At times it’s difficult to classify the sound created by Richard D. James — better known as Aphex Twin — on his sophomore release, Selected Ambient Works Volume II, as music. Yes, there are moments of melody and occasionally a slight rhythm, but what are lacking are any familiar song structures — or titles, for that matter — to signify one movement to the next. This is complex, challenging and unsettling music, and it is quite frankly the most terrifying record in my collection.

Taking cues from the avant-garde ambient works of Fripp/Eno, John Cage and Tangerine Dream and fusing it with his own sense of space and dimension, James first came to prominence with his 1993 debut Selected Ambient Works 85-92, which John Bush of Allmusic described as “a watershed of ambient music.” The record is best described as minimalist, with most tracks only containing intricate drumbeats and layers of echoing synths. It set the framework and standard by which the genre was measured in that time period — and was followed up the next year by Volume II.

Volume II is a daunting two-disc collection, reportedly inspired by James’ lucid dreams and apparent synesthesia (which is probably what makes the record so frightening). The tracks shift between the transcendent and sinister, with only intermittent hints at what lies beneath. The absence of song titles (with the single exception of “Blue Calx”) also lends to the overall mystique of the record. Listeners were instead given diagrams with corresponding photographs and left to decipher and interpret the names.

The record begins with the blooming childlike sounds of “[Cliff].” Juxtaposed against a wash of dark chords, the track could be the background for a modern horror film. (In my research for this piece I discovered that it was actually used in the 2001 indie drama Manic, staring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Don Cheadle and Zooey Deschanel.) The menacing echo of “[Tree]” evokes the foreboding image of entry to a dark forest and the realization that you are not alone, and closes with a note so low that it’s felt more than heard. “[White Blur 1],” one of the shortest pieces on the record, features some of the only recognizable voices on the album, albeit distorted and sped up and buried beneath the sound of a wind chime.

Disc two begins innocuously enough, with “Blue Calx,” but it quickly returns to the darkest reaches of the human psyche with “[Parallel Stripes].” The sound of florescent industrial lights hangs in the background of the entire eight minutes, lending to its hypnotizing and almost maddening tone. It’s almost as if James is challenging you to listen to the entire eight minutes and not break. If “[Parallel Stripes]” is mesmerizing in its delivery, “[Grey Stripe]” represents easily the most terrorizing track of the collection. The dynamic attack of what can only be described as white noise seems to lurk quietly and lurch out for the quick scare.

James clearly revels in his eeriness and embodied it personally by appearing on multiple record covers, his face in an ever present evil smile and often superimposed on otherwise benign images. While none of these subsequent records contained the same scary material within, the collected works of Selected Ambient Works Volume II left more than enough of a mark.

Sometimes I wonder if kids today are bothered in the slightest by the sorts of things that used to freak me out when I was a boy. For example, when I was 9 I spent several months in what I now refer to as my “Hitler phase,” when – fueled by the Nazi-horror stories imparted by a creepy friend, and spooked by a coffee-table book called Sieg Heil! that I had checked out from the local library — I frequently conjured the very real image of Der Führer lurking behind my darkened bedroom door. (He didn’t have to hold a machete – the thought of that moustache alone was enough to make me wet myself.) Those months were probably the only time I was thankful to share a room with my older brother, because I couldn’t stand to be in the dark by myself. I often found myself running at a full sprint to the front of the house to escape Adolf’s clutches, and those were the days when my mom would stomp through the house, snapping off lights I had left on and muttering something about owning the electric company.

At about that same time, during the fall of 1975, my friend Kevin brought over a single he had snatched from his sister’s collection. We knew it simply as “The Exorcist,” but of course it was an edited version of the “first movement” (A/K/A side one) of Mike Oldfield’s debut LP Tubular Bells, excerpted for use as the theme to William Friedkin’s film version of William Peter Blatty’s religious-horror novel. The single, officially known as “Tubular Bells (Theme from The Exorcist),” had reached the Top 10 almost two years before, but its success had predated by just a few months my headlong leap into pop-radio obsession during the fall of ’74. And as a 9-year-old, I wasn’t yet familiar with the R-rated film.

I was, however, intimately familiar with the novel. I don’t know why my parents had allowed me to get my hands on Sieg Heil! or The Exorcist or Jaws (which I devoured that fall even as the film continued its 8-month-long run in a local theater) – maybe everything was fair game for a pair of atheist liberals in the post-Watergate era. Suffice it to say that my first real exposure to Catholicism (apart from a couple of masses attended with my aunt and uncle) involved copious amounts of poor Regan’s vomit and a crucifix inserted where no crucifix should ever go. The impact of reading The Exorcist at nine probably explains a lot about the dysfunctional functioning of my psyche ever since, not least my tendency whenever an electrical gadget refuses to work properly to proclaim, a la Dr. Evil when his chair won’t stop spinning around, “I need an old priest and a young priest.”

Even with all of that going on, it wasn’t actually the A-side of the “Tubular Bells” single that set me off when Kevin played it for me — it was the flipside, which excerpted the closing portion of the album’s “first movement.” (By the way, wasn’t it entirely more satisfying to flip over a 45 and discover a cool song, as opposed to merely checking out the second track of a CD single or downloading an extra file?) “Tubular Bells (long version)” started out ominously enough, with a couple repetitions of the percolating guitar line that would underscore the entire track.

Soon enough, a formal, bordering-on-snooty British voice intones the words “grand piano,” and a melody is introduced atop that persistent guitar.

As the melody line concludes, the voice returns (innocuously enough) to say “reed and pipe organ,” and the melody repeats, and a pattern is established … a not-unpleasant pattern, really, though that guitar still offers cause for concern. Then the voice comes in again, this time a bit more disturbingly.

“Glockenspiel? What the hell’s a glockenspiel?” said the other voice, the one inside my prepubescent head. “Is that some sort of Nazi torture device?” Yet the pattern continues … relentlessly, and with growing momentum … the melody repeated by a bass guitar, a double-speed guitar, two slightly distorted guitars, and then …

Why did he have to say “mandolin” that way?!? As though it was the last instrument I’d hear before Hitler emerged from my closet? (Once my college girlfriend had heard this story, all she ever had to do to make fun of me was bug her eyes and say, “mahn-doh-LIN!”) The mandolin itself is spooky enough – high-pitched, quickly strummed, and with the other instruments building behind it. Building, building, through one more cycle featuring Spanish and acoustic guitars, and then finally comes the voice one more time, this time sounding like either Hitler or the devil himself: “plus, tubular … bells!”

As soon as that monstrous bell clanged for the first time, I was screaming, “Turn it off! Turn it off!” But Kevin wouldn’t turn it off, and I was forced to sit through the clanging … through the choir that may as well be angels of death … through that melody that I never wanted to hear again, and yet knew I’d be hearing in my head for the rest of my life.

Even as “Tubular Bells” inevitably became the soundtrack of my Hitler phase, the melody that sent me sprinting toward the light of the living room as surely as “Chariots of Fire” would later propel Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell, I became obsessed with listening to it again and again. Perhaps, I kidded myself, if I heard it enough times it would lose its ability to frighten me, and I could conquer my pathetic fear of a pop song.

It didn’t work, of course – and worse, Kevin and my brother Kit both knew it wasn’t working. Finally I banished the single from our house, telling Kevin I never wanted to hear it again and borrowing some other record of his that I can no longer remember – the Carpenters’ “Solitaire,” perhaps, or maybe “Fly Robin Fly.” This seemed to calm my nerves a bit, and soon I began to feel more confident in darkened hallways. But then, a couple of nights later, I was going to bed after a typical evening spent listening to my small collection of 45s, and my brother said, “You want me to play one more?”

“Sure,” I replied, and he set the needle down on a 45 – then walked to the door, cut off the overhead light and left, locking me inside … with “Tubular Bells” playing at full blast. That communist (which is what I called him when I was mad at him in those days) had borrowed the record back from Kevin, just so he could pull this awful stunt. I don’t know how many toys I stepped on, how many pieces of furniture I reduced to rubble, as I bolted from my bed and lunged for the door in complete darkness, screaming bloody murder while Kit held the doorknob on the outside so I couldn’t turn it. And when my dad arrived to bring down the hammer (which is pretty much what he was there for in those days), I could tell that even as he was figuring out a punishment for my brother he couldn’t hide the fact that he was … laughing at me.

Now I know why, of course. Now I know that the voice on the record isn’t Mephistopheles but rather Vivian Stanshall, former vocalist for the Bonzo Dog Band, and that his affect was supposed to be comical rather than nasty. (When Oldfield remade Tubular Bells a few years back in an effort to revive his sales numbers, he hired John Cleese to step in for the dearly departed Mr. Stanshall.) Now I know that the fascinating, haunting, but overly long Tubular Bells was pretty much the last stop for the hybrid classical/prog-rock instrumental genre before it morphed into New Age (and stopped frightening anybody). And now I know that the devil isn’t going to possess me via a pop song, no matter how menacing it is, and that Hitler isn’t going to leap out from behind every closed door.

Still, now I’m starting to think that maybe I shouldn’t have reminded myself of all this childhood trauma. And I’m thinking that you’ll have to forgive me if, over the next few days, I quicken my step a little bit when I traverse a darkened corridor.

Mike Oldfield – Tubular Bells, first movement

In a way, the Residents might be the definitive Halloween band. Preferring to stay completely anonymous, they’ve never appeared in public without some kind of costume — usually disembodied eyeballs with tuxes and top hats. Their few interviews are often fielded by their management company (the aptly named Cryptic Corporation), while the Residents themselves silently clown around with the childlike creepiness of deranged amusement park mascots. On top of that, their music is often deliberately perverse, unpleasant, and bizarre. In their early career this was often played for laughs — their first few albums are sublime slices of Dadaist nonsense — but their later works have been increasingly, almost unrelentingly dark.

The album I’d originally set out to cover was God in Three Persons (1988), a genuinely disturbing concept album about violent sexual compulsion and conjoined twins with healing powers, but something about that choice just wasn’t right. For one thing, the music had a bit too much ’80s MIDI chintziness to it, and the occasional intrusion of an ugly-sounding “Greek chorus” (“THIS IS A SAD PART … OH, IT’S SUCH A SAD PART!”) almost felt like a cop-out. It’s like they were saying, “Sure, this album’s dark, but don’t worry — we’re still the same ol’ WaCkY Residents!” Though I still love the album and consider it to be the band’s masterpiece, the nature of this series demands something more potent, scarewise.

Roadworms: The Berlin Sessions (2000) is a selection of songs recorded in rehearsals for the band’s Wormwood tour, a show based around an album based around the most gruesome and horrifying stories of the Old Testament. While the album, 1998′s Wormwood: Curious Stories From the Bible, was once again a bit too MIDI-reliant to have the right kind of musical impact, the live-in-the-studio versions scamper and slither between bursts of nightmarish noise and seething, skin-crawling, understated menace. One of the major improvements is the presence of guitarist Nolan Cook, an extremely skilled musician who’s nonetheless capable of creating the most hideous sounds known to mortal man. The vocals count for a lot, though, giving life to a virtual rogue’s gallery of forsaken Bible characters.

Ironically, for an album whose source material is the Bible itself, the relentless racket and spooky stage reverb make this sound like it was recorded in the depths of hell. “Judas Saves,” the album’s climax, may seem innocuous enough for the first few minutes … but just you wait.

I came to John Cale by way of Alan Moore. That sounds pretty roundabout, but I figure it’s not uncommon. See, Moore used a (misquoted and misattributed) Cale line as the epigram for the mind-blowing final chapter of Watchmen, and Watchmen has probably sold more copies over the years than any John Cale record has, ever. So there must be other poor souls out there who closed the book on that final panel — impossibly stark, just white text on black with the icon of a clock, hands pointing to midnight — and then flipped back to the indicia to find the source of the quote.

It would be a stronger world, a stronger loving world to die in.

Because, you know, you read a line like that, a line that in itself seems to offer up (not unlike the ending of Watchmen) both a bleak judgment of the human condition and a steely glint of compassion. I was aware of Cale only by reputation — I had not yet heard the Velvet Underground, though of course I knew of them, and I knew that Cale’s solo work tended to veer between prettily orchestrated chamber pop and screaming maniacal rock, and that his lyrical worldview tended to be dark, bloody, and perverse. Yeah, okay. But a line like that begs for some context, is what I’m saying. (And, y’know, Alan Moore knows the score.) And so, in time, I hunted down a cheap cassette of 1982’s Music for a New Society — a title that seemed, again, both hopeful and ominous — took it home, slipped it into my Walkman in my bedroom, in the dark, late at night, to listen while I settled down to sleep.

It was weeks before I found the courage to listen to it again. Hell, it was a couple of days before I found the courage to sleep again. This was — well, it was scary stuff.

Now, “scary” covers such a broad range of emotion, from the enjoyable tingle of watching a horror movie to utter pants-shitting terror, and it shades into sadness or anger at either end. A ranting madman can be scary — but so can a whisper in a quiet house. Almost all effective music has a certain spooky quality (it’s no accident we speak of a catchy melody as being “haunting”), but self-consciously “scary” music is hard to pull off without turning into wretched self-parody (see the oeuvre of Brian “I’m the Devil! BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA!” Warner, of the popular beat combo Marilyn Manson).

On Music for a New Society — which is currently out of print — John Cale finds the discomfort zone and quietly, without the shrieking histrionics that usually characterize his “extreme” work, starts to dig. At every turn, the album systematically violates the implied contract between musician and listener. It’s an odd-sounding record, for starters, produced and arranged for maximum disorientation; the songs were recorded with rhythm guitar or piano parts to give them structure, then those parts were mixed down or erased entirely — leaving melodies, percussion, and flourishes floating unanchored. Distortion flares up and settles. Volume levels spike unpredictably, perhaps randomly; a vocal track, too soft to make out, will suddenly crash painfully into your headphones, then dart away. There’s nothing for the listener to latch on to. Listen: An acoustic guitar sparkles briefly amid the séance knockings and ghostly laughter of “Thoughtless Kind” (download), startlingly pretty, and the whole thing opens up for an instant, and the claustrophobic weight of it starts to lift, and it almost coalesces into a folk song — and then it’s gone, and we’re in the wilderness again.

I think this must be what psychosis sounds like. When your mind becomes untethered, and you lose the ability to relate your sensations to the reality of your surroundings, and the ability to understand the emotional states of other people. When you become the only real thing in your world, and there is no solid thing to cling to. The voice, in the sparse instrumentation, is uncomfortably vulnerable. Cale writes in the studio, and the vocals here are mostly first takes, recorded in the depths of uncertainty. On “If You Were Still Around” (download), Cale is singing out of his range, groping for notes, trying to find the melody even as he sings it, with the net effect almost unbearably tense.

Then there’s “Sanities” (download), misidentified by Alan Moore as “Santies,” and itself an engineer’s misreading of Cale’s handwritten title “Sanctus.” The confusion is only fitting, really; the song gives us no fixed point of reference, more or less abandoning musical elements altogether, instead presenting a jumble of sounds and fractured images that never quite cohere. This is not music meant to entertain, uplift, or inspire; and one positively shudders to think of any notional “new society” that might find a ritual purpose for something so thoroughly treacherous.

Then again, maybe that was the intention after all. Speaking of Warhol’s Factory, and the uneasy way in which its ideals of transgression, decadence, and above all, hard work, aligned awkwardly with the contemporaneous easy-breezy drop-out strain of the counterculture, Cale has said “We believed that doing evil was better than doing nothing. Because at least you were doing something.” With Music for a New Society, Cale was doing something all right. Something inimitable and unmatchable. And man, is it ever evil.

Since we have some of the best writers on the planet here at Popdose, they of course are probably going to think outside of the box to come up with various ways to define the most disturbing, twisted, evil, or creepy music they’ve heard. On the other hand, I just cut a hole in that box, and I’m begging you to look inside.

I listen to lots and lots of metal. So when you start throwing out words like “evil” and “twisted,” it’s not hard to find that in my collection. I thought of going the evil route, but that seemed a little easy; I could give you any Deicide song and post a picture of singer Glen Benton with the inverted cross burnt into his head and just stop right there. Or I could’ve gone the twisted route by posting a Cannibal Corpse greatest-hits set and been done with it. Or I could’ve gone outside the box and posted tracks by BrokeNCYDE, who are scary because it disturbs me to think that four people have that little talent.

I’ve often mentioned to others how “creepy” a certain song is, so this seemed like the best path for me to choose. Below you have the soundtrack to your Halloween, because it’s time the adults have some fun as well. Do you live in a neighborhood where kids come to your door all night long looking for candy? Tired of it? Download these six tracks and play them on a loop out your front window, and next year the kids won’t be getting anywhere near your Smarties. But beware — they might just piss themselves when they hear what’s coming out of your little shop of horrors, so this year, instead of Tootsie Rolls, it might be best to hand out diapers. Just warning you.

And now, six of the creepiest songs ever written …

Deadsy, “Commencement” (download)

“Commencement” scared the crap out of me the first time I heard it, back in 1999. Most of Deadsy’s unreleased self-titled debut (1997) is pretty much along the lines of what you hear here: slow and synth heavy, with drum machines and keytars all over the place. It was one of those albums I found myself listening to a lot, in the dark, when I needed to unwind; my first listen to “Commencement” (off the first, unreleased version of Commencement, from ’99) was also in my room, lying on my bed, lights off. It was the very first song that ever really kind of made me shiver.

From the fade-in of the weird beats of the drum machine (which continue throughout the song) to the scary tone of P. Exeter Blue’s voice, this song makes you look under the bed once or twice before you go to sleep. I would absolutely recommend listening to it in the dark, turning it up loud and using good speakers, because it gets even creepier if you actually hear the faint synth sounds underneath the first verse, which to me sound like a bunch of possessed little children mumbling something in the distant fog.

You know what else is scary? Deadsy’s music is made in part by someone who came out of Cher’s vagina (presumably): P. Exeter Blue is Elijah Blue Allman, the son of Cher and Gregg Allman.

Danzig, “Sadistikal” (download)

“Sadistikal” comes from Danzig 4P, my favorite album in Glenn Danzig’s catalog and probably the darkest of any of the albums recorded under his surname. It’s pretty stark musically and requires an open mind to enjoy, but it was tough to expect to hear “Sadistikal” in the middle. The creepy and angry vocals, as if muted through a megaphone, punctuated by music that sounds like a gaggle of ghosts and the continuous noise of a whip being cracked in the background, make this sound purely scary. And while I’m not usually a lyrics kind of guy, it’s hard to ignore these lines:

Deep in your eyes
I know they lie
As the night must die
Every morning
To give birth to the day
So must all who die
To borne a hatred
Until now unknown
Every hell I know
I will make you feel
Deep, deep down you go
My love is your hell
To suffer and cherish
Deep, deep down in your soul
My love is your hell
Sadistikal

Celtic Frost, “A Dying God Coming Into Human Flesh” (download)

Starting here, you’re going to see a pattern of what really scares me: unearthly wails coming from the mouths of human beings. Those Cookie Monster vocals of death metal don’t do anything to scare me, but let out a wail as if you have the devil inside, trying to bust out, and you’ve got me. “A Dying God” was off Celtic Frost’s 2006 reunion album (after which they broke up for the second time), Monotheist. It’s around the two-minute mark where I was really startled the first time I listened to this, and it still kind of shakes me up to this day. The guttural wail of the lyrics “Frozen is heaven and frozen is hell / And I am dying in this living human shell” as delivered by Martin Eric Ain just gave me shivers again. And it was released as a single. A single!

Nine Inch Nails, “Erased, Over. Out” (download)

Trent Reznor is one of my favorite artists of all time and I listen to some “out there” music, but some of his early remixed stuff even I can’t get into. His newer remixed material tends to lean towards the dancier more structured end of the spectrum where his early remix albums tend to be of a more experimental nature. 1992’s Fixed EP, a remix of his Broken EP from earlier in the year, is almost unlistenable to me as it’s a shit ton of harsh noise. His remix album(s) for the classic The Downward Spiral, titled Further Down the Spiral, didn’t get any less weird thanks to remixes from some of the same artists on Fixed: J.G. Thirlwell (Foetus) and legendary experimental musicians Coil, whose contribution you hear here. It’s frankly amazing to me how much these guys could get out of the word “Erase” slowed down and extended, many times to the point where it doesn’t even sound like a word anymore. This song may only be six minutes long but it feels like 20 (and that’s a good thing).

Khanate, “Commuted” (download)

It took me until this June to finally pick up some music from Khanate. I had heard about them for a while thanks to being a fan of doom and drone metal but they didn’t really register on my radar until I starting looking into the works of the man who is probably considered the king of drone, Stephen O’Malley. One of the things I find fascinating about drone metal is how any human being can be interested in playing four notes for 24 minutes. One day, I’m going to make it to a drone metal concert just to see what the hell that scene is like. I of course exaggerate (only slightly) when I say it’s simply four notes because if you’re a fan you start to notice the subtleties of held notes, feedback and well placed single drum beats to act a buffer between parts that seem to jut out from left field at times. However, none of those things matter when your vocalist is Alan Dubin who sounds like he’s being tortured when he sings. I’ve never heard anything quite like Dubin’s nightmare-inducing vocals; the only person that I can think of that comes even close is Mike Patton on one of this more experimental days. “RED GLORY!”

Sunn O))), “Cursed Realms (Of the Winterdemons)” (download)

Simply pronounced “Sun” if you didn’t know, this happens to be the main project of Stephen O’Malley along with Greg Anderson (Goatsnake). Most people trace the origin of Drone Doom back to the early ‘90s with a band called Earth. While they may be the godfathers, Sunn O))) is the most well known leader in the genre and have taken it to a whole new level. They, along with pretty much any drone band are an acquired taste and while I’m the type of guy who likes to push people to listen to things outside of their comfort zone and expand their horizons a bit, even I won’t push this on anyone. Sunn O))) records can be rewarding, frustrating, beautiful and disturbing, sometimes all at once. Many of their tracks have sparse words or phrases here or there and many simply seem to just be one note held for minutes at a time. But I’ve come to enjoy them over the years though I usually only put them on when I just need to get away from things.

I vividly remember listening to this track for the first time a little over a year ago — September 25, 2008 — seven days after my son was born. My wife and son had come down with some infection during the birth and were stuck in the hospital. I had remained there with them for days and on this day I was heading home to get some sleep in a real bed. I was about a mile away from the hospital when “Cursed Realms” came on. The minute those agonizing screams came on, I literally jumped in my seat. This isn’t even an original. It’s a cover of a song by the black metal group Immortal. It’s kind of odd to think that someone outside of that genre could take a black metal song and actually make it creepier. However, to this day, I still think Sunn O)))’s “Cursed Realms (Of the Winterdemons)” is the scariest song ever recorded.

Musical sound doesn’t frighten me anymore. It did once, when I was young. The sudden, jarring strangeness of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” once freaked me out to no end, a veritable boon to all who wanted to tease a chubby, overly sensitive child. Whenever she felt like being evil, my sister would turn to me and shout, “Mamma mia, mamma mia, let me go!” which would send me running out of the room in tears.

Wimp. Definition of a wimp. Today I recognize the utter campiness of the tune and have grown to love the better part of the Queen catalog. In fact music that once struck me as strange and dissonant has become more attractive, not more repulsive, in my adult years.

But lyrics still have the ability to get in my head and cause the spiders in there to revolt. I’m currently fascinated by — and a whole lotta disturbed by — a group called Jupiter Society. Their sound is prog metal, heavy on the synths, but the scenarios in their lyrics are all Stephen King in space.

For instance, the last song on their debut album, First Contact, Last Warning (2008), is “Presumed Dying,” about a star cruiser that’s the target of hostile fire. One of the passengers climbs into a space suit and escapes right as alien beings blow the ship to smithereens. Okay, fine, then what? The escapee slowly drifts toward the sun. Oops. (It sounds better than it reads, by the way.)

Other creepy goings-on include “Bismarck Explorer,” where a survey team finds the abandoned ship of Captain Kate Bishop, yet all the doors have been locked from the inside. But if her crew never left, where did they go? And in “Cold, Rigid and Remote,” a corpse is reanimated as a cyborg; he contemplates his lack of emotion about the situation and his newfound immortality as he begins his hollow second life.

First Contact, Last Warning could be subtitled “When Bad Things Happen to Space People,” but it is an enjoyable album. Just don’t listen too deeply, that’s all.