"When I started working on a bat themed song, I remembered an SNL digital short about giraffes. I basically took the same approach to my song as the one in the skit. "
"Some heavy metal inspired licks with a little of my own horror Dubstep mixed in. I sampled some bat sounds, and some screams. The rest of the vocals I did myself via my phone. I don't get a lot of time to make music, I made this track in about three hours. "
Wings of Flesh is on ...and out Come the Bats which will be available to download from www.graveyardcalling.co.uk on Monday 19th August!
"My thought for "The House of Nosferatu" was that in order to give it a vampiric feel, I wanted to incorporate the organ and give it both melody and dissonance. The slow, brooding bassline is reminiscent of Nosferatu stalking up the stairs. All the synths that follow kind of complete the WIS sound, making it feel like it could be a song in an 80's vampire movie."
The House of Nosferatu is on ...and out Come the Bats which will be available to download from www.graveyardcalling.co.uk on Monday 19th August!
"Originally it started off as a dubstep VIP of “The Cemetery”, A drumstep collaboration between Tommy Creep and I. Starting with the bass and drum sounds from the original track, I slowed all of it down significantly, giving it a really loose, swinging feel. Deriving inspiration from movies, including the original inspiration “I bury the living”, such as “Return of the living dead”, “Cemetery Man”, and “Phantasm”. Once I had really funky groove going with the bass and the drums, I moved on to working on adding the samples from “I bury the living” again, and found a clip in particular very interesting… Where one of the characters says another character’s name, “Bob”."
"I pitched this sample down so it sounded like it was slow and evil and threw a phaser on it, making it sound more like a bass or a really odd instrument sample. That’s the offtime sounding bassy noise during a lot of the intro and during some of the middle as well. This track was heavily influence by the funkiness of artists like OPIUO, Spoonbill, Tipper, etc.. As you can tell, a somewhat common trend in my music, haha!"
The Cemetery (Ghoulish VIP) is on Tales from the Netherworld which is available to download from www.graveyardcalling.co.uk or on cassette directly from Ghoulshow.
"Inspired by movies like I Walked with a Zombie, the Zombi films, Curse of the Voodoo, and White Zombie. I was digging jungle and tribal beats a lot at the time and I wanted to make a very cursed or dark-sounding jungle track."
"Groups like M Machine, DubFX and Caravan Palace were frequently found all over my playlist while I was writing and producing Jungle Voodoo.
I started off with the wobbling, sub-bass sound and developed a lot of the track around that."
"The tribal drums were actually a recent addition to my sample library and I really wanted a chance to use them. This tune is all about the jungle around the spookhouse, and who/what lives inside. I really wanted the listener to feel uneasy while listening to this and I think the dissonant sounds helped achieve that."
Jungle Voodoo is on Tales from the Netherworld which is available to download from www.graveyardcalling.co.uk or on cassette directly from Ghoulshow.
"I wanted to do a track that featured a harpsichord-like instrument to have a mega-campy-spooky feel. I'd been listening to a lot of Harpsicorpse too that could have been an influence! I made a creepy bell patch and tried to come up with an eerie melody"
"The samples are from Dead Men Walk (1943). A great public domain vampire film, it had some dialogue that was perfect for the track."
"This was my first foray into using real instrument samples to form a song. I went with a kind of funky, spooky lounge track for this one. I took inspiration from old-school horror and film noir to give the mysterious kind of feel and knew I really wanted to incorporate an upright bass in it as well. I was listening to a lot of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, Frank Zappa and Medeski, Martin and Wood when writing this track."
"First it was a kind of island song, with the steel drums and the other exotic instruments, but I started taking another direction when I added one of the xylophone sounds and it sounded like it was right from a mystery film. Inside the spookhouse, you’ll find the Nethervator! An elevator that goes to straight to hell!" Nethervator is on Tales from the Netherworld, preorder fromwww.graveyardcalling.co.uk for instant download of Zeta Crash Landing. The cassette comes out July 29th.
"Inspired by films like White Noise, I wanted to make a track based around the idea of Electronic Voice Phenomenon. EVP is the idea that when recording background noise or static then playing it back, you can pick up paranormal communications."
"I thought that a creepy melody combined with radio static would create a great atmosphere for a track. I made a music box/xylophone style lead, used filters to give it the impression of coming across a radio transmission then added in radio static, with the same filters, to blend it together. For the last section, I resampled the main bassline, chopped it up and reversed parts to give it a weirder, otherworldly feel." "The film samples are from the 1960 film Eye of the Dead (aka Tormented); which follows the story of a man, haunted by a old girlfriend on an island."
EVP is on Vacant Tombs & Full Moons, preorder from www.graveyardcalling.co.uk for instant download
of Death Beach. The cassette comes out July 29th.
"Listening to tons of Spoonbill and Tipper help spawn this song from the beginning. I had a an idea after finding some beatbox samples to create the rhythm of the song. It sounded very organic and human, but I melded it together with odd factory sounds and other kinds of found noise to create more eerie and monstrous sounds."
"As with all of my music, I have Jhonen Vasquez to thank for a lot of my inspiration. The song personifies literally what it is supposed to sound like, a closet full of monsters; I think people would get it right away just from the title and most everyone has had that fear at some point in their lives. Just don’t open the door…"
Monster Closet is on Tales from the Netherworld, preorder fromwww.graveyardcalling.co.uk for instant download of Zeta Crash Landing. The cassette comes out July 29th.
"This was the first track I wrote, and was the very first time I had delved into electronic music production. Listening to tons of horrorbilly, psychobilly, industrial and house music is really what structured and set up the environment for creating this tune. I was really into groups like Centhron, Combichrist, The Meteors, and The Matadors, So it was just an amalgamation of genres that I was listening to that gave the song its flair."
"I didn’t have a particular movie in mind, although Calabrese's track House of Mysterious Secrets definitely inspired me heavily. This is about a house where nothing is quite what it seems, and things (and people) go missing without a trace frequently."
Spookhouse is on Tales from the Netherworld, preorder fromwww.graveyardcalling.co.uk for instant download of Zeta Crash Landing. The cassette comes out July 29th.
"This is a track I originally wrote on LSDj on the Game Boy. I'd just gotten the hang of loading samples onto the Game Boy and thought i'd write a song based around a digging sample combined with a wind sample. I tried used the digging sounds as a sort of percussion and tried to come up with a melody that would give the kind of sombre feeling of being alone in a graveyard at night."
"The bass was inspired by the track Ginger Pubes by Cookie Monsta, I thought the straight-sounding bass in that track really stood out from other dubstep/drumstep tracks at the time which seemed to go for the growly/wub sounds. I used heavy vibrato on the bass to give it a dirtier sound, I really like the extra-oscillating sound you get from fast modulating (I don't know the technical term for this but would like to know, so if anyone does...)."
"I was really happy with how the melodic break turned out the contrast of the switch back to the main bassline/melody and wanted to see how it would sound doing a version on Renoise on the mac. I tried using a "real" instruments to replace the chip-leads for the non-Game Boy version but felt that the plain-square waves worked best."
"One of the reasons for remaking the track on the computer was so that I could add in some more samples. The speech samples are from the 1945 film The Body Snatcher, starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. It tells the tale of a Dr MacFarlane who obtains his corpses through sinister means."
The Gravediggers (32-bit Body Snatcher version) is on Vacant Tombs & Full Moons, preorder from www.graveyardcalling.co.uk for instant download of Death Beach. The cassette comes out July 29th.
"I really wanted to do an alien-themed track. When I first started on the bones to this track, the lazer-sounding synths and computer-like noises really inspired me to move more in that direction so I started listening to more 50’s sci-fi scores and other stuff like that."
"I also was digging adding distortion on random stuff, and that helped get the drum/bass line going from the start by adding it on top of my drums. From there it was a hop, a skip and a terrifying jump through 50’s horror movies and soundtracks to finally get in the mindset to polish it off. I found myself as the song progressed as it gets more frantic it goes from an extraterrestrial life form coasting through the stars and then suddenly everything goes wrong and the spacecraft begins to plummet and finally crash into our humble planet."
Zeta Crash Landing can be downloaded instantly when you preorder Tales from the Netherworld from www.graveyardcalling.co.uk
"With this track, I was really exploring the dubstep sounds that were possible for me to create, and I was really inspired be a few other zombie based tracks. The likes of Nekromantix, Midnight Syndicate and Tommy Creep are what really inspired this tracks creation and were on my playlist during the making of this song."
"I found in particular that I was always interested by the iconic quotes from the classic 1968 flick Night of the Living Dead, mostly the news anchor on the radio bits. So I found the flick and chopped the bits out and started using the new-found dubstep techniques I had, to make this."
The track isn't on the upcoming release but you can download it for free here and the Tommy Creep remix here. Check out the official video made by Rorschach Noir:
Graveyard Calling brings you a series of posts talking about the influences and inspirations behind the tracks on the upcoming releases.
"I've always been a fan of horror-surf bands like The Ghastly Ones, Messer Chups or Gein & The Graverobbers and wanted to make a track that incorporated some of the same elements like the echo-drenched leads and snare rolls."
"I was looking around for films to sample for it when I came across The Beach Girls and the Monster, the 1965 film about a sea monster murdering the local surfers. It perfectly fitted what I was going for and is totally worth checking out."
Death Beach is the opening track on Vacant Tombs & Full Moons and can be downloaded instantly when you preorder the cassette from www.graveyardcalling.co.uk
