SpookyBytes: A Transcendental Halloween Playlist
30 pieces of candy for your trick-or-treating
“And whosoever shall be found / Without the soul for getting down / Must stand and face the hounds of hell / And rot inside a corpse’s shell”
So wrote Rob Temperton in a NYC cab en route to the final recording session for “Thriller”, and so you shall do as he commands. There is no holiday better for getting down and dirty with your scary self than All Hallows’ Eve, and we here at SoundBytes are frightfully aware. Mike and I decided it was the perfect time to set the mood for your perfect Halloween party with some all-out spooky jams. We’ll start you off with a bang, then lead you into the realm of the weird and the unacceptable as we fill your ears with tracks new and old, familiar and unfamiliar, from impossibly famous superstars and artists you’ve never heard of at all.
Enter if you dare, through the front door of Rihanna’s “Mad House” and proceed with caution or let the rhythm possess you through our spell-binding start. Ghouls and goblins like Crookers and Lil Wayne lurk in the shadows and Lady Gaga is in the bathroom playing “Bloody Mary”, while a “She Wolf” is locked away. Seeking “Stranger Things”, advance to the Upside-Down in a “Mad World” dominated by electronic music and the synth monsters created by Zhu, Polo & Pan, and Kavinsky. You’ll be joined by a “Haunted” Beyoncé and “Only You” have the skeleton key to escape back to reality. Classical music surrounds you and you catch sight of The Police, but as the chords trend eerie, the nightmare continues. A “Psycho Killer”, “Evil Friends”, and “Zombies” still separate you from the credits to our soundtrack.
This playlist was vaulted into reality when Kim Petras, the transgender German goth pop mistress, released a Halloween-themed mixtape this month (featuring input from the Mistress of Darkness, Elvira) with acid bangers and trance grooves that electrify and terrify in the same sound wave. That sound needed to be encompassed in a compact, digestible playlist filled with all the strangest shit from our favorite artists like Childish Gambino, Jefferson Airplane, Portugal. The Man and more.
The origins of Halloween are unearthed in the roots of the Common Era, 2000 years deep on Samhain, the ancient festival celebrated by the Celts on October 31st to mark the beginning of their calendar year in the land we know as Ireland & the UK today. Believing they were reunited with the ghosts of the dead, they turned an ear to the soil, listening for prophecies, as the harvest was ending and the long, unforgiving winter was on its way. With SpookyBytes, we invite you to turn your ear to the lesser-known sounds of the season; hand-picking a playlist for the pumpkin patch or pregame. We hope you find it sonically supernatural.
