Sunday, April 28, 2013

Top 30 Creepiest Films of My Life (in order of release date)

30. Paranormal Activity (Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman, 2007)
i'm glad i waited for the hype to die out for this one. i ended up watching the first 3 PAs in a row at my home/studio, the Log Cabin, a house made of, you guessed it- logs, built in the 50s and a very creepy vibe at night to begin with in this place. i can't imagine these films would be quite as effective on the big screen. i thought the 4th installment, which i just recently watched, sucked, however.


29. Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)
i love the atmosphere of this film. it is a beautiful, dark, ambient film with a great twist on the vampire legacy.


28. Deathproof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007)
this is definitely Quentin Tarantino's oddest film. i love this one to death. it's creepy, twisted, violent, sexy as hell, and fun.


27. The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002)
Naomi Watts blew me away in Mullholland Drive the year before the Ring was released. she is what makes this film the creepfest it is.


26. Mullholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
i saw this on the big screen in a London theater. another sexy, twisted, creepy-ass abstract film from Mr. Lynch.


25. Session 9 (Brian Anderson, 2001)
i saw this while living in my parent's basement. i thought it was gonna suck when i realized that David Caruso was in the film, but it is a very atmospheric thriller and i love the slurred tape effects of the "sessions' along with the setting of the Danvers State Mental Hospital. 


24. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (David Lynch, 1992)
this is my favorite of David Lynch's exercises in creepy abstract madness. everything about the film moves me and this was released during a very important turning point in my life. i owe much of my music style to the vibe Mr. Lynch created in this film.


23. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughton, 1986)
this is a very disturbing film, especially knowing that it's based on a real life character. leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth and that's a big compliment coming from me!


22. River’s Edge (Tim Hunter, 1986)
my sister and I were both obsessed with this film back when I was a senior in high school. i love Crispin Glover's bizarre performance in this film. it's also one of the only films in which i can stomach Keanu Reeves.


21. Happy Birthday to Me (J. Lee Thompson, 1981)
this one is a bit cheesy, but i love it. it brings me right back to 8th grade, hanging out with a bunch of girls and watching horror films on VCR after school. plus Mary Ingalls never looked so hot!


20. The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981)
i don't think i have to say much about this one most of you don't already know, but i remember my dad came home from seeing this with my mom, who thought it was "stupid." he, however, was blown away by the film and couldn't wait to take my 13 year old ass to see it. still one of my favorites to this day.


19. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
my dad and i went to see this one together and i will always cherish those days. it was awesome to grow up with parents that love horror as much as i do. my entire family recently went out for our first movie night together in years and saw the new Evil Dead. nothing like a nice, wholesome family outing.


18. Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978)
this is another one my sister and i have always loved. it came out when i was an impressionable young horror fanatic and it's always on my tv each Hallow's Eve. i will always remember hearing the radio ad for this one back in 78'.


17. Burnt Offerings (Dan Curtis, 1976)
this was one of my dad's discoveries way back in the day. i was really young when i first saw this on television and it scared the piss out of me, especially the limo driver with the Chicklet teeth.


16. Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pier Paulo Pasolini, 1975)
this movie is probably the most disturbing piece of cinema i have ever witnessed. i think what makes it so disturbing is not only the subject matter, but the beautiful cinematography and brilliant acting. it's too fucking real.


15. Trilogy of Terror (Dan Curtis, 1975)
what can i say about this one? i wasn't allowed to see this when it first aired on tv because i kept my parents up for weeks after they let me see the Other (#10 in this installment). i love all 3 stories, but Amelia, written by Richard Matheson, is just plain creepy. i think this film may have started my obsession with voodoo.


14. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
i don't know why it took me forever to finally see this classic, but i finally saw it around 1992 and it certainly lived up to all the hype! this is a unique, twisted, brutal film for its time and it still resonates with me today.


13. Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974)
this one is all about the atmosphere. i love Bob Clark's early films all the way up to A Christmas Story. this one is no exception.


12. Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (John Newland, 1973)
this is another one that scared the piss out of me as a kid and it's the only film to this day that i try desperately not to think about when i have to get up in the middle of the night to pee.


11. The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)
my parents took my sister and me to see this in a double bill with Rosemary's Baby at the Amboy's Drive In theater in NJ (which no longer exists) back in the day. i was too young to remember it and probably fell asleep before Rosemary's Baby even ended. my parents still tell the story of later that night: neither of them wanted to get up to check on my baby sister who was crying across the hall and flipped a coin or some shit to decide who would be the sucker to do so. Anyway, it still is the scariest film ever made in my opinion. i especially love "the version you've never seen."


10. The Other (Robert Mulligan, 1972)
i haven't seen this one since i was a kid (i saw it around 1975 on tv), but i know it scared me enough to not be allowed to see Trilogy of Terror, Jaws, or the Omen. Damn!


9. Deathdream or Dead of Night (Bob Clark, 1972)
this is a real obscure film about a soldier who returns from Viet Nam after everyone was led to believe he was killed in the war. it's loosely based on the creepy tale, the Monkey's Paw, written by W.W. Jacobs and published in 1902. it's really f'n creepy. who would have guessed that the same director would go on to make one of the most beloved Christmas films of all time?


8. Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968)
scared me for months! simply brilliant in every way!


7. Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)
i didn't really appreciate this film until i was an adult. what makes this film so brilliantly creepy is that it's all based on the acting and what you don't see rather than flashy effects and gore. plus, i always love a good scary film that revolves around devil shit.


6. The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963)
this is an amazing ghost story and one of my favorite films of any genre. i watch it at least once a year, whether i need to or not.


5. Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962)
love the vibe, love the organ music, love the settings, love the low-budget brilliance of this one. a definite cult classic.


4. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962)
this film left me feeling ugly and more than just a little disturbed. these two genius actresses can do no wrong together. if you haven't seen this, it's not really a horror film, but it is far creepier than most of the genre.


3. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
classic Hitchcock. my dad took my mom to see this before i was born, and yup, he pulled the shower trick on her adorned with a stocking over his head and wielding a butcher knife, and nearly gave her a heart attack. his landlord at the time, a loveable little old Italian guy from Staten Island, N.Y., nearly kicked his ass for doing it.


2. the Bad Seed (Marvin LeRoy, 1956)
this one brings me back to being a young kid at my grandmother's house in Staten Island, N.Y. my sister and I used to watch it over and over since it was one of the only scary films my grandma had on VHS. it's an awesome little film with great performances and a disturbing plot and it sure beat Lawrence Welk Show reruns!


1. Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)
it doesn't get more wonderful than this. i love love love this film and it made me want to watch anything starring Robert Mitchum or Shelley Winters, both of whom are genius thespians. it also has some very atmospheric music and cinematography. in a word, unique!

Saturday, April 27, 2013

DOG Days Part One: origins of the Doghaus

     At the ripe young age of five I had one of the creepiest and most impactful nightmares of my life. That night, I woke up screaming in terror from a dream in which I was drowning my childhood dachshund & terrier mutt of a pup at the insistence of the talking head of a massive, intimidating black doberman pinscher which hovered in front of my face like an evil spectre from hell. As I pushed my yelping dog's head beneath the sink water, I was sobbing profusely and asked the master dog head who he was. He replied, "I am God." Practicing my sight words at that age must have subliminally led me to the conclusion that DOG spelled backwards was GOD. However, as a young, impressionable kid who watched horror films with his mom and dad since the age of three, I was convinced that this was some sort of sign from the devil.

                       Click Here for Video: The Severed Head: A Story circa 1988


      15 years later, I bought my first 4-track recorder, a Yamaha MT2X after 10 years of succumbing to the shackles of pay-by-the-hour recording studios and I was finally free to experiment without watching a clock. I quickly learned to make the most of the limitations of my equipment and recorded my first full length multi-track recording as the sole performer, writer, producer, and engineer. The year was 1988 and the music was a concoction of distorted guitars, drums via a Roland TR-505 drum machine, synthesis provided by a Roland D-50 synthesizer, and several stomp boxes and rack-mounted effect units all rigged together with borrowed power cords. I dubbed my new bedroom studio the Doghaus, and my new project, which was an amalgamation of 80s metal, synth pop, new wave, and goth, was to be called DOG, courtesy of my childhood nightmare. I was especially fascinated with the backwards masking effect I learned to achieve by turning the tape over and recording on the opposite tracks in which I would play back when I replaced the tape to the proper side. This helped to symbolically solidify the connection between DOG and GOD...the yin and yang of my creepy glam-drenched horror rock.

                                         
                           Click Here for Video: She Makes Love to Serpents circa 1988





      After playing the album for my lifetime friend and fellow musician, Andres Karu, whom I first met in 1973 just before starting kindergarten, he handed me a recording of his own which was the creepiest, darkest instrumental track I had ever heard at the time. What really blew me away was the fucked-up, slurring backward voice that bled through due to the fact that it was recorded on an old 2-track reel to reel recorder on an aged tape he found lying in his basement amongst a bunch of old books and records. DOG quickly became a duo and we began to expand the Doghaus piece by piece, collecting used electronic goodies and a multitude of instruments of all kinds. By 1993, we had a full fledged 8-track studio with a collection of electronic, electric, and acoustic instruments and we had moved the studio into the basement of my parent's rural pine-barren home. The studio, which we painted entirely black, ceiling and all, became our cave of creation. The room was always reeking of incense and strewn with various macabre curios I collected from a unique little voodoo shop which was situated behind an African American hair boutique in Lakewood, NJ. The Doghaus also had its northern wall covered in mirrors. As I write this, my parent's pine barren abode, which was home to the Doghaus, is sadly about to go on the market. The old studio is now covered in boxes of old photographs, books, and music equipment, and will not likely ever again be used to create the lovely dark madness it once inspired.


                                  Click Here for Video: Get off My God circa 1994




Sunday, April 21, 2013

List #1: Top 10 Darkest Atmospheric Albums of All Time

...in order of release dates


10. Lustmord: Carbon/Core (2004)


9. Rotting Moldy Flesh: Decomposition (2004)


8. Bauhaus: Burning from the Inside (1983)


7. The Cure: Pornography (1982)



6. Siouxsie and the Banshees: Juju (1981)


5. Tangerine Dream: Phaedra (1974)


4. Tangerine Dream: Zeit (1972)


3. Black Sabbath: Master of Reality (1971)


2. Pink Floyd: Ummagumma (1969)


1. Pink Floyd: A Saucerful of Secrets (1968)

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Songs of the South: Voodoo, Racism, Tori Amos & Harry Belafonte

     In the summer of 2007, during a visit to my parents' home in the New Jersey pine barrens, I set up my recording equipment on their backyard deck with the intent of creating some new atmospheric ambient noise which would center around samples created with my recently acquired Ipod. During that period I was back to using my Tascam 8-track cassette recorder along with a custom-made 2-tiered guitar stompbox pedalboard for manipulating sounds looped from the Ipod. At the time I knew nothing about mashing, but I guess that is exactly what I was doing when I surrounded a classic Harry Belafonte slave song with the dark melodic piano and machine-driven drums of Tori Amos. My childhood backyard that formerly consisted of a vast landscape of sand dunes and several acres of scrub pines in which I would run around pretending to be lost on some uncharted planet straight out of an Issac Asimov novel was now gorgeously landscaped with mile-high shrubs and trees, multi-colored flowers, and lush exotic grasses. My mounds of rigged recording equipment piled up on my mom's plastiglass picnic table shrouded with a massive beach umbrella looked ridiculously out of place with the suburbia meets national park atmosphere of my parents' beautifully landscaped pine barren pride and joy paradise. This was just the setting I needed to create my twisted vision.



     Sometimes the greatest moments created during a work of art are the ones that begin with an "oh fuck" or  a "you have to be fucking kidding me." My 14-year old 8-track recorder decided to take a shit after recording nearly 6 hours of new tracks for "I Think I Met the Devil in New Orleans," the opening track of Songs of the South. It was the best thing that could have happened to the recording, which is still one of the creepiest pieces of music I have ever recorded thanks to the intermittent technical annoyance which caused the machine to temporarily slur like a dying, old drunk. In retrospect, I'm not quite sure if it was the tape I was using, the recorder, or the fluctuation in temperature and humidity during that summer, but the glitch lasted long enough to add an eerie slurring and start/stop effect to the track. Try as I might, it was an effect in which I was never again able to recreate. After that day, the recorder worked perfectly as it had for the past 14 years. Perhaps it was the voodoo, which seemed to envelop the entire recording.



     Songs of the South is an album that reflects the dichotomy of the Southern United States: the beautiful landscapes and warm hospitality of its people crossed with the brutal history of racism and the often misunderstood practice of voodoo. The music was created from the obvious to the obscure samples culled from my massive, eclectic iPod music collection manipulated with analog stomp boxes and crude 20th century recording techniques. The instrumental themes range from slavery and racism ("Cotton" and "the Hanging of Jordy Brown") to dark religious overtones ("Mississippi Voodoo Queen" and "I Think I Met the Devil in New Orleans"). Another track of note is the reworking and ambient interpretation of Billie Holiday's immortal classic, "Strange Fruit (revisited)." Looking back, Songs of the South opened new artistic doors for me in a number of ways including recording "on location" as opposed to confining myself to the often stifling confines of the quintessential recording studio. I also began to embrace the use of sampling technology and combined it in ways I had never imagined before. Mostly, Songs of the South represented a new way of approaching dark ambient and experimental noise thematically for me with its focus on the darkness of nature as well as the dark side of human nature.





Saturday, April 13, 2013

the 24 Hour Psychosis

 





     At the end of 2006 I found myself in a serious conundrum. While working a horrific day job dismantling software for one of America's most powerful communication conglomerates, I began a doomed musical project I dubbed TRANSFUSION M, which revolved around an obsession to reignite the glamrock revolution of the early 1970s. I spent the majority of 2001-2003 working with the Miles Hunt Club, an ambitious spin-off of the English alternative rock outfit, the Wonderstuff, which was led by the enigmatic singer/songwriter, Miles Hunt. After a debut release, a plethora of BBC performances, and tour of the UK, Miles returned to his much more lucrative Wonderstuff entity while I headed back to America wondering what in the fuck I was going to do with the next phase of my life both artistically as well as for mere survival. Luckily, an old friend of mine helped me to take care of the survival portion of my existence with a job offer at the aforementioned A Tit & Tit communications outfit. During my reign as a disconnect engineer who virtually ripped down T-1 and T-3 connections for large corporations I embarked on my next project, the glam-drenched TRANSFUSION M. I had written a few dozen songs inspired by Marc Bolan, David Bowie, and Sweet with an added infusion of 21st-century drum loops and massively distorted and otherwise effected guitars. I had an awesome lineup of brilliant studio musicians including Curtis King, who sang backing vocals for Madonna and David Bowie, and Tony Senatori, a ridiculously talented bassist from North Jersey. The live band was equally as inspired and featured an eclectic bunch of talented musicians who could shred like angry chainsaws as well as lull the pants off the most frigid of music listeners. However, after spending a tumultuous summer in hell on the east coast leg of the Warped Tour in 2006, no-thanks mostly to the short-sighted record label that backed us with loads of poorly spent cash, we ultimately parted ways and I vowed from that moment on to steer clear of coke-snorting, ass-licking, money-driven jackholes and follow my own path as an artist making music without the confines of the music business and its presumptuous bullpucky. 

The glam-rock days of Transfusion M

     So, by the end of 2007 my life had taken a drastically new direction as I "upturned the applecart" so to speak upon the advice of my old friend, Miles Hunt. I found myself working toward a degree in behavioral neuroscience as well as focusing on my love of dark electronic music and turned the majority of my artistic energies toward creating the ultimate soundtrack for the inevitable apocalypse, zombie-driven or otherwise. Bedtime for Robots allowed me freedom I never knew before. I acquired an incredibly atmospheric home built in the late 1800s in the farmlands of New Jersey. Friends of mine from the urban epicenters of the state nearly shit their pants when they visited my home on the range, which was equal parts Waltons-esque tranquility and Evil Dead isolation, complete with a single-lane bridge which was often closed down due to flooding.

I ain't no glamour boy

Winter of 2008-2009: the 24 Hour Psychosis



       It was in this isolation that I began the ultimate artistic challenge through the medium of analog recording: the 24 Hour Psychosis. I quickly discovered that recording 24 hours of new music would be no easy feat if the music was gonna kick ass both sonically and emotionally. I had dreamed of this project for several years but always chickened out and made double, triple, and even quadruple albums instead of committing myself, lest I actually be committed for attempting such a mad endeavor. However, this time I was armed and ready to make a go of it with my 8-track cassette based studio along with miles of effects pedals and a laptop computer. I imagined the 24 Hour Psychosis would most definitely need to run through every emotion and utilize every range of musical style. I created the entire project with a few close discerning friends in mind. I imagined playing the entire creation for them over a 24 hour binge of drinking, eating, and mind-expanding without sleep, although I did allow for a sleep break by creating 6 hours or so of sleep-inducing ambience. Amazingly, I did manage to finish the entire project although it took me from October of 2007 to Summer of 2009, when my personal life took the ultimate shit. Anyway, that just made me stronger and more determined. I was not gonna let a failed marriage, poverty, and unprecedented levels of betrayal get in the way of my damn project...my freaking artistic psychosis. No Goddamn way! I never did get to play the music in its entirety for my aforementioned friends. No, the slumber party from hell never did get off the ground and one of the gentlemen I planned on having in attendance even passed away during the making of the album. I also nearly crushed my new kitten to death in the Lazy-boy reclining couch in which most of the Psychosis was conjured. Amazingly she survived. However, she did end up with an ode entitled "Miss Peeps Rides Out" to solidify her immortality. She lies beside me fat as can be and snoring like an old hobo as I write this...


click here for the 24 Hour Psychosis promo spot on Youtube