Yikes…

Belgian band Univers Zero popularized integrating chamber music with progressive rock to create complex, often harrowing, and ultimately rewarding musical compositions. Part of the Rock In Opposition (RIO) movement in the late 1970s that rallied against the popular music of the day, the band took the standard guitar, bass, keyboards, drums paradigm and infused it with percussion, strings, and woodwinds to create challenging avant-garde pieces that often felt cohesively discordant and disturbingly compelling.

And with that maybe all the women left the room; let’s just say the wet t-shirt contest on the Prog Rock Cruise is something entirely off-putting and wholly other…

I’ve always been mesmerized by Univers Zero’s magnificent 1979 album Heresie, a 51-minute, three track odyssey into the supernatural and the macabre. Pretty much any track (or the entire album) could make our list of Buttkickin’ Halloween Songs, but for the sake of time I’ll go with the opening cut La Faulx. Translated from the French phrase for “The Scythe”, this epic 25-minute piece is utterly maddening, totally creepy, and is the musical embodiment of the soul being trapped in a maelstrom of the darkest, most terrifying uncertainty. Like a nightmare that doesn’t seem to want to end, ever.

The scythe is easily recognizable as the totem of the Grim Reaper, and while listening to La Faulx I immediately picture soul in a state of mortal flux. This is the wail of the dying man, or the man on the verge of mortality. Lacking a central motivic theme upon which to grasp, his soul is left to the capricious whims of Death’s touch. Heck, the more I think about it, it would make a killer soundtrack to a modern dance reinterpretation of “An Occurrence At Owl Creek”. Or maybe even “Jacob’s Ladder”. Same story, really. Oops spoilers…

Anyway check La Faulx out, let it play on and seep into your mind and your soul and become a porous, Schrodinger’s cat-like being of terrifyingly indefinite mortality for 25 minutes. Oh, and make sure you bring candy!