Halloween tunes: four tips on sonic gore and terror

With Oct. 31 just around the corner, the question most Blazers are surely asking themselves is "How can I get my hands on good, spooky Halloween tunes?" Luckily, when Blair asks, Silver Chips Online answers. The following four tips are meant to be a guide to acoustic madness as well as off-the-wall trick-or-treat insanity.

When it comes to haunted-house music, modern classical owns the genre. Pieces like The Planets by Gustav Holst, The Sorcerer's Apprentice by Paul Dukas and A Night on Bald Mountain by Modest Mussorgsky are a good place to start for creepy thrills. Special attention should be paid to the extremely eerie vibe of Scandinavian composers such as Jean Sibelius and Edvard Grieg. The best Halloween composer award, however, has to go to Stravinsky, if only because his first name is Igor. But in all seriousness, The Rite of Spring was disturbing enough to cause riots upon its initial performance.

For listeners who prefer a bit more "rock" in their music, they need look no further than the progressive rock of the early seventies. such as Yes's "Close to the Edge," Van Der Graaf Generator's "Lemmings" and Pink Floyd's "A Saucer of Secrets." But if any band brought haunted-house music into the rock era, it was King Crimson. Although the grotesque face on the cover of their debut album, In the Court of the Crimson King, seems like a perfect Halloween costume, their most frightening music belongs to the 1973 to 1974 incarnation of the group, whose blend of the desolate and dissonant is exhibited to great effect on the albums Larks' Tongues in Aspic and Starless and Bible Black. Although the group has since moved in a different direction, their brand of progressive rock was revived in the 1990s in Sweden by groups such as Anekdoten and Anglagard, who merged it with a gloomy Scandinavian sound.

Another wacky Halloweenish musical legacy is John Zorn's. His groundbreaking group of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Naked City, released some of the most disturbing and violent music ever played with a uniquely haunting blend of jazz and grindcore. One of Zorn's followers and the former singer for Faith No More, Mike Patton, formed the group Fantomas in the late 1990s, and in 2001, the band released The Directors Cut, a set of interpreted movie themes from The Godfather to Rosemary's Baby. It sounds like what would have happened if Frank Zappa, Freddie Mercury and Opeth wrote the soundtrack for Fiddler on the Roof and is truly a fiendish album.

But among all of these obscurities and oddball releases, the quintessential Halloween album is also the best-selling album of all time. It is, of course, Michael Jackson's Thriller. The title track captures the essence of the celebration: spooky and completely over the top. No one can forget the groundbreaking music video that featured werewolf-Michael and moonwalking skeleton-Michael. The song and video are not only Halloween standards but also pop-music classics.

Halloween is a night for experimentation, fright and adventure both musically and socially. But safety is the number one concern: Keep the music at a healthy volume to avoid annoying the neighbor's black cat or shattering a mirror. Nobody wants seven years of bad luck.