ISSUE #64
Meow.
Start digging around in Halloween music and before long you’ll turn a weird corner: there’s a lot of surf guitar. That strange kitsch has fueled everything from Friday the 13th to Rocky Horror. This band, Messer Chups, has distilled it to its purest form.
Ten years now I’ve been listening to Blonde. Whenever I do, it deepens me. That these songs were ever written is still a miracle. There’s no way to contextualize it without bringing up love—a steep style of living, built entirely out of faith—because love, like fiction, is something you can know everything about without knowing it really exists.
It’s the night the rave came home—two years after the terrifying events of Electroween, the terror in leather tights has reëmerged. No black-lit living room, no unfinished basement, no warehouse-district dance party will ever be safe. Cyberpunk as hell, clawing up from its filthy grave, this industrial-dance sound was never going to stay dead for long.
Hauntology is, as far as I’m concerned, Halloween’s most essential genre. Embodied by Burial, Boards of Canada, The Caretaker, and more, its defining sound is that of decay—vinyl noise, tape hiss, reverb, echo—and it captures the ghostly nature of nostalgia. A haunting, at its essence, is the presence of an absence.