Human characters in
horror films tend to be weak and vulnerable, but when you swap humans
for soft, fuzzy Muppet-style puppets, you open up a whole new world
of strangeness. Snore is a splatstick horror comedy from
Luther Bhogal-Jones, who, after playing with creatures of the night
in Goodnight, Halloween, has inserted two hapless puppets into a
dangerous situation.
Failed businesswoman
Karen and her spineless assistant and squeeze Callum, end up having
to stay in a dilapidated half-way house. In the darkness of the
night, whilst sharing the tiny bed, they hear a strange sound. This
sound comes from a sinister, small, pig-like creature called the Jip.
What then ensues is a desperate battle between the luckless puppets
and the armour-clad micro-porker. Blood is spilled, screams are
uncorked and designer man-bags are ruined.
The first thing that
really impressed me in the film was the physicality of the puppets.
Just after Karen and Callum wake and begin searching the room, the
detritus under the bed is pulled out and the bed is moved. Callum is
the beast of burden throughout this period, his trembling body and
pained grunts and heaves seeming entirely believable.
After Callum’s
non-euphemistic bed gymnastics, we enter what I think I might call
the “Ominous Red” phase of the film. The first manifestation of
this is an eerie red glow emanating from behind a stack of boxes. The
soundtrack pulses and throbs with threat. Callum trembles and mumbles
as he peers through the gap. Something rushes past. He lifts some of
the boxes and “a little creature” emerges on the other side. The
Jip is now in play, and if you ever wondered if a puppet can bleed,
you’ll get your answer watching Snore.
The Jip itself is
played by a man in a suit, with some green-screen trickery used to
create the battle between itself and the puppets. In a Q&A about
Snore, one of the inspirations mentioned was the film of
Steven King’s anthology Cat’s Eye, where a young Drew
Barrymore is terrorized by a small evil puppet. Snore is a
fun, tongue-in-cheek reversal of this human vs puppet dynamic.
I went into Snore
without any real expectations and came away really impressed with the
atmosphere and execution of the film. The puppets and the Jip are
great, especially how they interact with the world and each other.
The lighting and score make it feel like a true horror, and the way
that it plays out in ten short minutes felt satisfying to me. If you
like puppets in dire situations, and films that don’t take
themselves too seriously, head over to the YouTube link below to give it a watch,
I’d say it’s well worth your time.
When it comes to
fiction or the imagination, I’m a fan of strange rooms. These rooms
are often the kinds of space that might once have been a lounge or a
dining room, but that have since been converted or adapted for
peculiar experiments. Maybe a room has been cleared so that a séance
can take place. Maybe the room is untouched and scientific equipment
has been added to monitor something unseen. I just like this mixture
of the mundane and the bizarre. Cities Last Broadcast’s The
Umbra Report is a dark ambient album that embodies this feeling
in audio form.
My favourite track is
Disembodied. It begins with a rumbling drone, one populated with
scratchy higher tones and static. This feels like a trembling
soundscape, like everything is a quiver with strange energy. The
image that came to mind to describe this track is a group of fairy
beings, e.g. pixies, elves, etc. Said beings are coming down from a
magic mushroom high, sprawled about on the floor of a dilapidated
mouldy squat. A purer tone sprinkles a sense of sadness over things,
and the overall impression that I got was that of someone being out
of their usual place and time, disconnected, but not necessarily in a
healthy way. It felt very dark to me.
Stares Back is another
track that stood out for me. It starts with a raspy, sigh-like sound,
a deeper tone soon quietly blooming into life. An airy drone sits
behind things, a humming and resonant tone soon follow. The rasping
sound twists into a sense of tortured strings and squeals, and faint
impacts can be heard thudding at various times. This track felt like
what might be going on in someone’s mind as they stare into a
mirror, playing a game of “who is the real person” with the
reflection. I dare say that in this case, when they turn away, they
don’t see the reflection still staring daggers at their back. Just
how it should be.
Wherever the Heart Goes
is another rich and atmospheric track. Beyond the windy-feeling and
rustling, beyond the hints of breathing and static, there emerges
what sounds like heavy stone objects sliding. I couldn’t shake the
mental impressions gathered from watching many films in which stone
temple walls slide, sink or rotate, and with the track title in mind,
I fancied I was listening to some strange, dark oubliette of the
heart, a soundscape of shifting exploration and deeper ensnarements.
It was very cool to listen to.
The Umbra Report
is a scratchy, static-filled album, its soundscapes populated by
distorted voices, strange throbbing atmospheres, and drones that
cloak the whole in a warm, breathing darkness. There are hints and
impressions of musical melodies and singing, but they are soon
claimed by the more esoteric elements and shredded into a strange,
otherworldly waiting-room ambience. The album description hints at
the depicted events as being a possible depression, séance or
exorcism, but whatever is actually occurring, its certainly creepy
and fun to listen to.
Watcher at the Gates
is a dark ambient album from Kehseverin, aka Wesley Hiatt. I’ve
reviewed a number of Wesley’s dark creations in previous months,
and he always has a knack for creating tense, gritty spaces and
distorted soundscapes. Watcher at the Gates is another album
full of dark feelings; the heavy, fuzzy sounds rubbing against bleak
field-recordings and seemingly simple yet effective tones and
melodies.
One of my favourite
tracks is My Solemn Oath. It opens with a low muffled rumbling and
contains a pulsing atmosphere that presses and pressures the ears. A
buzzing tone soon joins, smearing an ominous fuzzy feeling over the
soundscape. As the track progresses, a trundling/engine-like sound
joins, and also, a more energetic tone that seems to have the aspect
of bashed piano notes, but notes that are muffled at the edges by
distortion. This felt like a murky, pressurized track to me, and it
was great to listen to.
Another track that
stood out for me was Soliloquy. It begins with a pulsing high tone, a
slightly lower tone dragged along as its companion. A bass hum joins
things, and the tones stretch and buzz and fuzz as things deepen. The
best way I could describe this track is like the audio equivalent of
watching dappled sunlight on a disintegrating concrete wall. The
sickly tree that’s casting the shadow is wilting and suffocated by
the environment around it, its dead leaves hanging like broken
promises. The tree’s shadow however, looks strangely perfect.
That’s how I’d describe the feelings that this track brought to
the surface for me.
The last track that
I'll mention is Upon Rooftops, as I found this to be particularly
dark. An agitated buzzing grows in each ear, a warm bass tone pushing
and sighing from beneath. This feels like another fuzzy, “staticy”
track. After awhile, a leafy rustling begins, roaming from ear to
ear. A deep simple melody warbles and pulses beneath. The sound of
rain emerges near the midpoint, with softer, high tones impinging as
the track nears its end. This track felt like it contained the
ceaseless attempts of something grating against the harshness of
reality. The dominant rustling sound just might be a struggling bird
trapped behind a boarded up window, the choice between standing still
or fluttering left, right and back again apparently its only option.
A track that embodies the emotion of futility.
Watcher at the Gates
is bleak yet warm, sad yet brave. Sometimes in life, you just need to
drink in the misery that you feel, simply because doing anything else
seems like deluding yourself or being untrue. In doing so, you might
just experience a little space opening up around the things that
bother you or that you feel are dragging you down. Watcher at the
Gates might just provide the audio accompaniment to this.
Back to Beyond
is a dark, space ambient album from Alphaxone and ProtoU, and is the
follow up to their 2017 album Stardust. The album description
tells tale of a long journey into the vastness of space, mysterious
black-hole-emitted golden dust causing the protagonist some
consternation. There is also the issue of the protagonist’s cat
performing zero-G acrobatics as it tries to feed.
Quantum Zero is one of
the tracks that I enjoyed the most. It begins with small ticks or
clicks, a sound that put me in mind of hot metal that is slowly
cooling. There is a whining noise and the muffled feel of static, and
then, a tone a little like a distant train whistle. An airy drone
rumbles through the soundscape, the clicks beginning to echo into a
larger space. There is a pulsing tone and a little later, deeper
vibrations. Towards the end of the track, beeps and radio frequency
sweeps can be heard, and what sounds like paper being scuffed. For
me, Quantum Zero felt like it described a vast reactor or engine
room, one that has recently fallen silent and is in the process of
simmering down.
Dreams of Solace is
another track that stood out for me. It opens with chuffing air
movements and an “air blowing down a ribbed plastic tube”
vibration. A rushing sound roams the soundscape, and what might be
doors hissing open and closed. Electronic warbles and a long sweeping
tone manifest, small trills and whistles in the distance joining
them. Towards the end of the track, the sounds of movement through a
metal vent seem to be heard. I felt like this track was the best
match for the cover art of the album above, the pipes etc. It also,
for some reason, brought to mind a scene in the film Brazil,
where Robert De Niro turns up and messes with the pipes and tubing in
the wall.
Finally, The Edge of
Perception is a track that I enjoyed because it felt “watery” to
me. That’s not to say literally water-filled, but there are
elements to the audio that seemed to impose a distortion to things, a
little like how water muffles and warps sound. It starts with a low,
airy drone, a distant dripping, and a closer echoing knocking joins
things. There is a low, voice-like call or groan, and a deeper
rumbling fuzz. There is also a persistent high “ahh” vocal that
sits uneasily above things. This is an echoing, flowing track with
swells and the sounds of impacts in long corridors. For all of that,
it is a warm track, the flowing melodies that come in near the
midpoint setting a lovely contrast with the rasping hisses and
echoes. Maybe this track is the sci-fi equivalent of a lonely alien
minotaur at the heart of a labyrinth made out of cold metal.
Back to Beyond
was, for me, the soundtrack to being on a long space journey. Many of
the tracks feature metallic vibrations, muted clicks and beeps, and
the hisses of atmosphere escaping from pressurised containment. For
the most part, it seemed an album of smooth tones, small sounds and
mechanical objects buzzing into the void. The darkness it displays is
tempered by the warmth it also contains. It’s a bit like the
difference between seeing zombies on your lawn in the light of the
full moon, compared to seeing them in golden sunlight, while dew is
still dangling from spiderwebs and birds are chirping their morning
chorus. Both scenes could be horrifying, but the second has its own
beauty.
Visit the Back to Beyond page on Bandcamp for more information. You can also check out the track Quantum Zero below:
Dark Ambient Review:
Behind the Veil of Black Stars
Review By Casey
Douglass
Album cover
In my recent interview
with Scott Lawlor, we touched on the topic of ambientonline.org’s
One Sample Dare Challenges, contests in which the composers must use
only one sample to create their musical piece. Scott recently
released Behind the Veil of Black Stars, a slice of dark space
ambient that was created for one of these challenges. The album
consists of three, twenty to thirty minute tracks, each of which
conjures up the bleak indifference of space in its own way. My
favourite track is No Place To Land, and one of the main notes I
wrote about it was “Recipe for agitation?” You'll see why.
No Place To Land begins
with a low, gradual sound, a little like wind blowing along a plastic
tunnel. It winds upwards and begins to rasp with a sharpness to its
edge not long after. A shrill sound emerges, which to me, seemed like
a flock of jackdaws settling for the night. The track starts to feel
as if it has a mechanical underpinning not long after this, which I
think is confirmed by the siren-like sound that comes after.
The siren tone arrives
at about the three minute mark, and it feels like it agitates the
soundscape. It also cements the impression that the rest of the track
gave me, which was of a spaceship trying to land on a barren planet,
but each time that it gets near to the ground, it spies some reason
as to why it shouldn’t land. The track lifts and falls, rises and
descends, over and over. You feel like you can hear engines winding
down and surging upwards with each failed attempt, and that very much
sets the scene for the remainder of the track.
I liked the uneasiness
that No Place To Land seemed to bring about in my mind. It wasn’t
too harsh or uncomfortable, but as someone who knows how his brain
feels when his OCD has tripped him up with rumination and anxiety, No
Place To Land approximates this unsettled feeling, but in a much more
mellow way. It’s like a dark, space-based Groundhog Day,
but with subtle changes as it plays out.
There
is much to enjoy in the other tracks too. Behind The Veil of Stars is
a track that seems to shimmer and boil with static, drone and an
ominous feeling of vast depth and distance. Unquiet Spirits Wandering
a Dying Planet flicks bubbling tones and electronic warbles from ear
to ear in the first half, yet settles into a deeper, “plane flying
over your head” droning space for the second half, which I must
admit I preferred. They are both great tracks.
It’s
amazing to think that Behind the Veil of Black Stars
was made with only one sample at its core, and yet Scott has twisted
and manipulated it into a dark sci-fi creation, one that thrums with
the cold of space and the threat of an indifferent universe.
Dark Ambient & VR:
An Interview with Phantom Astronaut
Dark ambient music
creates incredible moods and a sense of immersion. Virtual reality,
in the right hands, can do the same. When the world of dark ambient
meets the technology of VR, the experience can be astounding. Sadly,
I’ve not experienced VR, but you only have to read or watch others
to see that it can be a powerful playground. With that in mind, in
the coming months, I will be posting a series of interviews with
creators who straddle the worlds of dark ambient and virtual reality.
This is the first of those interviews, and it’s with Phantom
Astronaut, aka Dekker Dreyer.
Dekker Dreyer is a man
that wears many creative hats. He composes dark ambient soundscapes
as Phantom Astronaut, he creates and directs immersive VR horror
films, and he also writes Amazon top 20 selling novellas. As a first
interview subject, he certainly ticks all the boxes. Below, we talk
about how he came to the idea of merging his art with his music, the
roll of dreams, the intimacy of VR, along with the influence of
horror, folklore and the occult. I hope you enjoy it.
* * *
Casey: In
an article on Entrepreneur.com, your view that VR is about a feeling,
and not a narrative is one of the topics covered. Dark ambient music
also, for the most part, seems to be about the same thing. When and
how were you first exposed to dark ambient, or the idea of it, and
why do you think melding dark ambient and VR together is such a
powerful combination?
Dekker: I think we've all been exposed to
ambient music in one way or another without realizing it. I remember
being very small and hearing an orchestra warming up and that chaos--
those tones all blending together-- it stuck with me as musical.
One of my earliest projects was a short film to
accompany a movie called Naqoyqatsi, this ambient film scored
by Philip Glass. That was probably my first head-on collision with
ambient music.
My creative partner Cyr3n pushed me much deeper
though. She turned me on to sound baths and places like the
Integratron out in the California desert, and the La Monte Young's
Mela Foundation in New York.
I took all of that in and started wondering how I
could integrate this music with the kinds of themes I explore in my
art and I stumbled onto this rich universe of "dark ambient".
I approach all of my projects from the same
starting point; I want the audience to experience something
emotionally more than intellectually.
I create things that you'll play at midnight,
laying on your back, getting lost in the textures. Dark ambient, to
me, works best when you feel it, physically. I love playing in domes
and halls and places where the audience can lay back and let the bass
radiate through them. It's a very physical music, it engulfs you,
just like VR. I also pair my music with visuals so it's all part of a
single sensory experience.
Casey: At
the end of 2019, you released an immersive visual album, Lucid,
under your music name Phantom Astronaut. In Lucid, the
experiencer gets to explore five dreamscapes that bring about
emotions from the darker side of life. The audio-visual experience
also invites the person to ponder parts of their own morality. Which
is the dreamscape that you are most pleased with, and what was the
inspiration behind it?
Dekker: I can't play favorites on Lucid,
I love all of it, but I can talk about how it came about.
Did you know that we don't really know what dreams
are? Science, as of this moment, doesn't know for sure why we dream.
There's also no clear universal definition of consciousness. That
fascinates me.
Artists and philosophers have been preoccupied
with dreams since the dawn of time. We live a quarter or more of our
lives in the dreamscape and yet we can't share that between each
other. It’s so lonely to think about that. The road to VR is paved
with cobblestones made of history's dream journals. For the first
time we're able to create environments that allow others to walk into
our dreams... it's very intimate. I'm still not sure how I feel about
that aspect of it.
Casey: It
is certainly an intimate notion, but at the least, if you have
created something to show one of your dreamscapes, you are giving
permission for someone to visit and experience that. Are you
concerned that someone might learn something about you that maybe
even you aren’t aware of, or do you think it boils down to more
general hopes and fears that someone will “get” what you hope to
convey from it?
Dekker: The
nature of privacy is changing and I think that humans have this
inherent alienation that can't be soothed. No matter how well I know
someone I can never truly know them in the way they know themselves.
Communication and art and storytelling is a manifestation of our
desire to be closer. I don't believe that someone exploring one of my
dreamscapes will walk away with the same interpretation as me, so I
just hope they find something that's meaningful to them in that
shared space.
Casey: In
an interview with Voyage LA, you revealed how you thought that your
experience and admiration of the Disney World theme-park might have
informed your desire to create your own virtual realities. What was
it about the experience of being in that place that you think
appealed to your world-building inclinations, and how has this merged
with your love of horror and folklore?
Dekker: I end up talking about Disney a
lot. It's funny how that's a recurring theme in my life. I want to be
very clear because sometimes people conflate my interest in theme
park design as an interest in how Disney chooses to use the medium.
I'm inspired by this brilliant moment in history where humans have
decided that they want so deeply to live in alternate realities for
days or weeks at a time that they'll pay extraordinary prices for it.
I see that as beautiful. I see that as a willingness for us to
collectively embrace imagined worlds. That's what inspired me about
the Disney parks.
I see that desire for people to experience
environments and characters and I answer that from my own perspective
which is informed by paganism, cults, the occult, and the
supernatural. These themes, in our majority Christian culture, happen
to be connected to horror. Many fairy-tales or myths or folk
traditions are firmly in the horror genre when examined through our
current sensibilities.
As for why I'm attracted to these themes? I'm not
sure. It could be about embracing the powerlessness of humanity on an
individual level when up against nature. We're very fragile creatures
and our main strength has always been our ability to create social
groups. When you watch a horror movie or experience a VR world you're
inherently alone in the forest. That position tells you a lot about
yourself.
Dekker Dreyer
Casey:
While talking to the Good Men Project, you raised the issue of how
art is emotional communication, but that in most forms, it is
filtered in some way, and that the effect is easily broken. Why is
virtual reality such a powerful platform for creating more immersive
experiences, and, if one stands out, what was a time when you felt
that you were most immersed while engaging with any variety of art?
Dekker: I think this comes from the element
of isolation I mentioned earlier. We're all a child, standing at the
top of the basement stares, timidly holding a flashlight.
Unfortunately, I have a hard time becoming
immersed in any virtual worlds anymore. That's what happens to
anything when you know how it's built. I can tell you about the
strongest reactions I've seen in VR though. I was showing a series I
created called The Depths, a horror series that takes place in
a capsized ship, and one person screamed and threw the headset across
the room. They were crying and couldn't speak. I felt proud of that.
I'd never seen someone react to a movie like that. If I had to guess
why it was, it was a combination of isolation plus the claustrophobia
of that rising water and darkness... music designed to make you feel
uneasy... throw a creature into that scenario and it transports
people so completely, that their bodies react.
Casey: The
various viewing and production elements of The Depths came
together very nicely to cause that tearful scream. Do you think that,
as VR technology improves, it will be easier, or more common, to
cause that kind of emotional reaction in the audience, and if so, how
would you like to see it evolve?
Dekker: I don't
think that any tool makes the creative process easier. Our
conversation with media is always changing, so that means that the
audience will come to expect something different as technology and
culture change. I imagine hearing this same question when the first
films were being publicly shown and people were running for cover
when they saw a train coming at them on the screen. It won't be
easier, just different.
* * *
Thanks so much to
Dekker for taking the time to answer my questions. You can find him
at his website, and you can find his many creations through any of
the links above.
I’ve always had as
much time for urban environments as I have for the peace or bleakness
of nature. Even though beautiful vistas have their place, there is a
lot to be said for a small park backed by the thrum of traffic in a
busy city. Reflections at the Sea is a dark ambient album from
SiJ and Textere Oris, an album that, at its very core, brings these
two forces together.
The album description
tells of a person who wants to see the sea. Sadly, they are living
alone in a big city. One day, a fog blankets the concrete, glass and
metal around them. The environment feels different, and as the album
plays, the fog seems to bring said person to a place in which their
fantasies are almost at hand.
For me, Reflections
at the Sea is an album that
feels light and peaceful. There are field-recorded sounds of church
bells and people talking, but there are also soothing drones, pipe or
flute-like tones, and pleasant vocals. These elements make the fog
envisioned in the album description one that is illuminated by golden
sunlight, rather than a dreary, damp smothering greyness that fogs so
often can become.
I
think that I’d have to say that Train Leaves in the Rain is my
favourite track. It opens with a chiming, undulating space, and a
mellow low tone. A “staticy” rain emerges, a voice crackling
through a tannoy system joining it. A smooth drone sits beneath
everything, floating female vocals and train sounds sitting
comfortably among the various plucked notes that occur in the latter
half. This is a peaceful track, and one which merges the mechanical
with the ethereal with adept ease.
Veter
101 is another of the tracks that stood out for me. It also makes use
of a tannoy-style announcement. A small tone sounds, like a mouse
trying to clear dust from a pipe. A muted buzzing shortly follows,
making me thing of a tiny dot matrix printer spooling out tiny
receipts. Okay, my mind is now thinking about mice buying
train-tickets for their own micro train. This track is features a
plucked melody, piano notes, and a variety of voices. It has an
energetic feeling, but like the Train Leaves in the Rain, it seems to
merge a variety of mechanical recordings with pleasing light tones.
Finally,
the track K Moryu is the last I will mention. It’s a track where
the sea very much makes its presence known. It begins with a high
whistling tone, lapping waves, a deep beat and a male vocal. The
cascading rattle of a rain-stick sounds at intervals, a variety of
instruments playing their own particular notes and melodies
throughout the track. This is the longest track on the album, sitting
at almost twelve minutes in length, and it gives the listener ample
time to bathe in the lulling qualities it provides.
Reflections at the
Sea is the ideal kind of album
for anyone who might be stuck somewhere and would love to be
somewhere else. It offers that “world at a distance” feeling,
when the weather or other circumstances make the familiar seem a bit
different, when the usual view down the road is changed by fog, and
you get the feeling that somewhere else might just have moved in to
take its place, even if just for a little while.
Visit the Reflections at the Sea page on Bandcamp for more information. You can also
listen to Train Leaves in the Rain below:
