“Evil heat is running through me,” he slobbers between bursts of deranged carousel guitar, which, in tandem with the rhythm section, catapult Cave into the abyss. Sheets of noise echo the disorder coursing through Cave’s soul. Cave speaks for the bad seed, the Old Man within us all, aching to procreate and slake his lust for death, and his single-minded drive infects this song with devilish momentum. Sinister appetites drive Cave into a Pentecostal frenzy of erotic fury and the Birthday Party transcribe his delirium into filthy sonic mayhem. Nick Cave sounds like a raving evangelist for original sin bellowing in agony as he is immolated at the altar. I: This song is just scarcely controlled chaos, primed and pointed in one grapeshot blast at the metaphysical hinge joining sex and death. A reminder that the hope is more entrenched than the dark of the night. There are those notes, soaring to heights, in this song. If only we were simply able to give up control to the one to come. He found that in the midst of this suffocation of darkness and its implications for humanity that there may be a parasite, something hopeful, writhing up from within the darkness, aiming to destroy its host:īy undivided and absolute abandonment of yourself and everything, shedding all and freed from all, you will be uplifted to the ray of the divine darkness which is above everything that is. Ian accentuates the “being” of darkness showcased in this song as it invades, engulfs and swallows us whole, while an ancient word from one of the “strange-ers” of the faith, Dionysius, must be spoken. Milton’s description of Hell is fitting here: “No light, but rather darkness visible.” Darkness illuminates in the world of Vampyr and Year of No Light concretize the absence of light as a real entity with will and cunning and capture the film’s shadow poetics.ī: I, too, would place Vampyr in my pantheon of favorites, so I will be inhaling the dark, misty tendrils of this soundtrack in the next couple of days (I never knew of it!). This isn’t the sound of darkness invading–this is the sound of darkness coming home to roost, drawn magnetically to the living death rotting in the heart of Courtempierre. This sonic compound paints a chilling tonal landscape: tendrils of lambent moonlight writhing along of banks of churning shadow, positive shadow suffocating hope, leaving life and light wilted and deformed. Year of No Light invoke the film’s nightmare imagery and chill the listener’s blood with a patient, This Will Destroy You-inflected strain of doom. It builds slowly, accumulating tension as the main guitar riff relentlessly marches on and is joined by funereal synths and ominous swells. This song negotiates a difficult balancing act, poised at the juncture of three very disparate moods: stately, yet ethereal, while simultaneously dank and doom-encrusted. Though separated by eighty years (!), this soundtrack succeeds in encapsulating the film’s aesthetic: the diffusion of darkness as light. I: Year of No Light brought their blackened sludge to bear on Carl Theodor Dreyer’s classic film Vampyr (my favorite horror film, incidentally) in 2013 and succeeded in crafting a very peculiar and yet very fitting soundtrack to this unorthodox classic. ”Saignee/revelations” by Year of No Light In the second half of our short series on Halloween music, here are Ian Olson‘s selections with my commentary.
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