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The Chronicle Review Corner

So this is about the scariest collection of tracks we have ever listened to, the music for a yet-to-be-made horror film that explores the agony of eternal damnation in such graphic detail that audiences faint.

On the other hand, it’s a startling recording of the organ, which is treated more as a synthesiser to create sound and mood using taped playbacks.

“Les ombres du Fantôme” is an exploration of Gaston Leroux’s novel “Le Fantôme de l’Opéra” (1910) through 14 improvisations, recorded using the organs of Coventry and Arundel cathedrals, accompanied by soprano voice and saxophone/bass clarinet, and electronics. It’s an impressive display of the power and flexibility of a church organ, a long, long way from “Jerusalem”. (The story: disfigured Erik lives beneath the opera house and becomes fixated on soprano Christine. His abduction of her leads to a search-and-rescue operation).

Opener “The ghost with the death’s head” is about as traditional as it gets, staccato blasts from the organ that are only vaguely unsettling, but gradually fading into a pulsing ambient sound, to our ears a nod at what is usually expected from a church organ before the music parts company with that norm and ventures into territories new. Say the sleeve notes: “The reverberation of the organ welcomes other organs from different positions … filling the textural space”.

At first play we were worried it would tail off into normal organ music merely made unpleasant to listen to but “You must love me”, track two, was reassuringly out there, the opening more like electronica than organ (for chunks of the album you’d be hard pressed to say “ah, organ”), an eerie music for the spheres in a rather disconcerting sci-fi movie.

“The angels wept tonight” on the other hand is a rather glorious ambient tune “a long spectral piece figuring the noumenal (possessing the character of real rather than phenomenal existence) qualities of the angels that listen to Christine singing,” say the notes.

You’d be hard pressed to guess it was organ and even more hard pressed to say it was a real organ — it was recorded via microphones directed at the high corners of Coventry Cathedral’s West Screen area, time-stretched to align with the Arundel organ. The high pitched intro might have your ASMR kick in but it’s a strangely compulsive sound. Nine minutes long, too, and it starts off a section of ambience that is very different to anything you have heard before.

“At the graveyard in Perros-Guirec” is suitably ominous. Layers of voice and horn are added, the production then played back in two parallel layers on a sampler; one layer started in tune and descended by an octave over the duration of the piece as if being slowly lowered into the grave.

“The Chandelier” and “Masked ball” see a return to a sound that is recognisably organ, the first loud and dramatic, the second eerie and more atmospheric.

Creepiest track is maybe “Christine Christine”, reminiscent of the eerie noise at the start of ELO’s “Fire On High,” just scarier.