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This is based on opinion. Please don't list it on a work's trope example list.

Following

Nightmare Fuel / Boards of Canada

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Albums with their own page:

Examples:

Old Tunes

  • "House of Abin'adab" from Old Tunes Vol. 1 practically lives off of Nothing Is Scarier; the only sound throughout the entire track is a low, quavering drone that occasionally pipes up in intensity.

Music Has the Right to Children

  • The cover of Music Has the Right to Children anyone? The Faceless...
    • The inside of the album has each of their faces magnified. Ugh.
    • Plus, the "I... Lovveee... You..." samples on "The Color Of The Fire."
    • Though maybe not outright Nightmare Fuel, "An Eagle In Your Mind" and "Sixtyten" are subtly ominous.
    • Not to mention the more subtly ominous "Pete Standing Alone". Brr...
    • "Smokes Quantity" is very ominous too, especially those droning... sounds repeated throughout the whole thing. The icy keys that join partway through don't help either.

In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country

  • In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country. The whole EP has an unsettling atmosphere, especially "Amo Bishop Roden" and the title track.

The Campfire Headphase

  • "Sherbert Head", with the intense static filter, sound clips of people who are either loudly talking, laughing, or screaming, and the minimal melody that can be both beautiful and strangely empty. It is incredibly reminiscent of something one would hear on Geogaddi, rather than this otherwise placid album.
  • "Slow This Bird Down" is fairly ominous, especially compared to the rest of The Campfire Headphase.

Tomorrow's Harvest

  • Tomorrow's Harvest. An apocalyptic dread is present through the whole album, from the opening bleakness of "Gemini" to the Downer Ending of "Semena Mertvykh".
    • And speaking of "Semena Mertvykh", the title is a Russian translit for "Seeds of the Dead". Creepy, that is.
    • "White Cyclosa" can easily put the listener on edge, whether or not they've seen Day of the Dead.
    • As with most BoC works, fan interpretations are ubiquitous, but a Redditor came up with this particularly horrifying one.

Other Releases

  • Their remix (under the "Hell Interface" alias) of Colonel Abrams' "Trapped" turns an upbeat pop song into a horrifying song about love gone wrong.
    • Speaking of Hell Interface, the Anti-Christmas Song "Soylent Night" is arguably one of the most unsettling tracks ever heard from BoC. The main melody is a sample from the fifth movement of Johann Sebastian Bach's Magnificat twisted into a dissonant, haunting loop. Partway through a passage from "Silent Night" can be heard, but it has been treated in such a way that it sounds more like a faint and ghostly wail than any human vocal. To top it all off, the song concludes with a distorted robotic voice reciting the Lord's Prayer.
  • Some of the tracks on the "Random 35 Tracks Tape" can be unsettling. Case in point? Audiotrack B08. Tense atmosphere, dissonant, clanging melody, the perfect soundtrack to a lost Silent Hill area.
    • Audiotrack B06 is very quiet and empty. In fact, it feels almost a little too empty...

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