Welcome back.
Are you feeling comfortable? Good. Right about now, you’re sitting casually in your seat, perhaps in a chair staring at the monitor, perhaps bundled up on the couch, wrapped in your Snuggie, your laptop buzzing on your lap with the warmth of its underside providing a pleasant sensation there. Occasionally the hard drive skitters and skates, trying to access some connection inside of this digital field of play.
And it is a field of play, don’t let it fool you otherwise. Take a good long look at the screen, for instance. Sure, your conscious, active mind sees black letters spelling out the very words you’re reading, but let your eyes haze a moment. Don’t think about meaning so much — just see the black squiggles on the expanse of white, amassed like battalions, one paragraph against another, staring each other down, preparing for the moment to bolt in attack, random “s” characters raising their swords against the myriad numbers of “m,” not to mention the machinations of those vowels, so kind to link consonants into those words that spill into your head as you read them but, as we well know, they are Machiavellian, yes they are. Those “A” “I” and “E” shapes poised to kill their counterparts, running headlong with a blood-curdling scream of “Aiiiieeeeee!!”
You could almost hear that scream as you read it, that “Aiiieeeee…” couldn’t you? It’s amazing the information the brain fills in with the absence of a direct descriptor to clarify it. Take, oh, I don’t know, that voice in your mind as you’re reading. It sounds like your voice, has all the cadence and nuance of your voice and, even, those words you mispronounce in your regular day-to-day speech are mispronounced by the narrator in your mind, the one you think is you — but it’s not you. These are my thoughts, my words, and in truth, at this very moment, it is me who is in your head right now, telling this tale, pulling these strings. Are you wondering perhaps, how long have I been in here?
You should.
Are you feeling comfortable now? Good. Let’s begin.
Metamorphosis by David Eagleman
Harvest Moon, Blue Oyster Cult from Heaven Forbid
Harvest Festival, XTC from Apple Venus Volume 1
The Ethics Of Jokes by Garrison Keillor from Horrors! A Prairie Home Companion
Earth Died Screaming, Tom Waits from Bone Machine
Prelude, Bernard Herrmann from The Day the Earth Stood Still
Humanity Part II, Ennio Morricone from The Thing: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Through The Mirror, John Carpenter and Alan Howarth from Prince of Darkness
Fat Albert, Bill Cosby from The Best of Bill Cosby
Cold Colours, Neil Gaiman from Warning: Contains Language
The Hearts Filthy Lesson, David Bowie from Outside
Vampira, The Devin Townsend Band from Synchestra
Dark Carnival, Resurrection Band from Lament
Limbo, Rush from Test for Echo
The Invisible Man, Marillion from Marbles
…and we saved the best, scariest and spookiest track for last. It’s buried in the cobwebs, inch-depth dust and dark thickness of a dank, humid night. Beware of clicking on it just in case you’re weak of heart or fearful of mind, for it has the power to instigate nothing less than utter madness.
Happy Halloween!
I always get a little thrill when Danny Elfman decides to step back in front of the microphone or, more bluntly, when Tim Burton decides to let Danny Elfman step back in front of the microphone. His last actual studio recording with a band was 1994’s ill-fated Boingo, an attempt to drag wacky and macabre party rockers Oingo Boingo into the ’90s, yet the dire and very pointed rock sound of the album accomplished two unwanted things: it alienated the original fans who wanted the music to be more fun and less funereal, and it failed to attract new fans thanks to its alignment with the moody, grungy times. After a live farewell concert, documented on a final band release, Elfman and longtime collaborator Steve Bartek went back to the scoring stage.