Xela — Halloween/Suspira

Xela returns with a Halloween treat after the exellent The Dead Sea with two little creepy wonders on this 7". Re-imagine of both John Carpenter’s main theme for Halloween and The mighty Goblin’s main theme for Dario Argento’s Suspira. He really does manage to do wonders with both tracks making them wholly Xela tracks, replaying them in such a clever and inventive way.

Halloween which starts of with sinister muffled tones and late night sleeping tones. Almost one can imagine some one slumbering in a hummock, but before you get too conformable a buzzing feedback chug drifts in and out - almost like are sleeper is starting to have bad dreams. Then the familiar main Halloween melody appears reborn in muffled electro xylophone which has a child’s musicbox vibe. One can almost picture the once sleeping hummock victim falling bloody to the floor or maybe this is the soundtrack to a cut scene from the begin of Carpenter’s Halloween, where the young Michael Myers has strange psychedelic, bloodsplattered, dreams, just after he has killed his sister.

On the flip side we have Susperia – it starts off again with abused music box vibe and rhythmic clatter. Before long the familiar and much loved melody drops in, but it feels more strangely dreamy and muffled than the original- even having something of a muffled almost black metal heart about it in the production. Before long the melody disappears into mountains of fuzzed guitar for a moment or two, before the main melody kicks back in once more feeling rather sharp and brittle, before once more disappearing off into a cloud of feedback as the track ends.

Xela has really capture with this release how cover version should be done, i.e. make them your own and twist them out of shape, highlighting different musical elements. It would be great to see Xela do a whole album of horror soundtrack covers, to see what odd and bizarre shapes, he can twist other known tunes into. This can be ordered direct from the label here and one or two other places, but act fast as this is only ltd to 250 copies.