Professional Moldy Fig/Curmudgeon
Well, a song that makes you think about ghosts?
I listen to this song and I imagine a ghost from an old Fleischer cartoon, with that sort of wacky jazz feeling:
edited 12th Jan '14 6:03:54 PM by Aldo930
"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."
Heresiarch Command
Some of the morbider bands in the deepest depths of death and some black metal can invoke the atmosphere of terror from beyond quite easily. In the case of rawer, more feral band like Mexicans Shub Niggurath it's from the structure and composition of the song: it begins elemental grinding riffs chromatic in their texture like the frenetic thoughts upon seeing the advent of scientifically impossible yet hideously alive phenomena enter this world. Then it moves on to a stately, imposing melody whereupon you realize this extra-dimensional terror has a mind, structure, and intent of its own.
edited 12th Jan '14 6:17:12 PM by StillbirthMachine
Only Death Is Real
AXTE INCAL AXTUCE MUN
A Hawk and a Hacksaw: "A Black and White Rainbow"
The transition from the introduction to the main melody makes me feel that a door is opening in the back of my brain, and my consciousness is floating away, over mountains, into a void beyond the boundaries of the known universe. Under the all-seeing gaze of something with a lot of teeth.
I didn't write any of that.
GAAAAAAHHHHH
The Collective
The Seer. Almost all of The Seer except Song For A Warrior. It is an absolutely eldritch album straight up.
edited 13th Jan '14 10:23:03 PM by iamathousandapples
"I could eat a knob at night" - Karl Pilkington
Apparition in the Woods
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
"93 Ave. B Blues" is a very disturbing piece of music, although seeing the first performance of it was downright funny: The whole band jumped back onstage for the encore, that happened, and they walked off.
Frankie Teardrop by Suicide and Peking Saint by Cat Power.
The first, because Alan Vega sounds like a wraith when he screams. The second, because of the mysterious nature of the song itself. Also, there is this.
3 microphones forever
Comus - "Diana". Lots of their first album could qualify really, but this was the first song of theirs I heard, so it left a big impression. Even without being able to understand most of the lyrics I could tell something disturbing was going on, and there's something about the lead vocals that make me imagine it being sung by a mischievous Humanoid Abomination of some kind.
The Microphones - "The Glow". So there's kind of a funny, if trippy, story to this - I first listened to It Was Hot We Stayed In The Water in bed one night and must have dozed off during/slightly before this song - somehow I was awakened by the quiet section at about 3:30 (the part with the lyric "Hey wake up, it's me, the glow"), and in my half-asleep state I honestly expected to open my eyes and see someone/something addressing me personally. Since then I've had this interpretation in my mind that "the glow" they're singing about is a benevolent spirit of some kind (that section is sung way too gently to seem malevolent at all).
The Artificer
I awoke in a sweat from the American Dream
Tim Hecker - Virgins
This is the first album that comes to mind when I think of "ghostly" music. First track could be the moment of death as your soul leaves your body and is sucked through a wormhole up into the next life, second track could be a jumble of memories from your former life as you are flung backwards and forwards through time like the third act in A Ghost Story. In particular the second track makes me think of some stately grand piano, covered in dust, playing itself in an empty room in a dark and abandoned house as will-o-the-wisp type beings dance through the air .
Edited by SinNanna on Mar 20th 2019 at 7:42:45 AM
"...always on the verge of death, yet repeatedly baffling Christendom by continuing to live."
Apparition in the Woods
I never actually answered this one, so let's see:
- Prurient, "Myth of Love" (Black Vase, 2005):
- Coil, "Where Are You?" (Musick to Play in the Dark Volume Two, 2000):
- Dome, "Keep It" (Dome 2, 1980):
- Public Image Ltd., "Under the House" (The Flowers of Romance, 1980):
- This Heat, "Music Like Escaping Gas" (This Heat, 1979):
This is, I guess, the non-metal shortlist? There are certainly heavy guitar/bass-driven songs which make me think of vast destructive cosmic forces and the unknowable alien in day-to-day existence, but I feel like just deluging this thread with Portal, The Body, Wormphlegm and the like in the midst of subtler horror shows like this would feel a bit jarring. "Under the House" comes the closest, but that's all percussion and voice and is kind of its own thing.
Maybe a metal list some other time? Yes, some other time.
I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.
I awoke in a sweat from the American Dream
That Dome song sounds so much like something from a Silent Hill game it's hard to believe it came out in 1980. Thanks for making me aware of it. Anyway, I just thought of some other albums that could fit this thread.
Prurient - Rainbow Mirror
Gives me the impression of wandering through some apocalyptic Eldritch Location while being stalked by unseen forces. I'm listening to this as I make my way through the last book in The Southern Reach Trilogy and it fits perfectly.
Black Mountain Transmitter - Black Goat of the Woods
The artist describes it as "the soundtrack from some lost low budget horror movie, rediscovered on an old and faded VHS cassette found mouldering in a deserted house in the depths of the woods". Pretty self-explanatory.
The Caretaker - An Empty Bliss Beyond This World
Pretty much music from the early 20th century chopped and screwed so that it sounds like it's coming from another dimension. The comments are full of better descriptions than I could muster.
"...always on the verge of death, yet repeatedly baffling Christendom by continuing to live."
I like noises.
The first three tracks from Tyondai Braxton's History That Has No Effect are very heavy on the paranormal effect. This guy makes heavily experimental music using real-time sampling, looping and tons of effects pedals, and some of his stuff is deliberately formless and alien-sounding. "Great Mass" and "Haunt The Ghosts Who Haunt Me, Better" both sound like lost souls calling out from abandoned radio stations, and the former also has a drone-of-dread quality to it, as if someone has just discovered piles of dead bodies in his basement and does not know where they came from. And the name of "I'm Gonna Start Shining Bright!", as well as its chaotic, panicked arrangement, makes me think of a person transforming into something inconceivable.
Keep Calm and Parry On
"Silver for Monsters" from The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is one of my favourites. You hear it and immediately think of going into the dark woods to hunt down the monsters that lurk there. The texture-rich strings, the dark Slavic chanting, the guttural shouts and roars and that killer bridge all work together to sell the game's dark fairy-tale themes perfectly. It's just intensely magical in a very special way.
You know when you listen to a song so haunting (yet, in some cases, oddly beautiful, like in the case of the song I post here) that it conjures images of eldritch abominations and other...creatures?
So, here's a thing: Post a song and tell us what that creature makes you think about: Eldritch Abominations, Ghosts, and other legendary creatures.
This song ("A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld (Loving You)" by The Orb) makes me think of an eldritch abomination that knows and wants so much information that it'll end up consuming us and the universe. Everything that happened and didn't happen, every version of history of all planets, clothes, technology, books, all is part of the brain:
edited 12th Jan '14 6:04:25 PM by Quag15