Peter Hammill (1974) Gog/Magog (In Bromine Chambers) - LOST70sGEMS

The two-part song starts with some haunting organs and springy bass pluck sliding in on top of it as well as some drums rattling all around it. The creepiness is immediate as Hammill gets his cue wrong and we hear start the line twice, as he reveals 'some have me Satan, others have me..GOG!' The bizarre cadence that follows no accessible melody but instead seems to follow a more theatrical monologue as Hammill's voice rises with the droning church organ, soon some hyperspatial  reverbs animate his voice to demonic proportions as his vocal takes on more resonance. He pushes his voice to a croaky raw as he rails about the 'corridors of power'. His voice increases in electronic processing, cascading in terse static yelps, the dreaded organ sound just keeps searching in the background. By four minutes in I am completely spooked as Hammill sings with a very pronounced phasing and chorusing that echoes back in response, it's chaotic as the bombastic drums add more violence to this earth flattening composition. His strange (there's no other way to put it) vocal mannerisms are so draconian, he belts intentionally with little breath to gain a ragged, strained muster to it, embodying that of a coiled beast, or a werewolf undergoing some sort of transformation. The bass player plucks some nice notes before the track soon transitions with the drums heavily panned back and forth.


We're now thankfully it seems in Magog, the musique concrete half of the composition, but things are only about to get scarier and more ingenious in their ability to unnerve you with just the slightest of everyday objects and production technique. There is a whirring bass signal, the panned drums somehow as if by Magick transform into some more ordinary clutter sounds, still oscillating as does something dissonant like a alien radio or a Metalic organ. An armchair creaks, as do several other objects which glow with an electronic whoosh as they rattle back and forth.
Some timbales rustle like wind chimes, a foghorn briefly toots its horn (I think that's what it is)as more tapping on planks of wood or some sort of surface pan back and forth veering from right to left channel endlessly. 

 It's like a haunted house effect but a spatial audio version and far more terrifying, I propose listening to this in the dark with a pair of decent headphones in the dark should become a true Halloween custom, if you dare! The tapping could either be a ball bouncing down some stairs, or the devil at this point..and I continue to hear some sort of horn you hear on cruise ships but that could just be me. 

Some faint industrial sound effects are in the background, either recordings of a steam train chugging or the heavily treated clanging of a factory floor, who can trust their ears at this point.
There are now all kinds of soundings peeking out from the depths, a strange spring, some sawing sounds, and the rumble and phasing of an echoplex and some of it's feedback as it crackles away like cockroaches on flypaper. I hear a bell toll, probably the clearest sound so far and most recognizable as a brooding bout of bass heavy noise rumbles and Hammill begins to throat yodel like a 12th century monk in the dark caverns of a well as the bell is struck with immediacy and panic like a village being warned of an incoming danger. 

As he warbles a second voice in a very distorted filter chants intelligible incantations; the filter is incredibly crackled, electronically rendered and has that thin tinny, distant tone you would get from a megaphone. A mix of modern and old as the disembodied voice sounds like some evil overlord sending a warning, odd collages of sound continue in the background full of vibrations and white noise, once recorded sounds now some mangled wall of sound transformed from its original audio source as another wooden or steel object is dropped into something hollow to give a rippling 'plop', maybe 'ball in a cup', everyone's favourite pastime!

We get invaded by a litany of cracks like pots and pans being played come across as the static continues to oscillate and undulate into something more smoother, and audio waves rise in the mix to a more mellifluous whole. Soon some reverse echoed gongs, flexatones and pots and pans sear across the mix along with the introduction of a saw at one point, the wobbly signals seem to coalesce and provide a seeming score from all this before abruptly ending and we get more goofy percussion and bird whistles. The pulsing sound never goes away, the soup of sound keeps burrowing away into our ears, it becomes an elephantine bray towards the end as more clear-cut objects beak through. The delay continually adds a computerised tremolo and the frequent cracks of objects make for an audial nightmare bar none.