In honor of Halloween, I'm guiding your attention to sound scape creation artist, SEHT. A good Halloween vibe (at least for me) relies heavily on atmosphere. From the abundance of haunt-related decoration to the increasingly chilly weather, it isn't Halloween if it doesn't feel spooky. When I was a boy, I paid $4 at Osco Drug in Wichita for a cassette tape called "Spooky Sounds of the Dark." On October nights, I would play it to help me get into the Halloween spirit and generally scare the shit out of myself (I was 9). The tape was 90 minutes of low-budget chain jangling, cat shrieking, howling, and a few dead moments when there was little more than a creaky gate and leaves rustling on a footpath. But it was these hollow scenes that truly made my ears tingle. Natural sounds layered in an unnatural way, grouped to create a mood, can bring to the listener the audio equivalent of metaphor. One might approach SEHT in a similar way as I did to the four-dollar cassette of spooky sounds: to transcend a normal evening in the pursuit of atmosphere, to create a mood; to give yourself chills.
SEHT is the result of one man (Stephen Clover, ex The Stumps) taking his sweet time, but being meticulous. Every blip comes in right where it should, just as all those soft waves of reverb meander for the perfect length. There are probably countless technical terms for what Clover is doing on his SEHT albums (there are four and a couple EPs that I'm aware of), and honestly I feel a little out of my depth writing about music in the digital realm. But as a long-time fan of ambient and electronic, I can tell you it's really neither of these. For one, SEHT rarely puts a beat into his tracks (removing it from the electronica genre), and to the best of my knowledge he doesn't use animal sounds as samples (which pretty much rules out ambient as its classification). Listening to SEHT is less like watching fireworks as it is like watching the tide go out: the commotion is over, and each wave lumbers into itself before drifting back toward the horizon (the track below hopefully illustrates this, but taking one song out of a SEHT album is like taking a 3x5 snapshot of the Grand Canyon--it just doesn't capture the overwhelming expanse).
SEHT is pensive, but confident; self-aware without being pretentious. One may find it relaxing, but I don't think you'll be able to sleep to it. It's as if there is something troubling beneath the wavering hum and low, on-going drone. Perhaps it is the mood it creates, but at times listening to it gives me shivers and sends my head spinning around to see if someone (or some thing) is lurking behind me.
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