The Guardian: Goth and metal stars select the scariest music ever made

Forget the Monster Mash. For the ultimate Halloween playlist, reach for horror soundtracks, 1940s kids’ music and Russian darkwave – all chosen by Sunn O))), Creeper, Diamanda Galás and more

Diamanda Galás

Iannis Xenakis – Mycenae-Alpha (1978)

This is the first sound work Xenakis created for the Upic computerised composition tool he developed to turn hand drawings into electronic music. As a Greek resistance fighter, he had half his face blown apart by shrapnel and was imprisoned many times. His music is ferocious and difficult to perform but extremely innovative.

The violence in Mycenae-Alpha attracted me instantly. I realised the composer was a master warrior who used music as a flight of harpoons. I had been working on my first vocal pieces and had already performed Wild Women with Steak-knives (the Homicidal Love Song for Solo Scream) [which appeared on Galás’s 1982 debut The Litanies of Satan], so this work was a confirmation that I was headed in the right direction. An experimental singer needs to have 400 screams at her disposal, so Mycenae-Alpha can be a compositional model.

The Mycenaeans were a Greek warrior elite. Their strategy in warfare was unparalleled and their massive walls and architecture were so formidable as to imagine their creation by the hand of a Cyclops. Mycenae-Alpha is as terrifying as the drawings from the giant hand that composed it.

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