10 Spooky Scary Electronic Albums for Halloween Time

The Sight Below
It All Falls Apart

One of the least beat-driven artists on this list, Seattle-via-New York producer The Sight Below is a master at conjuring an unsettling, suspenseful sound that’s heavily influenced by shoegaze, drone, and ambient techno. The few-and-far-between beats on this album are soft, they’re slow, and have a very hypnotic quality to them. The synthesizers on this album have a bevy of plugins on them to make the sound of this LP airy and numbing. The massive presentation of this album makes it a pretty grand, cinematic experience for the hour that it lasts.

Though easily the least “dance music” album on this list, It All Falls Apart is an engaging, amazingly-produced hour of music that’s just as unsettling as it is blissful.

(Choice Cuts: Through the Gaps in the Land, Burn Me Out from the Inside, Stagger)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05GFHvH6I6A

Clams Casino
Instrumentals

Clams Casino is one of the most in-demand producers in hip-hop music, and listening to any of his free instrumental tapes, it’s easy to see why. The dude has an amazing ear for foggy, hazed-out beats that, while often times being catchy as hell, still maintain an infectiously ominous quality to them. While all of Clams Casino’s instrumental tapes are great and worth listening to, we have to give it up to his debut tape, Instrumentals, for containing some of the most intoxicating songs he’s ever produced.

From the freaky chopped-and-looped singing on All I Need to the utterly strange sound palette on Brainwashed By London, Instrumentals still holds its own as one of the most singular and heady instrumental hip-hop mixtapes released this decade.

(Choice Cuts: All I Need, Illest Alive, What You Doin’)

Daftside
Random Access Memories Memories

Still one of the most unique and WTF electronic music projects we’ve seen in the past handful of years, Random Access Memories Memories is a song-for-song remix album of the latest Daft Punk album, Random Access Memories, by Darkside, the collaborative experimental electronic music project of Dave Harrington and acclaimed producer and DJ Nicolas Jaar. Together, the duo, under the name Daftside, take Daft Punk’s bright, colorful tribute to music of the 1970s and 1980s, and completely change these songs, turning them instead into cold, uninviting microhouse tracks.

Songs like Get Lucky and Doin’ It Right – two songs that were originally uppity and cheery – are transformed into odd, dismal pieces of electronic music. Some songs on here definitely fit the Halloween mood more than others, but as a listening experience, it’s definitely worth checking out, if for no other reason than to see just how unsettling some of the most bubbly and fun songs of 2013 can become.

(Choice Cuts: Get Lucky, Give Life Back to Music, Instant Crush)

There you have it, our choices for ten albums to really kick-start your Halloween party. Honorable mentions go out to Lotic’s Heterocetera, one of the most sonically overwhelming electronic music EPs of 2015, oOoOO’s self-titled album, another great Halloween-y release from Tri Angle, Pharmakon’s Bestial Burden, a candidate for the most genuinely frightening electronic music album of last year, and Death Grips’ No Love Deep Web, which is a bit too heavy on the hip-hop side of things for us to consider it a solely electronic album, but still one of the darkest and most punishing albums of its kind.

Let us know below what your choices for essential Halloween electronic music are!