On Terror In Music

One often hears films or novels referred to as "terrifying."  The word is more rarely used in reference to music, and it is even rarer still to find musical artists that utilize terror in the fabric of their work.  I don't mean the terror that attacks a middle-aged suburban housewife if by some strange chance she happens upon a Tyler, The Creator track.  And I don't mean the limpid, stylized fear-mongering so prevalent in certain goth and industrial scenes.  What I mean, frankly, is Icelandic sound sculpturist Ben Frost.

There are a number of ways to come across terror in recorded music, from a listener's perspective.  There is the experience of being confronted with something so far outside your comfort zones - be they for lyrical decency, tolerance for noise and volume, or taste for speed and aggression - that it is shocking.  That would be the housewife's reaction to violent hip-hop.  There is also the experience of having one's expectations confounded, of realizing that something which you thought you had all sussed out can also come at you from a whole different angle.  I vividly recall the first time I heard The Beatles' "Helter Skelter," on headphones, with high volume, in the middle of some strange 1970s compilation cassette with a haphazard and bizarre tracklisting.  My image of the Beatles - a particular image drawn mostly from their sheer cultural prevalence and a teenager's attitude which derided the group as "parents music," - was shattered by the emergence, seemingly our of the ether, of such a damaged, deranged - possibly evil - song.  It was frightening.

But when it comes down to it, the only really unnerving part of "Helter Skelter" is the coda, which fades out in the traditional manner, only to fade back in malevolently.  Its a simple but effective warping of listener expectations, as the brief respite only seems to heighten the madness of the song's jammed-out ending, which pushes insistently forward, which feels very much as if its coming at you, before it disintegrates completely and the stereo pans and fades follow suit, sounds and instruments dropping in and out and around the mix, until finally Ringo Starr, sounding absolutely unhinged, lets out the scream about blisters on his fingers and it abruptly fades out again with one last bit of guitar abuse.  It has never surprised me that Charles Manson chose this song as the soundtrack for his own personal apocalypse.

Ben Frost's album By The Throat takes the ambience of the "Helter Skelter" coda and stretches it for 45 minutes.  This is music designed specifically to unnerve, to frighten, to provoke anxiety.  And here is the key difference, alluded to earlier, between various aspects of terror in music.  This is not the anxiety provoked by the unknown or unfamiliar, or by a sudden curveball thrown at you from previously safe and reliable sources.  Those reactions hinge mostly on listener expectations.  This is music that makes terror its very sonic template and emotional palette, music that sets out to make panic aural.  The album, taken as a whole, establishes a mood of tension which is never resolved.  The tension, in fact, seems to cycle back on itself, amplify itself in a mobius strip of anxiety, as the album ends with the same hovering cloud of atonal violins first heard in track number one.  Clinically, anxiety is both cyclical and self-amplifying, and I have never come across a better sonic representation than Ben Frost's achievement here.  The appropriate parallel is the "Grief" section of Lars Von Trier's masterful Antichrist.

Not, then, music for a sunny day.  But not all music is about reassurance and comfort, and very little music goes to these places and burrows into them as deeply as By The Throat.

ADDENDUM

 The four specific instances I can recall being frightened by a piece of (pop) music:

1.  The Beatles, "Helter Skelter."  Already covered that.

2.  Sonic Youth w/ Lydia Lunch, "Death Valley '69."  Lunch's untethered expression of carnality and incipient violence was scary (and arousing) for a teenage boy.

3.  Joy Division, "Decades."  The last song on Closer.  Something in the sound of that rattling percussion - like wasps swarming at a funeral - is deeply unsettling.

4.  Ben Frost, "Killshot."  The first song on By The Throat begins on familiar enough ambient electronic ground... and then the massive bass pad drops in, the sonic realization of spine shivers, and you start looking over your shoulder for the person that is out to get you.