The Ultimate Stay-At-Home Halloween Playlist

This post appeared originally on THUMP UK. A few years ago I hosted my first and only Halloween party. By this, I mean the strangers I had moved in with that September announced they were having one, which immediately inspired a month of anxiety—what if I want to go to bed and people are still in my house, merrily chuckling to themselves about how they're totally subverting childhood conventions by carving a bong out of a pumpkin? Mainly though I was gripped with panic about being able to play records in the vicinity of a sort-of-captive audience, as opposed to just the one weird, old guy in Belgium who I would occasionally WeTransfer artlessly recorded ambient mixes to.

The next 30 days were spent meticulously planning in my head. Revelers would enter the flat and immediately be entranced. First by a mysterious green light emanating from the end of the corridor, followed by a forebodingly low end rumble, drawn out past the point of comfort and punctuated with stabs of chilling symphonic shrills. These partygoers, trailing red food coloring along the walls of my home and half-blind in their pound-shop werewolf masks, would be utterly swept away in a totally immersive, terrifying crescendo of ever heightening audio unease until suddenly…bam! Sweet release as icy synths lock onto a bouncy 4/4 beat, before you know it the place has become the New Cross equivalent of the Rocky Horror mansion. Halloween hedonism ensues, yours truly goes down in history.

Obviously it didn't play out like that. I couldn't get hold of a green light, only a red one and the Berghain-Dungeon-Meets-Creepy-Catacomb aesthetic I was going for amounted to a few rubber bats hung precariously from a lampshade. I nervously drank almost a liter of mezcal, passed out on top of a Raime record and spent the next day intermittently ringing NHS Direct, because "I just need to have a little chat with someone kind, you know?"

All of this is a roundabout way of saying: you should choose your Halloween vibe carefully. Are you and the other nerds with original VHS copies of I Spit On Your Grave gonna sit around in the dark scaring yourself shitless—all the while debating whether Popol Vuh's work on Nosferatu or Riz Ortolani's work on Cannibal Holocaust is the superior dreamy horror soundtrack? Or are you gonna actually try and dance and hug and kiss with arched eyebrows and gleeful abandon as high-camp space-age disco soundtracks your cobwebbed romp?

Regardless, it's safe to say that Halloween, and all things ungodly, has inspired some truly thrilling electronic music. The weekend's over, so by now you'll hopefully have gotten the wild partying out of your system, and instead currently find yourself crying comedown tears into an empty Costa coffee cup. That said, the true horrors still await, as Halloween itself is actually tonight. So, with that in mind, here's a blood-splattered selection to while away your Hallows' eve at home with.

We'll get the semi-obvious one out of the way—this is the eponymous track from The Haxan Cloak's second LP, everyone's favorite horror-soundtrack-that-never-was. There were a few guys putting out records in a similar vein to this around that time (Demdike Stare and Raime spring to mind as obvious high points) but no one did it quite like Londoner Bobby Krlic. Opening with a distant, unnerving vocal sample that sounds somehow panicked and detached at the same time, the track descends into pure dread: heartbeat thumps drift in and out of the scattered percussion and looming, leering synth sweeps becoming increasingly tense and queasy.

A scream that it'd be a crime to describe as anything other than bloodcurdling and the almighty crashes of a blown out drum kit. These are the first sounds you hear on The Body's incredible 2014 LP, I Shall Die Here, and it sets an intense template for everything that follows. Clawing its way out of the embers of their previous albums—all very good, if slightly formulaic, examples of doom metal—their debut on RVNG Intl. was the sound of the group reconstructing their core from the ground up. It's sparse blasts of guitar, scorched-earth howling, neanderthal drumming and—before you all start having a cry about its relevance to a Thump audience—a sinister underbelly of electronics. In fact, a quick google informs me those electronics were provided by none other than The Haxan Cloak who it turns out produced the record. Feeling very good about my playlist-curating instincts right now.

The most dancefloor oriented alias of Hospital Productions boss Dominick Fernow (aka Prurient, Christian Cosmos and about a billion other noise guys who are all just him). Clanging, echoey guitars gradually give way to a drum pattern that would sound surprisingly breezy were it not for the hollowed out percussion in use and what sounds like the repeated howl of a prisoner of war being tortured. That's the image that comes to mind because, for all the theatricality of Fern's other projects, Vatican Shadow is the space in which he explores the grimly dehumanizing everyday of religious fanaticism. Enjoy dancing to this one!

Here we go then, the chase. Loads of dance music over the years has simulated that breathless feeling of a chase. Usually though it's a cool car chase being evoked, all smooth lines going dur-dur-dur-dur and crystalline synths going pew-pew-pew. This is not that type of chase. This is some poor woman (regrettably, it's always a woman) muddied and bloodied and unable to escape whatever is after her because no matter how much the dark envelopes her, there'll always be the wide whites of her eyes giving her away. Regis is the best for this sort of thing and you could do worse than get yourselves a copy of his Manbait compilation from last year for the most intense dance of your meaningless, pathetic and ultimately short life.

I feel like this was really unfairly slept on, in the way I guess a lot of electronic albums that aren't quite primed for dancing/driving/lying on a beach are. This is the first track from Acteurs' only LP to date but it's totally transfixing. Relentless repetition, crackling white noise, sci-fi squiggles and that creepy, creepy voice breathing heavily: "over and over and over and over and over…"

One week, back when I still had a job that required me to sit in an office everyday, an endless stream of Discogs packages started to arrive that I had no recollection of ordering—the result of a drunken 5am feeling-sorry-for-myself spree. Maybe it was just because it arrived wedged against the extended 12" version of "I want to know what love is" by Foreigner, or because it turns out I spent 40 quid on an original pressing and therefore I'm just trying to make myself feel better about the whole expensive debacle, but I absolutely love this song. It really does have it all: the most gonzo, acid-fried premise, a straight faced spoken word monologue about discovering the earth after it has been destroyed by man. That's before we even get to a chorus that makes you want to punch the air in joy.

We're all by now very grateful for the sterling reissue work Dark Entries are doing—a whole host of beautifully put together Italo, minimal wave and generally oddball synth records are relatively easy to obtain now without having to go without food for a month/spend two weeks trekking through the flea markets of Europe. Their pressing of Clay Pedrini's "New Dream" was very welcome indeed and here we have the man himself offering up an epic treatise on the classic Victorian horror novel. With an overload of synth lines and cheesy drum fills as backing obviously. Normally you'd reach for the instrumental version but this time of year we can all delight in some pantomime Milanese man triumphantly intoning, "I'm Mr Jekyll, you are Mr. Hyde" over and over again. Which when you think about it, kind of misses the whole point of a story about one person specifically battling with himself. Never mind.

While we're down this path, here's German minimal-wavers Das Kabinette giving a very deadpan reading of O.G. horror movie, The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari. This would be a good song to put on if you're friends with boys and girls who have matching razor cut fringes and dance purely with their shoulders.

Let's take things off-planet again, with the (not quite) original space disco track, "Space Disco" by Cosmic Hoffman. This is the 1981 version which is a little more uptempo than the 1978 original. It gives you everything you could possibly want from a song called "Space Disco" by a guy calling himself Cosmic Hoffman—to the point where there's little point trying to exhaust my vocabulary explaining it, when you can just hit play above and shoot off beyond the stratosphere using nothing but a pair of mirror shades and silver-sprayed cardboard robot costume for protection.

The weekend's over. You're still winding down in a haze of silver spandex and Halloween-themed cupcake crumbs, with nothing but the memory of an ewok making out with a guy in an ironic 'Make America Great Again' cap on your bed for company. What better time to stick on Alan Jefferson's magnum opus, Galactic Nightmare, a double LP that takes its cues from War Of The Worlds, only with (presumably) way more psychedelics involved. Anyway, Alan from Hull spent literally half a decade making this: he played the music, wrote and narrated the story, sung the songs, painted the artwork, drew the poster. You get the picture. The story has something to do with a race of alien vampires (all of whom have Hull-centric accents funnily enough), but really at this point you can be happy just drifting in and out of all the different suites as Halloween comes tumbling down around you. Until next year when you pull out the facepaint and do it all over again.

James is on Twitter.