Unease: October 2021

By Christian Ortmann

I’ve been looking forward to the October playlist for a while now. I saw it as my chance to say “no no no, these are the creepiest tracks for the Halloween season.” It must be the pretentious side of me that enjoys talking about them, because they are deliberately difficult to digest and hardly what I’d call enjoyable either. I think I appreciate these songs the same way I appreciate modern art. Sure, I don’t always “get” it, but I always will respect an artist seeking to push the boundary of convention and the very idea of what art can be. All of the songs I picked explore texture, depth, and atmosphere in an increasingly novel way and they tell enthralling stories that inspire the imagination for better or worse.

One creepy song that never seems to get the recognition it deserves is “Marla” by Grizzly Bear. It’s an understated tune that evokes the cold loneliness of its album art. Linens draped over old furniture, a distant gramophone, dust, cobwebs, the lingering feeling that you’re not alone. The melody traipses down the hall while every floorboard creaks underneath it. This track just feels haunted. After this however, I went with a few selections that come with more notoriety in the subgenre of horror-music. To explain Xiu Xiu’s 2019 album “Girl With Basket of Fruit” in a metaphor, it’s like if the tunnel scene from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was music. The soundscapes of Xiu Xiu flash back and forth between industrial noise, distorted vocal samples, and harsh electronics. It's erratic and unpredictable, the kind of killer combination that evokes a fight or flight response in any setting. 

The two titans of this playlist sit back to back at tracks seven and eight. “Hamburger Lady” by Throbbing Gristle is a piece of disconcerting noise that recounts the story of a woman who was badly burnt in a car accident. Lyrical content aside, the instrumental is sparse yet confounding. All “Hamburger Lady” needed was a revving engine, a signal horn, and tape production to create one of the most bone-chilling tracks that I think still stands up to this day. I don’t know what was going on in the late 70’s but it also gave us the last song I’ll write about for now. “Frankie Teardrop” is the only song I know of to inspire its own challenge of psychological endurance. A comedian and radio host named Tom Scharpling would dare his listeners to listen to this song loudly, and in “the most creatively terrifying situations that they can think of.” Despite the completely manufactured horror of the challenge, participants rarely saw the ten-and-a-half-minute song through to the end. This song also tells a story, the titular Frankie is a young father who was laid off from his factory job. What follows is his descent into desperation, madness, and possibly the afterlife.  The first time I showed it to any of my friends, they were playing with an Ouija board in a college dorm. For all intents and purposes... It went very well. Remarkably it is a more sparse arrangement than Hamburger Lady, relying on little more than a drum machine and the vocal performance of frontman Alan Vega, who builds the whole experience up from a quivering whisper to blood-curdling, shrill cries of agony. 

I sit writing all this understanding that nobody will read it until Halloween is over, so maybe keep these songs in your back pocket for a rainy day, or this time next year. Rest in peace to MF DOOM who left us one year ago. See ya in November.