Recalling My Eves Through Slang

There isn't much Halloween music out there, aside from Thriller and Monster Mash.  There are some great horror-themed classical pieces but they're reserved for another pair of blogs I run - and aside from that the only thing left is horror movie soundtracks, which are largely free from the pressures of repeat listening.  I'm not sure why there isn't much of a market for scary popular music, and there haven't been too many groundbreaking hits from the past few decades to sway the market in its favor.  I guess it makes sense in the same way it makes sense there isn't a lot of Thanksgiving music - the holidays that have their own music are Christmas and Easter, and they have the ancient and bottomless liturgical repertoire at their beck and call.  Halloween's origins are much more distant to modern celebrators, and the concept of scary music evolved in its own enclosed space.  That being said, many people associate certain artists, albums and swaths of music with Halloween for various personal reasons.  Arbogast on Film, one of my favorite movie bloggers (now sadly finished with reviewing), did a post many years ago on a short-lived 90's band named October Project whose two albums he played every Fall.  He admitted that some may feel the music was too "precious or pretentious or twee"*, but it perfectly captured the moods and textures of Autumn in his heart, and inspired a particularly beautiful piece of descriptive writing:

"...they really do communicate for me the exquisite electric sadness of Fall in general and October in particular. In their harmonies I hear the scratch of dead leaves swirling on the upwind and sense a bit of wood smoke in the air."

In trying to come up with a good Halloween post for this blog I was struck with the fact that Halloween is primarily an anchor of memory, much like Christmas and Thanksgiving.  Most of the proceedings revolve around children who, being drawn from the existential drudgery of school with the lure of the fantastic and unnerving, inhabit a unique state of wonder wrapped up in macabre make-believe and pageantry.  Much like the subject of the cover of October Project's debut album, the magic of Halloween lies not in what it is but rather what it infers, in the moment and in the recollection of all the moments prior, and a child's costume can't possibly communicate all the emotions and sensations the Eve has to offer.  No two Halloween histories are alike, and mine doesn't have as strong a connection to a particular music as Arbogast's, but there are a couple of things that spark my synapses this time of year.  One is David Darling's incredible album Journal October, but the one I'm going to write about today has a certain distant, lost feeling about it that has endeared it to me - Slang.

Slang was the brainchild of Layng Martine III, an engineer and mixer based in Nashville, and the album's music was created by him and Widespread Panic bassist David Schools along with a large cast of Not Ready for Dick Clark Players.  Though the liner notes to their first album, The Bellwether Project, say next to nothing about the genesis of the group, it's easy to see from song titles and the sound palette used that their inspiration draws from the music and landscape of the South.  Martine's father, Layng Martine, Jr., was a country songwriter who scored some Top 10 hits in the 70's, and the influence of the Down Home is hard to miss, though filtered with a great deal of taste and restraint through modern electronica techniques.

The Bellwether Project holds a special place in my heart as it was an album that, much like Seks Bomba's Somewhere in this Town, my father purchased after hearing about the group on NPR, probably the most press they ever got in their seemingly short lifespan.  I've had some trouble finding detailed information on Slang as they only released two albums across four years (the latter release, More Talk About Tonight, dating from 2004) - as with many electronica entities, such as Autechre and Boards of Canada, maintaining a personal face for the music isn't a priority.  I feel that electronica is a genre that feeds off the relative anonymity of its authors, a mystique of distance and unnatural inception, and the often eerie and haunting music of Slang is drenched in this fuel while keeping an Earthy tangibility via acoustic sampling.  It's also music very much of its time, taking cues in digital technique from late 90's/early 00's chillout and lounge electronica, somewhat like the briefly successful group Ivy** but much more cock-eyed and funky.

If I had to pick a genre for this kind of music, aside from the overly broad and slightly irritating Electronica moniker, I'd have to settle with the vaguely-defined Chillout genre that includes such disparate groups as Zero 7 and Bonobo.  Slang never felt a need to raise their voice or break their grooves, and while many groups thrive on that crisp energy it may have kept Slang from breaking farther up than they did.  However, that implies that they had any interest in that, and I can't make a case that Martine and Schools wanted anything more than a small-scale project to experiment with the fractured side of a back porch.  I wouldn't have it any other way, as a lot of past albums survive on their inception in the minds of the Lone Inspired, such as Vyto B's Tricentennial 2076.  The album art is a superb counterpart to the music, a recollection stuck in between moments of waking life, as electrifying as it is unanchored from context.  It's connection to my nostalgia is impossible to describe fully except to hold up nostalgia on a pedestal, and in that way holidays like Halloween will survive for as long as its celebrators raise children of their own.  If you decide you don't connect with Slang as deeply as I do that's just fine - everybody's got their own October Project and the variance of those memory touchstones*** is what makes human life worth remembering.  Your Halloweens will always be yours to keep, and if you let Slang in you can consider it a small gift from me to you on this finest of Eves.  I'm going to spend this Halloween holed up with some of my favorite horror flicks, including the unbelievable Eyes of Fire, so if I don't see you I wish you a very Happy Halloween.

~PNK

*Allmusic's entry on the group was somewhat suspicious of the whole thing, slapping them with the unfortunate label of MOR (Middle-of-the-Road) Goth Pop, terms that cause a blistering of the skin among savvy critics.  My favorite sentence is the final one: "The trick to enjoying October Project is to simply not take it nearly as seriously as it takes itself."

**This might not count for much, but the song I've linked here was used in the opening credits to the Stephen King-developed 2004 TV miniseries Kingdom Hospital.  It's more a mark of the times than anything else but I still get a healthy wave of nostalgia every time I hear their Long Distance album which features this song.


***This really doesn't count for much, but I'll always remember the word "touchstone" as being introduced to me by Touchstone Pictures, the studio behind The Nightmare Before Christmas, and if there's a stronger force of nostalgia in my psyche than that movie I don't know what it is.