#the haxan cloak

[ruinedholograms]

(2014)

[postpunkindustrial]

the body - I Shall Die Here / Earth Triumphant

w/The Haxan Cloak

[knightofleo]

Björk | Family

I raise a monument of love There is a swarm of sound Around our heads And we can hear it And we can get healed by it It will relieve us from the pain It would make us a part of it This universe of solutions

[radiophd]

the haxan cloak -- burning torches of dispair

[grrl-beetle]

The Haxan Cloak - N/Y

[circleofbirds]

The Haxan Cloak - Excavation (Part 1) (2013, drone/dark ambient)

[voskhozhdeniye]

The Haxan Cloak - The Drop

[iamlisteningto]

The Haxan Cloak’s “N/Y”

[mywifeleftme]

189: The Haxan Cloak // Excavation

Excavation The Haxan Cloak 2013, Tri Angle (Bandcamp)

Through his work as the Haxan Cloak and as a film composer (notably on a couple of Ari Aster pictures), Bobby Krlic has helped define the modern aesthetics of what we might call Upsetting Music:

Extremely low frequency synthesized bass with a subliminal roar

Slow, deliberate, violent industrial percussion with a ton of reverb

Creepy whirring noises that simultaneously evoke machinery and insects

Staticky, panned whooshing sounds, that suggest rapid movement captured on degraded video tape

Piercing whines, reminiscent of alarms or the shrill violin notes exploited in scores like Psycho

Snippets of higher pitched noises that sound like muffled or glitched recordings of human cries

Unlike traditional symphonic scores or even the kind of throbbing but ultimately melodic progressive electronic stuff used in ‘80s horror scores, this music largely eschews melody in favour of manipulating sounds to provoke a visceral sense of unease as directly as possible. Electronic music made its initial inroads into horror in the late ‘70s largely because it was cheap to produce, but the runaway success of independent/low-budget films with keyboard-heavy scores like John Carpenter’s Halloween made the aesthetic popular. Since then, genre film has continued to evolve alongside the darker strains of electronic music, from schlocky early ‘90s flicks that incorporate techno and horrorcore rap, to the way industrial became de rigueur for a certain variety of desaturated, nihilistic, almost fetishy brand of cheap ‘00s torture flick.

Independent of this history though, I think there’s something specific about recent horror and thriller filmmakers’ embrace of dark ambient/drone music like Krlic’s that links to Western contemporary anxieties and how these audiences experience fear. I remember many years ago (I’m 51) reading an article in a film theory class about how the rise of automation in the early 20th century kicked off a minor craze in the newspapers of the day for grisly stories about bodies being maimed by trams and the like. The author argued that these sorts of accidents were a new form or vector of terror specific to the industrial age, and that there was a corresponding spike in depictions of these tragedies in contemporaneous films, which tended to pull their subject matter and aesthetics from the well of public worries. Genre music has evolved along parallel lines. Traditional orchestral horror scores derive from ominous motifs found in classical music and opera, which reflect older notions of how evil and despair should be depicted—a Christian understanding of evil, with attendant tropes. A world mediated by religion and versed in devotional music (masses, hymnals, Gregorian chant) would naturally imagine Satanic music as its inversion (dark, baroque renditions of the religious cannon) or opposite (“primitive” tribal music).

By the middle of the century a secularized notion that evil might derive from the personal psychoses of individuals, or (as the tram reading suggested) the indifference of technology and institutions, became widespread, and was duly reflected in the cinema. Today, in the West anyway, our bodies are more insulated than ever before from daily exposure to the sorts of violence depicted in horror films, and our fears have become more secularized and more abstracted still. Our most immediate experiences of dread and bodily harm have tended to come from what we witness on our screens, the fear of seeing something troubling. At the same time, filmmakers have realized that the sonically unsettling aspects of ominous symphonic music (extreme high and low frequencies; disharmony; jerky rhythms) could be divorced from the orchestral context, leaving artists with a set of specific tools for physically startling audiences in tandem with the action onscreen.

Krlic’s music is a product of these parallel processes. As noted, much of his work prioritizes psychological and physiological effect above all, pushing these notions (in his Haxan Cloak work especially) about as far as they can be taken outside of extremist genres like harsh noise and powerviolence. When he makes his synths literally growl, our bodies respond to the perceived threat, even though we know what we’re hearing isn’t produced by a living animal. Some of what he’s exploiting, again, is stuff that goes back to our base threat-detecting instincts, but the overtly technological aspect is also the sound of horrible things both real and simulated we’ve seen through media. Staticky screams and the scrape of metal on concrete summon the spectre of snuff films, hostage videos, extreme BDSM porn, war footage, and all of the movies, video games, and music videos that have adapted their imagery to get a rise out of people. It also, especially to a broad subset of “average” moviegoers, sounds like the type of music people who want to rape and murder your family would listen to for kicks.

There is a good deal more going on in Krlic’s music than simple fearmongering though—we can look at Excavation, his second and final LP to date as the Haxan Cloak,as part of a long lineage stretching from ‘60s experimental electronic music like White Noise through Nurse with Wound, Aphex Twin, and Nine Inch Nails among many others. “The Mirror Reflecting (Part 2)” eventually reveals a sequence of austere, crystalline guitar-like sounds that post-metallers Agalloch might’ve produced; “Dieu” opens with some subterranean breakbeats and chopped up samples that nearly threaten to look in the direction of a dancefloor before a creepy violin quells the thought; the rain-drenched “The Drop” flashes a bit of a Baths-style emo/downtempo vibe when it isn’t trudging past the sounds of dark satanic mills. Just as some people will hear Excavation as sadistic junkie music, others will no doubt find it an exceedingly warm and plush casket to disappear within, the overwhelming weight of its sounds divorced of violent associations, just signals strobing across the darkened hemispheres.

189/365

[rose-1383]

[ruinedholograms]

(2013)

• Body/Head (Kim Gordon) - Coming Apart

• Queens Of The Stone Age - …Like Clockwork

• Tim Hecker - Virgins

• Hans Zimmer - Man Of Steel

• GB - Within These Machines

• Arcade Fire - Reflektor

• David Bowie - The Next Day

• Autechre - Exai

• The Haxan Cloak - Excavation

• Agnes Obel - Aventine

• Grouper - The Man Who Died In His Boat

• Atoms For Peace - Amok

• V/A - Sound City: Reel To Reel

• Nine Inch Nails - Hesitation Marks

• Washed Out - Paracosm

• The Knife - Shaking The Habitual

• Julia Holter - Loud City Song

• Majical Cloudz - Impersonator

• Chelsea Wolfe - Pain Is Beauty

• How To Destroy Angels - Welcome Oblivion

[lyssahumana]

[knightofleo]

The Haxan Cloak | Excavation (Part 1)

[radiophd]

the haxan cloak -- observatory