What is the darkest/hardest music you like?

the riffs and the hair, man.... (actually I really like the sounds rhythms and textures, they could have been called Hawkwind Division)

Siouxsie's "Nicotine Stain" also one of the scarier tunes I've ever heard; brilliantly sampled by Mad Professor on his remix for Massive Attack's "Superpredators."

one of the darkest albums i know is 'turn loose the swans' by my dying bride.
that said, i think certain songs/albums by say swans or ministry are pretty dark on that stripped back, nihilistic level.

i'm always looking for dark/depressing stuff. who am i kidding?

Swans.

HAHAHA I'm listening to DARKSPACE III right now!!!! Like, before I saw this thread!

There's your answer.

don't know them. do you recommend?

It's absolutely stone-dead phenomenal. In my decade top 20, probably, once I get my head round it all. You'll go mental for it.

(III is the album, btw)

cheers man. jumping on the case right now...

am going out now but do chronicle your amazement for posterity

just listened to 'dark 3.14' off that record. astounding. builds up incrementally over 4 minutes, then settles into a kind of groove, then gets unexpectedly fast, then segues into my favourite bit - the atmospheric outro, which benefits as much from its repetitiveness as its sense of epic vacuousness ... what a journey. fantastic stuff :)

You sure you weren't listening to the new Muse by mistake.

hahaha. no, but those guys have disturbingly similar formula, it's true.

only time i've ever expressed any interest in muse was when i had to feign it in order to keep things on solid ground with the missus.

Don't people get burned out going down this path eventually? You end up collecting perverse shit like.....Little Marcy or records by primitives who clearly lack talent.

That said, Diamanda Galas is pretty bone-chilling. At least she has chops too. Fear the chops!

You end up collecting perverse shit like.....Little Marcy

If you came up with that reference before reading my first post way back when I salute you.

(My current real answer is probably Yanni. Wait...)

Hardest: Swans
Darkest: Stephen Jesse Bernstein's Prison, when one considers his poetic persona wasn't a character, but unmediated.

"dsrk" and "hard" are different qualities.

"Hard" but not "dark": Hecker (florian, not tim), Liturgy, Xenakis, Sciarrino

"Dark" but not "hard": Leonard Cohen circa "Songs of Love and Hate", Death in June, Blood Axis

"Dark" and "Hard": Khanate, Burning Witch, Sutcliffe Jugend, Maurizio Bianchi

The "darkest" record i know is Thee Last Supper, an LP of field recordings released by T.O.P.Y. of the night of the mass suicide at Jonestown. You can hear Jim Jones hectoring and lecturing people to commit suicide and in the background you can hear cult members (and their infants) screaming in distress and panic as they die.

Hecker (florian, not tim)

Haha, I was about to say!

http://www.epsilonminus.com/darquedungeon/dd_7.gif

posted this on the noize board the other day. still can't get over this record:

listening to this nonesuch album for organ from 1971 and HOLY TOLEDO BLEW MY MIND. never heard it before.

new music for organ
william bolcom - black host
william albright - organbook II

william albright, organ

sydney hodkinson, percussion

SERIOUSLY SATANIC NOISE ORGAN ALBUM.

wow, so great. and seriously scary!

Yikes. That Jonestown recording is a stunning document (and is at archive.org). It an end-of-the-world gospel revival, with all the celebratory mood inverted.

creepy organ on Black Host (which alternates from fear and dread to near silence) suddenly EXPLODES into pure noise of organ, drumming, and awesome tape loop action. just unbelievable.

opeth, probably

Darkest: Diamanda Galas/Throbbing Gristle/Antony & the Johnsons/Khanate/Univers Zero
Hardest: Marduk/Rebaelliun/Immolation/Slayer/Eyehategod/Sissy Spacek

Whenever asked about dark music in my collection I always think of Massive Attack's Mezzanine I don't know why I think of it as a dark album. Something about it reminds me of tar. Also I recall Golden Palominos 'Dead inside' and Recoil's 'Liquid' have some dark lyrics courtesy of Nicole Blackman but I haven't listened to them in years. Musically speaking they're not very attractive.

Hardest and favorite that I have in my collection are probably:

Paul Dolden - L'ivresse de la vitesse
Li Jianhong - 三生石
Rashied Ali & Le Roy Jenkins Duo - Swift Are the Winds of Life
John Coltrane - Ascension

xpost - Scott, where can I hear that? I have some Olivier Messiaen but Black Host sounds amazing from your description.

i don't know if its on cd. i have a vinyl copy. one just sold on ebay for five bucks, so it's not sought after or anything. maybe keep an eye out there. very very cool.

Yikes. That Jonestown recording is a stunning document (and is at archive.org). It an end-of-the-world gospel revival, with all the celebratory mood inverted.

― Drove away his head. (Derelict), Saturday, September 26, 2009 4:54 PM

link?

is it this??

http://www.archive.org/details/ptc1978-11-18.flac16

that seems to fit the bill.

Agree on the Stephen J Bernstein.

Swans' Cop gets my vote here. It's been punishing me for 20 years now, and I still love to come back for more. I probably have more extreme stuff in terms of both harder music and perhaps darker lyrics, but this LP combines the two perfectly.

Haven't downloaded that file, but from the context of the discussion I'm guessing that it's that. There are Lps of the People's Temple gospel band playing straight up gospel, but this is different, it's just a field recording of the event of the mass suicide itself. I'm guessing that the T.O.P.Y. LP (which claimed to be released by The World Satanic Network System) is just culled from the recording identified on that site as the FBI tape.

"... nothing we could do, we can't, we can't separate ourselves from our own people. (pause, children crying in background) ... For twenty years laying in some old rotten nursing home ... (pause) ... taken us through all these anguished years. They took us and put us in chains and that's nothing. ... (stuttering) ... there's no comparison to that, to this. They've robbed us of our land, and they've taken us and driven us until we tried to find ourselves ... we tried to find a new beginning, but it's too late. You can't separate yourself from your brother and your sister. No way I'm gonna do it. I refuse. I don't know who fired the shot, I don't know who killed the Congressman. But as far as I'm concerned, I killed him. You understand what I'm saying? I killed him. He had no business coming. I told him not to come. ... (long pause) ... die with respect, die with a degree of dignity. Lay down your life with dignity. Don't lay down with tears and agony. It's nothing to death, just like Max said. It's just stepping over into another plane. Don't, don't be this way. Stop this hysterics... This is not the way for people who are socialistic Communists to die ... no way for us to die. We must die with some dignity ..."

I don't really like hard or dark music at all. The darkest music I really like is probably goth-era The Cure (80-82) and some of Depeche Mode's more depressive moments ("Blasphemous Rumours") while the hardest music I really like is probably Dream Theater.

the hardest piece of music i own is nadja - the bungled and the botched. although i like hardness and darkness they aren't things i want to listen to very often, so this one album satisfies me pretty good on the heaviness side. the moment when the main riff hits actually produces a physical reaction in me every time i listen to it, and i often can't make it through the entire record it's so powerful. i'm sure there are plenty of albums that have this kind of effect on you guys, but this is the only thing that has ever done it for me. like any metal review will brag about "PULVERIZING RIFFS" but metal so far has not pulverized me; it's just made me want to rock out. this album has pulverized me.

blech dream theater.

That should be their real name.

most of what i like is dark and/or hard ... i'd have an easier time trying to figure out what lightest/softest music i like is, because there is significantly less of it.

Los Campesinos

You end up collecting perverse shit like.....Little Marcy

Little Marcy as in "Little Marcy sings to $1.98 children"?

Hardness sort of wears out, doesn't it, as it gets familiar? And darkness gets cozy and comforting rather than intoxicating. These sounds to have a bit of the unexpected to work their magic. Which is why darker, harder, faster and so on is a pursuit rather than a destination. Gotta find a new record to rattle you cage. I put away the Swans for long stretches so they can get their shock back. A friend just sent me this Ufomammut track, "Blotch" that doing some serious battery on my while some classics are recharging.

Hardness sort of wears out, doesn't it, as it gets familiar? And darkness gets cozy and comforting rather than intoxicating. These sounds to have a bit of the unexpected to work their magic.

that's assuming you're listening to things for "hardness' or darkness' sake," as opposed to listening to it because it's good music.

Darkest: Black One, the new Lokai record
Hardest: Dopesick

as opposed to listening to it because it's good music.

Sometimes, for sure. That's not to say a lot of it doesn't stick as great music.

I guess the trouble for me is that "hard" can just seem like a macho posture (dull, aesthetically obvious, conservative in its taking up of earspace with chest-thumping display behavior) if you're not moved by it as art- i.e. there's lots of metal that is "hard" but not interesting in its hardness, and so it turns "soft" at the level of ideas.

The same issue can apply to "difficulty" in high modernist 20th century classical composition such as New Complexity composers, or "difficulty" in power electronics- personally the endurance contest aspect of stuff like Sutcliffe Jugend, Whitehouse, The Grey Wolves, Prurient and Intrinsic Action is what makes it "hard", but in a "hard to listen to" way that feels more phenomenologically challenging rather than just "macho", tho obviously most power electronics is also macho in that way too. I guess ultra-high pitched sine wave compositions are "hard" without being "macho"- I'm thinking of really piercing stuff from 0, Ikeda, Chartier, etc.

Sometimes you don't feel up to that kind of hard work, no? Also, bendy very much on OTM about the way that certain kinds of hardness can go soft with familiarity. I now listen to some black metal and noise records and I have heard them so often that they are a kind of ambient music for me rather than some kind of traumatic or troubling encounter.