (Kenny Irwin):
“It took 1250 hours of creating artwork frames over the corse of a year plus countless hours of post production time to create this film all by myself.”
In the comments section, Dovetastic describes Pakistani UFO history.
ALSO check out
December 10th, 2008 at 11:00 pmhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/kennyirwin/sets/72157604476547192/