Mr. Wind-up Bird’s Halloween Mix

Well, that was a little harder than expected. It turns out that I have many songs with spooky themes. Unfortunately most of them are deeply mediocre. What’s below is the best of the rest, minus a couple of tracks already selected by ad hoc and Not Me, Boss.

Cover and mailout to follow when I get my arse in gear.

OTF Halloween Mix:

1. Congo Drummers of the Societe Absolument Guinin

2. Voodoo Ray A Guy Called Gerald

3. Bat Macumba Gilberto Gil

4. The Gorgon Speaks Cornell Campbell

5. Gorgon Sound Horsepower Productions

6. Ghost Dance Prince Buster

7. I Was a Teenage Werewolf The Cramps

8. Plague of Zombies Scientist

9. At Midnight T-Connection

10. Horror Business The Misfits

11. Burial of Long Shot The Prince of Darkness

12. The Phantom Renegade Soundwave

13. I Don’t Care About You Fear

14. I Put a Spell On You Screamin’ Jay Hawkins

15. Ghost Rider Suicide

16. Blood and Fire Niney The Observer

17. Lavender Coffin Joe Thomas

18. In The Midnight Hour Moloko

19. Fearless Vampire Killers Bad Brains

20. Testone Sweet Exorcist

21. Bad Touch Example Company Flow

22. Shadow Boxing Doc Scott

It starts with your actual Haitian voodoo drummers from the (imaginatively named) Soul Jazz CD “Voodoo Drums” and closes with Shadow Boxing (because it sounds creepy). It’s fairly obvious why most of the others are included but I stretched the theme to include songs about the witching hour.

The .rar mp3 files are just over 100MB, so they are split into two files: part one and part two.

Hope you enjoy.

2 Cups Of Blood (the Not me, boss Hallowe’en mix)

1. Dr John – Gris Gris Gumbo Ya Ya
2. AC/DC – Hells Bells
3. Liars – There’s Always Room On The Broom
4. The Birthday Party – Release The Bats
5. Cozy Powell – Dance With The Devil
6. The Fall – New Face In Hell
7. Method Man – Sandman
8. PiL – Flowers Of Romance
9. Godley and Creme – Under Your Thumb
10. Crystalites – Blacula
11. Black Sabbath – Iron Man
12. Botox Zombies – I Was A Teenage Satan Worshipper
13. Innerzone Orchestra – Blakula
14. Gravediggaz – 2 Cups Of Blood
15. Upsetters – Black Bat
16. Marsha Hunt – Walk On Gilded Splinters  

I’ve gone for a voodoo, Satanism, witchcraft, priapic goth, occult Lancastrian visionary, horrorcore, ghost story, blaxploitation vampire, Obeah, gothic nursery rhyme kind of vibe, with big drums.

Dr John’s dragon blood, secret sand, and broken heart and get together drops should warm you up enough for the bells of hell, and then there’s Liars’ ‘There’s Always Room On The Broom’, the radio-friendly unit shifter from their bracing concept album about witches, They Were Wrong So We Drowned. 

The songs about bats, devils, hell and the sandman speak for themselves. PiL’s Flowers of Romance is technically unspooky, but you only have to listen (or watch the TOTP performance) to know where I’m coming from. And when I was a kid I remember getting scared shitless by Godley and Creme’s tale of seeing the ghost of a train station suicide, so I had to stick it on here.

I don’t know much about Botox Zombies but I love ‘I Was A Teenage Satan Worshipper’, an electro-disco confessional including what sounds like a eurotrash zombie with a crystal meth habit repping his Satan-worshipping posse: “We’re fun, we’re beautiful, we’ve done everything you’ve ever dreamed of.”

Innerzone Orchestra is one of Carl Craig’s many pseudonymous projects. Programmed is my favourite of his studio albums; it’s got a typically vague concept (something to do with computers, surveillance, and, er, a there’s a vampire and stuff) which Craig’s got too many good musical ideas to keep in mind.

The Upsetters’ ‘Black Bat’ is an awesome dub I found on the bargain compilation Original Bass Culture a few years ago, described by Ian McCann in the sleevnotes as being ”full of the creepy magic of Obeah, the Jamaican mystical religion”. And to end where we began, only foxier, Marsha Hunt’s version of the bad doctor’s  ‘Walk on Gilded Splinters’).

2 Cups Of Blood

evilC’s Halloween mix(es)

Okay… you know the score – the theme is ‘Halloween’. I soon started making a list of candidate tunes in my head (and on my mobile phone) but I was torn over whether to make the compilation ‘atmospheric’ and a little bit spooky or just go for the obvious and compile tunes that had creepy themes rather than creepy atmospheres. In the end I basically couldn’t decide …so I did both and made two compilations! Cheeky, but hey!

Compilation 1 – ‘evilC’s slightly spooky AmbientDubHopStepThingy mix’ – is the more atmospheric one. It’s constructed largely from the tunes I was listening to in the mid-90s: Dub-Hop, Ambient and Electronica, but is given a tiny contemporary edge by the presence of Burial’s ‘Wounder’. I’d like to think that this music is part of Burial’s ‘lineage’, but that’s a topic for another time. As you can see, this compilation is held together by Biosphere’s (literally) chilling ambience – Geir Jenssen actually originating from Tromso, 70 miles inside the arctic circle in nothern Norway – something to bear in mind when listening to his music. It crossed my mind to make the whole of the compilation in the same vein: Dark Ambient. However, in the end I opted for a slight compromise, in order to keep it a little accessible and packed the middle out with the atrophied beats of Dub Hop. Some of these selections may not be the best examples of that style, but I had to bear in mind the theme of Halloween and spookiness and thus Spectre’s slightly cartoon-y ‘Invasion Of The Body Snatchers’ made it to the final version simply because it’s in keeping with the theme, whereas offerings from Techno Animal or Alec Empire might have seemed more obvious. It’s undeniably heavy going in parts, but deliberately so. I’ve actually edited most of these tracks slightly, minimising the silence at the end and beginning of most of the tracks or fading them in/out if they merged with their neighbours on their original CDs. This is so that those lucky people with CD burning software that leaves no gaps between tracks can make a CD version where the relentlessness (and thus the atmosphere) is optimised. One word of advice, though: mind your speakers!

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Tracklisting:

1. Biosphere – ‘Antennaria’
2. Scorn – ‘The Next Days’
3. Biosphere – ‘Phantasm’
4. SIMM – ‘Clown’
5. Torture – ‘Soaking Bodies In Dub’
6. Tricky vs. The Gravediggaz – ‘Psychosis’
7. Spectre – ‘Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers’
8. Witchman – ‘Hammerhead’
9. Burial – ‘Wounder’
10. Skull vs. Ice – ‘Operation Mind Control’
11. Biosphere – ‘Silene’

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Compilation 2 – ‘evilC’s not-quite-so-spooky mix’ – started out as an attempt to be a bit more varied and playful, but when I looked at my final selections, I saw that my misspent Goth youth had come shining through! Again, I’ve minimised the silence either side of some – but not all – of these tracks and also fiddled with the volume on some of them, where they may have seemed inappropriately quiet next to other tracks that had been mastered louder. I’m not sure if this has entirely worked, but there you go. Again, it’s a slight compromise, stylistically, but I just *had* to end it with This Mortal Coil’s quite devastating version of ‘I Come And Stand At Every Door’ – a track originally recorded with this tune by The Byrds, but whose lyrics are actually a poem (sub-titled ‘The Dead Little Girl’) by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet. Not really a Halloween song, but slightly spooky nonetheless.

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Tracklisting:

1. MC 900ft Jesus & DJ Zero – ‘A Place Of Loneliness’
2. MC 900ft Jesus & DJ Zero – ‘Real Black Angel’
3. In The Nursery – ‘Haunted Dancehall’
4. Voltaire – ‘When You’re Evil’
5. Tom Waits – ‘Whistlin’ Past The Graveyard’
6. Danielle Dax – ‘Yummer Yummer Man’
7. Diamanda Galas – ‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’
8. Suicide – ‘Frankie Teardrop’
9. The Cure – ‘Subway Song’
10. Solvent – ‘An Introduction To Ghosts’
11. Brendan Perry – ‘Death Will Be My Bride’
12. Gavin Friday and The Man Seezer – ‘Death Is Not The End’
13. This Mortal Coil – ‘I Come And Stand At Every Door (The Dead Little Girl)’

Have fun!