The Undercover Soundtrack – Josh Malerman

October 26, 2016October 29, 2016 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris3 Comments

The Undercover Soundtrack is a series where I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative environment – perhaps to connect with a character, populate a mysterious place, or hold a moment still to explore its depths. This week my guest is contemporary horror/thriller author and songwriter Josh Malerman @joshmalerman

Soundtrack by Richard Band, White Lies, Between Music, Allison Laako

You ever seen the 1986 movie Troll? There’s a bonkers scene in which Sonny Bono (the very same) gets touched by the troll and turns into a forest. This scene scared the living piss out of my brothers and I growing up; watching the poor guy morph into an apartment full of plants (and the pain on his face, man o man) had me asking Mom if he was going to be okay. She said yes, he was gonna be fine, and then she laughed because, of course, she was thinking about Sonny and Cher, not “the poor plant man”.

Now, years later, I think about that conversation with Mom and I wonder if horror has a way of freezing time, trapping moments in amber. The Troll soundtrack came out on vinyl recently and I listened to it quite a bit while writing A House at the Bottom of a Lake, not because the music sounds like it’s underwater (that’ll come later here), but because Richard Band’s music has both the innocent freak and the wonder of youth. Cantos Profane best encapsulates this on the album. It’s the song most of us Troll-lovers remember the most from the film. (Recently I had a documentary crew at my house, filming a short about my first book, and I had Troll playing and when Cantos came on, he stepped out from behind the camera and said: “TROLL!”)

First date

A House at the Bottom of a Lake is about two 17-year-olds, Amelia and James, on a first date. It sounds perfect: canoeing across a chain of lakes, sandwiches and beer in the cooler. But the pair discover something below the water’s surface that changes their lives forever. It’s a house at the bottom of the lake.

Although most of the music informed the writing of the book was without lyrics… soundtracks… ambient noise (my cats included), there was a dollop of rock n roll. And nothing seemed to fit the mood I spotted between Amelia and James better than White Lies’s Death from the soundtrack to the movie A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. I suggest you strip down to a t-shirt and underwear and dance alone like alone to this one.

Now freak

Because A House at the Bottom of a Lake is a first date story, a teenage love song, I gravitated toward movie soundtracks that do both the freak out and the wonder. Because that’s what teenage life is. (That’s what life is like now, too, but let’s focus on the past for a second here, eh?) The whole ‘gravitating’ thing becomes clear after the fact; I can’t imagine lining up a series of albums with a mind that this or that is going to influence the story because really why not listen to something that feels the opposite of your book idea and see what comes of it? But in this case, and in hindsight, it’s clear to me that I was thinking of teenagers in love and the horror of “firsts”: first kiss, first sex, first love. And, in a skewed way here, first home, too. So Troll worked because it came out about the time I was experiencing some firsts of my own. But about halfway through writing the book, my girl Allison discovered a band that changed the whole process.

Yes. They’re under water

Now, before I introduce Between Music and their project AquaSonic, I feel it’s necessary to say that if I were making a movie, I wouldn’t be the type to play a song whose lyrics matched up perfectly with the scene. Too literal. Too cheesy. It just doesn’t feel right to play Mrs Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter if a character of mine is named Mrs Brown and she actually does have a lovely daughter. But when Allison showed me a youtube clip of Between Music I said screw my own rules.

The band has an entire under water show. All their instruments are underwater, recorded under water, played underwater. Hell they even sing underwater. While working on the book I knew the setting was a naturally horrifying place: it’s dark, wet, distorted, cold, and claustrophobic. The only details of the house you see are by the end of your submerged flashlight beams, and that’s through the prism of your facemask. About 60 percent of the book takes place in the submerged house. So to discover a band who has shown us what music sounds like below the waves was, for me, a step deeper than kismet.

It was magic.

Here’s another clip (it’s too good for just one).

Courtship song

Lastly, I wish I had a clip of Allison performing the song she wrote based on A House at the Bottom of a Lake. “The Courtship of Amelia” is a gorgeous, freaky, hit and you’ll have to believe me when I say it’s an earworm. A worm that, I discovered, can live long under water.

Josh Malerman is the author of Bird Box and the forthcoming Black Mad Wheel (May, 2017, ECCO/HarperCollins.) Along with a half dozen published short stories, Malerman is also the songwriter for the rock band the High Strung. He lives with Allison Laakko and their pets (including a brilliant weimeraner named Valo) in Michigan. Find him on Twitter as @joshmalerman and on Facebook.

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Undercover Soundtrack

‘Teenage life is freak-out and wonder’ – Josh Malerman

October 24, 2016 Roz Morris @Roz_MorrisLeave a comment

My guest this week is the perfect writer to see us into Halloween. He’s been a guest of the series before and he’s always had a liking for the unusual thrill. The title of his new release will probably tell you that: A House At The Bottom Of A Lake – an imaginative tale with plenty of scares and a good dose of first love. His approach to undercover soundtracks is also oddfield and individual – he likes to play music that feels very opposite of his book idea. But even he had to go with the flow when he found a band that played and recorded an entire show under water. He is Josh Malerman and he’ll be here on Wednesday with his Undercover Soundtrack.

Undercover Soundtrack

The Undercover Soundtrack – Rohan Quine

July 2, 2014 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris4 Comments

‘Sadness and longing in the wildest pleasures’

Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative environment – perhaps to connect with a character, populate a mysterious place, or hold a moment still to explore its depths. This week my guest is magical realist author Rohan Quine @RohanQuine

Soundtrack by Sinead O’Connor, Dead Can Dance, Suede, Lana Del Rey, Kim Wilde, Soft Cell, This Mortal Coil, Roxy Music, Madonna, The Orb, The KLF, Ministry, Genesis, Marc and the Mambas, Marc Almond, Kode9 and the Spaceape, Bronski Beat, Donna Summer, Erasure, Bauhaus, Bryan Ferry

Since women are a bit cooler than men, I’ll start with the women in the following cast of principal characters – a cast loosely spread across all five published tales (The Imagination Thief and four novellas – The Platinum Raven, The Host in the Attic, Apricot Eyes and Hallucination in Hong Kong). Aptly here, Alaia Danielle is a singer. She’s morally upright and somewhat high-tension, with cool good taste and a large, cerebral compassion. Her dignity and the humanity beneath her seriousness were partly conjured up by the majesty with which Troy by Sinéad O’Connor builds up, from controlled quietness into a world-bestriding anger that’s just as controlled. Performing, Alaia emits a wordless song with the viscerality of Diamanda Galás and the ethereality of the Cocteau Twins; but the best single suggestion of her was the sublime The Host of Seraphim by Dead Can Dance.

Green eyes

Pippa Vail is a sweet, depressive dreamer who sits on her high-rise tower-block balcony in silence, while her rich inner life seeps out across the town spread below her; her prominent green eyes look wet and hurt, as if she’s been crying, though there are no tear-stains. Evoking the swell of silent beauty she hears in the sky, from within the unending loneliness of her high-rise balcony-grave, many early tracks by Suede influenced my creation of her. Two amazing examples are Still Life and – appropriate for her high-rise location – High Rising.

Evelyn Carmello is sunny, tough, sassy and social, looming large in her small home-town of Asbury Park, near New York. Lana Del Rey’s 2012 album fed into her, but Evelyn is lighter. Starcrazy by Suede was useful as a very Evelyn example of another kind of Suede heroine: joyously functional in the real world, she’s a dirty-sexy streetwise party-girl, although that scene is mostly now in her recent past. I can also hear in Evelyn an echo or two of that cool-eyed, dirty-city classic Kids in America by Kim Wilde.

Angel’s Baby Doll is the self-image of the character Angel (see below). I birthed her from somewhere in the vicinity of two beauties by Soft Cell: the divine Torch; and Sex Dwarf.

Ravens in the tower

Constant in the Chocolate Raven is a yearning for the everyday external world to transcend its qualities of dullness and flatness, to attain the colours and lights living in her mind. The music that helped create her, therefore (especially when she’s on that Dubai skyscraper terrace, creating the tower in the mountains from convulsive blasts of energy she fires across the night-time desert), was music that radiates a transcendent beauty undercut by regret that such beauty will always be up against such a deadweight. Salient examples were Song to the Siren by This Mortal Coil and To Turn You On by Roxy Music. The Chocolate Raven’s creation of the Platinum Raven is in itself a song to the siren.

In that nightclub tower where the Platinum Raven presides, events of the brightest darkness, decadence and beauty occur. The dance-floor is a cat-walk where every night those anorexic models float past us, beautifully drugged-out and weak and untouchable, forever down the runways of their airport lanes, expressionless in damage through the night-lit clouds with their make-up flashing soft in the lights, like perfection, clad in shreds of lightest silk that conceal the needle-marks. The album Erotica by Madonna was in the mix here, being steeped in this heightened feeling of darkness beneath legendary nightclub fabulousness; yet this album’s world-class attitude and sass are permeated by a simple, universal sense of the sadness and longing that enrich even the wildest pleasures and highest achievements we’re capable of while alive. The title track Erotica is a fine example – as is the track Deeper and Deeper, beneath whose easy hedonistic surface lies a perfect evocation of the natural evanescence of your every past joy and your every future joy.

Conspirator

The Platinum Raven’s conspirator in that tower is a DJ named Amber, whose infernal nature and allure reflect the fact that he happens to be the continuation of Rutger Hauer’s psychopathic character in the film The Hitcher. Soundtrack-wise, however, he’s evoked by what he might spin: late in the main room, Little Fluffy Clouds by The Orb; then later still in the VIP room, something from the legendary album Chill Out by The KLF, such as the track 3am Somewhere Out of Beaumont.

Damian West is a gangster whose gauntness of expression indicates much danger and paranoia. The sound of the inside of Damian’s head was well suggested by the colossal charisma of The Fall by Ministry. Another contribution was made by the claustrophobic immensity of that slick little slice of hell, Mama by Genesis.

Angel Deon (in some novellas called Scorpio) is an androgynous creature whose spiteful sleek depraved face radiates decadence and damage from its sharp beauty. He is shadowy, effete, both unhealthy and luminous; his head is a fantastically dark cavern of jagged riches, and musically he’s pure Marc and the Mambas, plus tons of the darker output of Soft Cell and of Marc Almond solo. To locate my creation of Angel, I’d pinpoint somewhere between two stunning Mambas tracks: The Animal in You; and My Former Self.

Leader

Lucan Abayomi is a charismatic gang-leader, drug-dealer and Angel’s boyfriend, whose smile spells trouble, violence, sex and danger. He was partly born from that dubby bass in lots of dubstep from around 2006, redolent of nocturnal high-rise housing estates, lonely concrete spaces and bass speakers booming out of car windows. We can hear part of his origins in two by Kode9 and the Spaceape: Nine Samurai; and Sine.

Shigem Adele is an effusive, flamboyant nightclub host, a lovable and neurotic survivor, whose warmth can illuminate a roomful of people. He was born somewhere between two classic electronic dance tracks: the haunting anguish and defiant beauty of Why? by Bronski Beat; and the iconic sensuality of I Feel Love by Donna Summer.

Kim Somerville is newly in love with Shigem, being quiet, observant and loyal, with a tinge of thoughtful pessimism:

In an absent way he sings along to the lyrics of the track playing quietly on the club’s sound system; and I am struck by his voice, which is clean, vanilla, supple, pure and filled with earnest beauty. It’s a voice of great wholesomeness, picturesquely sad and honest, redolent of goodness – and a little white lie, I think.

That was inspired by the voice of Erasure’s Andy Bell, always to be heard with Vince Clarke’s keyboards, as in the beauty of two representative Erasure tracks: the grandeur and exuberance of Run to the Sun; and the sombre grandeur of Crown of Thorns.

Narrator

Finally, my narrator Jaymi Peek. Most of the time he’s subtle or elusive in nature, being a humorous clear lens and benign observer. In his broadcasts, though, he becomes a charismatic and empowered face who projects himself addictively into the imaginations of a global audience – the assaultive power of which is suggested in Double Dare by Bauhaus, whose message never dates. (I hereby stake a musical claim: the first 15 sentences of the long paragraph at the bottom of this page, narrated by Jaymi, constitute what must be the most precise verbal description ever written, by anyone silly enough to try it, of the exact sound of the first 40 seconds of Double Dare.) As with the Chocolate Raven’s projection of the Platinum Raven, one of Jaymi’s missions in his wildly varied projections is perhaps to help himself (and us) to transcend all that needs transcending. Echoing the Song to the Siren that I mentioned above for her, I shall therefore end here by returning to that song for Jaymi too – but this time it’s Song to the Siren by Bryan Ferry, from 2010. This is a sound so rarefied by its own expensive exquisiteness that its surface feels laminated and sterilised from all reality, residing forever in some elite suite of perfection above us, with nowhere higher left to go before the air would run out altogether…

Rohan’s novel The Imagination Thief and four novellas – The Platinum Raven, The Host in the Attic, Apricot Eyes and Hallucination in Hong Kong – aim to push imagination and language towards their extremes, to explore and illuminate the beauty, horror and mirth of this predicament called life, where we seem to have been dropped without sufficient consultation ahead of time. He’s on Twitter at @RohanQuine and has a website www.rohanquine.com

Undercover Soundtrack

‘Sadness and longing in the wildest pleasures’ – Rohan Quine

July 1, 2014 Roz Morris @Roz_MorrisLeave a comment

My guest this week writes urban fiction imbued with magic realism and horror. His characters are drawn directly from soundtracks, from music that expressed their desperation, loneliness, fragility and streetwise sass – Sinead O’Connor to Madonna; Dead Can Dance to Suede and Soft Cell. He is Rohan Quine and he’ll be here on Wednesday with his Undercover Soundtrack.

Undercover Soundtrack

The Undercover Soundtrack – Will Overby

December 11, 2013 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris3 Comments

‘The thoughts start flowing again’

Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative environment – perhaps to connect with a character, populate a mysterious place, or hold a moment still to explore its depths. This week’s post is by horror and thriller writer Will Overby @Will_Overby

Soundtrack by Bruce Springsteen, U2, Benny Goodman, Julie London, Kryzysztof Penderecki, Gyorgy Ligeti, Brett Rosenberg

I have never understood how anyone can write in total silence. Call me crazy, but there’s something about writing to music that frees up the flow of thought, that takes my mind to places I wouldn’t ordinarily visit, that presents me with sudden, surprising inspiration.

I first noticed this back in 1984. I had just graduated high school and I was working on what would turn out to be my first completed novel, August. That summer I purchased Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA and listened to it most days when I was writing. As the weeks went by, I quickly realized that it was becoming a soundtrack of sorts to the book. Songs like Downbound Train and I’m On Fire helped me add a particularly gritty feel to the character of Brian DeCanto and gave him a depth I couldn’t have achieved otherwise.

This was a revelation. Subsequent stories and novels continued to have soundtracks, including a never-to-be-published young adult novel inspired completely by the music of U2. Back in the day I would make mix tapes to play while writing. I still have a couple of those tapes, and it’s really interesting to go back now and see what inspired me 15 and 20 years ago. Nowadays I just cue up a playlist on my computer, and I can add and delete selections at my whim.

While writing this post I’m listening to the music I used for inspiration while working on my novel The Island. In this story two friends, Sarah and Amy, travel to a Caribbean island for a getaway but end up being caught up in a vodou cult complete with zombie rituals and mysterious disappearances. There is also a touch of romance, as Amy falls for a local tour-boat operator, David.

When first developing this book, I would often listen to the type of music I imagined the characters would enjoy. Sarah and her fiancé, for instance, are into big band music, so much of her characterization involved immersing myself in songs like Goody Goody by Benny Goodman. David, on the other hand, collects vinyl records and is especially fond of 50s jazz; John Coltrane seems to be his favorite for reflection, but as his and Amy’s love affair blossomed, I found myself drawn to sultry numbers by Julie London like I’m in the Mood for Love to accentuate their growing sexual attraction.

When it came to the meat of the book, I relied on instrumental pieces – both modern classical and film soundtracks – for inspiration. The zombie ritual near the end of the book, for example, is set to Kryzysztof Penderecki’s Polymorphia – a creepier piece of music I’ve never heard; you can almost feel skeletal fingers closing in around your throat as the pizzicato strings play a frenetic path up and down the scale. Likewise, his The Dream of Jacob was sometimes set to repeat when I needed a feel of dread and unease. For scenes early in the book when Sarah is having hallucinations and nightmares, Gyorgy Ligeti’s Lontano wonderfully portrays the outward appearance of calm while panic and horror gnaw inside.

No music was a greater inspiration, though, than Brett Rosenberg’s soundtrack to the 2006 film, Half Light. While the more horrific music seemed to mirror some of the Penderecki pieces to great effect, the quieter more melodic passages were fantastic in helping me round out the character of Sarah. The heart-rending solo violin selection Girl in the Storm, for example, perfectly captures Sarah’s sense of loss and loneliness.

For those of us writers who use it, music can be a great motivator. I know if I’m having trouble getting in the mood of the story I can turn on the book’s playlist and the thoughts start flowing again. If you happen to be one of those who can’t write with the distraction of music, I urge you to try listening to some pieces to set your mood before you write. You may just be surprised at what springs into your mind. And onto your page.

Will Overby has spent 30 years in the boardrooms and glass offices of retail banking. Between dodging mergers and drafting policies he publishes novels. He and his wife live far from the corporate world in rural western Kentucky. They have two grown children, a dog, and a menagerie of cats. A graduate of Indiana University, Will is an avid Hoosiers football fan. Connect with Will on his website, www.willoverby.com, on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.