Nightmare Fuel / Aphex Twin

I... WANT YOUR SOUUUUUUUL!
I... WILL EAT YOUR SOUUUUUUUL!

Aphex Twin: Strange, brilliant, and a master of scaring the hell out of people.

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Selected Ambient Works Vol. II

• Radiator, a disjointed, almost jaunty tune that genuinely does feel like it belongs in the soundtrack of some prestige psychological thriller. It somehow perfectly encapsulates the feeling of being watched and stalked. Did we mention this is only the second track on the album? It is thankfully followed by the Sweet Dreams Fuel that is "Rhubarb."
• White Blur 1, an unsettling haphazard mishmash of bell noises, creepy rumbling, and reverberating vocal samples. Thank god it's only 3 minutes as opposed to the usual 5-8.
• White Blur 2 takes this up to eleven, consisting of nothing but a looped psychedelic riff interspersed by a creepy distorted laugh and occasional muted whispers, it keeps going like this for 11 minutes. You could've stuck it in a Yume Nikki level and nobody would be able to tell the difference.
• Hankie takes that creepiness of tracks like Spots, mentioned below, and takes a bigger step further with atonal, almost screechy synth strings and a mood that feels like a poltergeist exorcism Gone Horribly Wrong.
• Grey Stripe is a piece that starts out with piercing wind sounding like it's blowing across a desolate wasteland, while punctuated with ghostly wails and moans. Then the wails become more piercing, and are joined by odd sci-fi sound effects, and then metal crashing and shrieks take over. A noise that sounds like a very distorted chainsaw comes in, and the track ends on beeping sci-fi noises. It's a mix of sounds that you'd expect coming from a haunted house or in an old-sci fi/horror movie.
• Window Sill, which is subtly off and unnerving in a hard-to-explain way.
• Many of the tracks are quite akin to something out of Silent Hill. Case in point, Grass.
• Interestingly, most of the creepy tracks are the ones related to nature; Grass, Mould, Tree...
• Stone In Focus, which is focused around bass-heavy rumbling and surprisingly tonal synth wash while featuring a clock's ticking noises playing in the background and some creepy synth melodies throughout the entire track. It's like a darker cousin to Rhubarb, and it sounds like "floating out in deep space without any way to return home".
• Spots is a creepy Drone of Dread with some voices heard in the background. Creepy by itself, but then you find out what Word of God says those voices are.
  "Someone I used to know, you know who you are, worked as a cleaner in a police station and kindly pinched me a police interview tape. It was with a woman who murdered her husband, it's the background audio in this track."
• And then there's the final track, "Matchsticks" - wailing, echoing synths that push Drone of Dread BEYOND eleven. This is considered to be the most haunting track on the entire album, which is saying a hell of a lot given what's already been listed.
• Several unreleased Selected Ambient Works Volume II tracks:
  • Stabbing Interview appears to be an earlier version of "Spots" from the actual album, but with even MORE echo, disturbing noises and muffled human screaming. It sounds like it's rotting and falling apart!
  • Chopped F Beginning is a drone-focused track which is very akin to the official soundtrack of Half-Life.
  • If White Blur 2 isn't scary enough, think again. Th1 (evnslower) is downright even worse than the penultimate track itself. It's filled with abrasive drones which sounds like if you're a Sole Survivor of an Arctic exploration gone wrong with no way to return home.

...I Care Because You Do

• The album cover itself is a painting of James giving an unnerving smile.
• Come On You Slags! has an exceptionally creepy, anxious main melody.

Richard D. James Album

• Like the album preceding it, this one features James' signature Slasher Smile, except now it is 1) combined with a Kubrick Stare, and 2) an actual photograph!
• The intro to Milkman is a garbled recording of a man speaking in what sounds like a foreign language. It turns out it's English, but run through a ring modulator to make it unintelligible. Until one YouTuber decoded it. (Warning: NSFW and Nausea Fuel, with a side of Cluster F-Bomb.)
  "It popped out like a motherfucker; you should have seen the git. He screamed and he winced, and his eyeball, it... I remember I was, like, fucking his eye up. And I, I thought, Shit, I'd fucking better not press too hard with my fucking two-inch hard cock. So it quivered on it, it dripped down my fucking cock. and I thought, That's good, and I swear to myself, That's fucking good."
  • David Firth's fanmade music video for the song takes it to a whole new level, as it features a deformed lunatic who beheads the titular character, fondles his corpse, goes on a rampage by slaughtering everyone within the neighborhood, guns down the milk man's wife and does the same to her husband. To make things even worse, her son shows up with a horrified expression... only to get shot by the said lunatic, right before he turns the gun to himself (presumably out of guilt for his actions).

"Come To Daddy"

• The video (pictured above), once described by Dave Grohl as "the most terrifying music video ever", follows a group of children. Not just any children, though — each one of their faces is replaced by the identical grinning visage of Richard D. James. They terrorize a desolate industrial wasteland whilst a distorted face (belonging to James) on a TV howls about how he wants your soul. The most memorable aspect of the video, however, has to be the tall, white, skinny, demonic thing that crawls out of the TV at the song's climax and screams in an old lady's face.
  • In fact, the demon served as the inspiration for Asura.
• The brief non-song segment in the video where the song stops entirely to couple slow-mo footage of the children skipping and lullaby music is bound to have an eerie effect.
• Those same smiling kids are depicted on the song's single cover, although some of the fear is alleviated once you see the kid on the far left doing part of the Bloods gang sign.
• Not to mention the song itself contains a 34-second long anguished scream from the very depths of Hell.

"Windowlicker"

• Windowlicker isn't quite as scary as "Come to Daddy," but it's still freaky in its own way. In probably one of the biggest examples of Fan Disservice in music video history, the video is full of scantily-clad women...that all have Richard's smiling face pasted onto them. Plus there's another woman in the video who is horrifically ugly with a deformed, bucktoothed face that inspired an equally eerie sketch by H. R. Giger.
  • Bennett the Sage was so creeped out by the video that he placed it at #1 on his list of the Top 10 WTF Music Videos:
    Hey, wanna never sleep again? Too late!
• Equation, off the "Windowlicker" single, has become more well-known for its Easter egg than the actual music. Near the end of the song, the music is taken over by a series of noise sweeps. Feed that noise through a logarithmic spectrogram, and you get this distorted image of a smiling Richard, fittingly nicknamed the "Demon Face".
  • What's even weirder is amidst the general atmosphere of noise, at around the 5:24 mark—right before the Demon Face appears—there's a sound that's eerily similar to a little girl moaning.

drukQs

• Gwarek2 is a highly unsettling musique concrète piece that was used in the credits of Rubber Johnny to make an already eerie shot gazing out of a window into a barely-lit night even creepier.
• Gwely Mernans, a track full of dark rumbling noises and atonal piano pads playing in the background. What's even more creepy about it, beyond it giving off this overwhelming sense of dread and paranoia, is that its title is Cornish for "death bed".
• The spoken-word interlude Aussois, a random excerpt of what sounds like an innocent conversation between two kids across the room from the microphone. The lack of context to what they're talking about (assuming that they're talking about a dance), the poor sound quality, and the fact that the audio just stops and goes completely silent for 6 seconds...

Other Releases

• This promo video for 26 Mixes for Cash. It's completely silent and features a series of pictures of Richard with the face of each picture morphing into the next. The faces get more and more disturbing as the video goes on (including the aforementioned faces from Windowlicker, I Care Because You Do, and Richard D. James Album).
• At some point, Richard was commissioned to write a song for a Virgin Airlines commercial, and he responded with Aphex Airlines, 6 minutes of abrasive noise. While he likened it to the sound of a jet engine during takeoff, Virgin rejected it on the grounds of it sounding like a plane crash.
• At The Heart of It All, Aphex Twin's Contribution to Nine Inch Nail's remix album Further Down The Spiral, is a gritty, industrial track that feels unnerving in how simply hopeless and desolate it feels.
• 13 Barbarella On Microdots is pretty unsettling, which sounds like the auditory equivalent of running away from a killer armed with an axe in a dark forest, ready to chop you down to pieces.
• Rubber Johnny — A short film created by Cunningham over three years using several Aphex tracks that stars a deformed teenager in a wheelchair who can twist his body to an inhuman degree. Think Eraserhead set to a rave track.
  • The short film originally existed as a 30-second commercial for Drukqs (Cunningham liked the idea so much that he decided to expand it) that runs on Nothing Is Scarier, as there's no context given for the visuals, and it's not even labeled as an Aphex Twin commercial until the final moments.
  • The short film's DVD comes with a 42-page book containing photos of the film's protagonist Johnny that portray him as less of a human and more of a horrific, twisting, somewhat humanoid mass of skin and flesh. Here's a peek at what's inside. Warning: absolutely NSFW!

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