This machine is there to please.

I'm obsessed with Porcupine Tree's album In Absentia. It kind of started with Dirty Knobs, actually -- okay, it started with Warren Ellis. 

Warren Ellis posted a link on his blog to an album... well, he put it best: "An eight-hour piece of ambient drone music broken into thirteen chapters. The album’s name, FIELD RECORDINGS FROM THE EDGE OF HELL, is such a perfectly fitting descriptor of the sound that I have little more to add. I’m only 90 minutes in and I swear I can hear organs playing from inside a pit." 

Field Recordings from the Edge of Hell, by Dirty Knobs, put me on the track of more unsettling ambient music. There were so many things about that appealed to me: beyond the obvious appeal to my morbid instincts, it also reminded me, in its documentary presentation of indescribable and inscrutable darkness, of the House of Leaves. Which is totally the kind of thing that makes my brain all wet and spicy. So when Boyfriend gave me a bunch of albums by his new favorite band, Porcupine Tree, and I discovered that they were to varying degrees ambient and creepifying, I was delighted. (It helped that I was in a play at the time that was also morbid and strange, about which I may expound further at some later point.) 

So In Absentia was from a period when they'd moved away from straight-up ambient, more towards a kind of prog-metal-ambient mutant beast thing? And there's murder and mutilation in there, though it's not necessarily obvious all the time. My favorite track is probably "Gravity Eyelids," which segues right into the instrumental "Wedding Nails." The former is as tender and delicate a song about molesting someone as has probably ever been written, but of course it's also got a thick, greasy layer of awfulness right underneath this film of beauty. Yearning and desire and hope and sorrow and fear all at once. And then "Wedding Nails" is a piece that sounds to me as much like murdering someone can be and still be music. It ends with this amazing ambient section, like a breath held in a cavernous place.

I'm partial to Fear of a Blank Planet as well, though that one is creepy in a less visceral, more civilized way. Still unsettling, but it has more to do with suburban alienation and teenage hopelessness and angst than, you know, murder and madness. I do recommend the band in general, though, for those times when you want something subtler than Rob Zombie but more intellectually disturbing.