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Fatalist

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Joy Division and the uncanny in music

Mar 02, 2015, 14:27

Like I'm guessing a few other people did here, I watched the Joy Division film on BBC4 on Friday night. Excellent piece of work which got some genuinely interesting responses from its interviewees. One of the things that came over most though was how, in the space of just a few months, JD went from being copycat punks to... something else, a band that even their friends suddenly became in awe of. There was also a sense from the members that they weren't quite sure how this had happened themselves (though clearly Ian Curtis was an exceptional talent). http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0543ytw

I'm not a JD super-fan by any means, but they're one of those bands where there's something else going on in their music that you can't quite put your finger on, something that's extraordinarily compelling (I'm thinking in particular of the second side of Closer). It's not just that the music's good, it's almost disturbingly good, like there's something uncanny about it.

Of course, the likes of Ghost Box and all the 'hauntological' groups have based their whole modus operandi on capturing the sense of the uncanny inherent in certain types of music, particularly pertaining to the often quite weird popular culture of the 1970s. But while I dig a lot of that stuff, I find it mostly evokes a facsimile of uncanniness rather than the real thing.

What I'm talking about is something a bit different to that, about music where your appreciation extends beyond just great riff/melody/beat/voice/lyric etc, to where there's a persistent sense of transcendent spookiness, for want of a better term. In other words, there's an uncanny element to the listening experience.

I guess another example for me would be Hawkwind's 'Golden Void', particularly the non-vocal sections - there's something about those passages that continues to slightly freak me out, so astonishing do they still seem to me. It could be a childhood-based imprinting thing, but it still sometimes happens. For instance, the reason I've gone on about English Heretic so much is because I get a similar vibe from some of his stuff too.

Does any of this make sense? ;-) And if so, which music do you hear as uncannily good?

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Joy Division and the uncanny in music – Fatalist, Mar 02, 2015, 14:27


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