Envenomist - "Ensnarled"

Black pulses guide through a Lovecraftian void of murk horror and total darkness.

Another dark, dystopian and sinister track from my favorite new dark ambient discovery, Envenomist. The perfect soundtrack for your Saturday morning. 

This one is in my playlist for today's haunt setup. The rain and winds have finally moved out, so it's time to finalize the display for tomorrow night's trick-or-treat.

Enjoy.

  

The Haunters - "In The Dark Mixtape"

Look, it grows dark! The positive peace of everything fills me with rage, with something that is the bitter aftertaste of the air I breathe. My soul aches... In the distance a slow ribbon of smoke rises and disperses... A restless tedium blocks all further thoughts of you...

— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Thirty minutes of wonderfully discordant, ghostlike dark ambient for your Sunday morning. Just what the soul needs as we inch ever so close to All Hallows Eve.

Enjoy.

  

Black Mountain Transmitter - "Cemetery Miasma"

Ultra lo-fi haunted graveyard ambient.

SAY NO MORE! Really great discordant, black ambient audio (with just the right amount of Halloween spookiness added in!) from the also really great Black Mountain Transmitter. Here is your instant cemetery haunt soundtrack! Just press play and enjoy!!

Midnight Syndicate - "Spectral Masquerade"

And they danced... A ghostly waltz by "soundtracks to imaginary films" composers, Midnight Syndicate. Haunting piano and gothic bells fill out this early fan favorite.

Lots of great Gothic atmosphere in this classic Midnight Syndicate track from 2002. And it is paired perfectly to scenes from Carnival of Souls, Nosferatu, White Zombie, and other classic horror films! Enjoy!

3 Hours of Ambient Sounds from Forbidden Planet's Alien Krell Machines

I'm hoping to get some serious work done on this year's yard haunt projects this weekend. So I was really stoked to get this from Planet Doom Haunted House ace and all-around pleasant dude, Brent Wilson.

3 straight hours of ambient audio pulled from the 1956 sci-fi classic, Forbidden Planet! Now to be completely honest, I have only seen this movie a couple of times and I don't readily recall the noises of the Krell Machine, but after listening to it I was quite surprised!

This looping track makes an incredible dark industrial ambient audio track on its own and would make a really, REALLY great background audio track in a haunt scene! It's so menacing!!

I'm off to work in the garage, and I'll be playing this while I toil away...

Press play and enjoy!!

Aphex Twin - "Matchsticks"

When I first discovered the dark ambient music genre and its subsequent use in my home haunt display, it was—of all places—in my wife's CD collection.

Buried in with all of her other CDs that I never thought too highly of, was an obscure double-CD by some band that I had never heard of called Aphex Twin.

And I hate to admit it, but she was the one who first told me to listen to it, saying it had a creepy sound that would tie-in to the Halloween season.

So I popped the Selected Ambient Works, Vol. 2 CD into the player and pushed "play."

The audio that came through those speakers ABSOLUTELY floored me. I immediately fell in love with the hauntingly dark atmospheric sounds unlike anything I had really heard before. I listened to that CD for the rest of the night, amazed at what I was hearing...

And then it hit me. These tracks would make the perfect audio backdrop for my haunt display! No traditionally-structured songs, no immediately recognizable instruments and no vocals. The music would sit "behind" the display, serving only to add an incredible element of tension and creepiness to the visual elements.

I ended up using 6 different tracks from that Aphex Twin release for my display that year, and those tracks were used again for the following 3 or 4 years. It was the first time that I had really focused on the audio aspect of my haunt and what a truly good soundtrack could do to enhance the overall haunt experience.

Every Halloween season, I still go back and listen to that original 6-song playlist. And every time I do, I hear the first note of the first song and I get an incredibly warm, nostalgic feel. The track Matchsticks was the first track used and it is still one of my favorite dark ambient tracks of all time.

So take a walk down the Highbury Cemetery memory lane and enjoy Matchsticks by Aphex Twin.

Charnel House - "L'Appel Du Vide"

With mere hours to spare before heading out to the Midwest Haunters Convention, my new Charnel House CD, "L'Appel Du Vide" is finished! 3 tracks of "haunt ambient" audio, perfect for a home haunt or haunted house scene setting.

This release is my first foray into the world of music composition and represents my first steps into learning to create this specific style of audio. I had discovered the dark ambient genre about 8 years ago, fell in love with it, began using it in my annual yard haunt display and finally decided late last year that I wanted to try my hand at creating my own haunt-specific version it.

This version of "L'Appel Du Vide" is a limited, hand-numbered "2018 Midwest Haunters Convention" edition of 20 and comes with a hand-numbered CD and silkscreened Charnel House patch, housed in a hand-numbered gatefold sleeve. Every facet of this release, from the creation of the logo, photography and sleeve art, to the silkscreened patch and the hand-stamped and numbered Memorex CD-R was produced in-house here at the Cemetery. Super DIY all the way!

And for anyone lucky enough to be at the Midwest Haunters Convention this weekend in Columbus, Ohio, find me on the tradeshow floor and I'll give you a copy of the CD!

I hope to see you there!