Buttkickin' Halloween Songs: "Calliope" - Nox Arcana (2006)

What, no lyrics? You guessed right Hokeyfolks, today we are featuring our first of what will probably be a few instrumentals this year. After all, there’s nothing like some creepy ambient music to scratch that foreboding nighttime itch. And we plan to yield to that desire today.

So let’s kick things off with Calliope from the dark classical/ambient project Nox Arcana. The song hearkens back to their 2006 album Carnival of Lost Souls, which has zero to do with gloriously bonkers late 60s independent horror movie of the same name and is apparently a take on the great Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes.

I’ll leave all the storyline summations to the etheric wisps of digital rain and turn back to the song itself, which orbits around a titular pipe organ, welcoming us to some nighttime carnival that maybe we’ve never seen before but somehow has always been there.

Between the mournful bells and the constant giggling from an unseen child, Calliope lures and traps us inside its lurid enticements. A recurring and paralyzing nightmare, yes, but one we recall only in the dreaming world. The carnival and memories of it dissipate come daylight. Nothing remains, save for a vague, unsettling intangibility that never really goes away…