Occasionally, we at The Bird on Fire are gifted with contributions from guest bloggers. One of our favorite guests is the apparently mild-mannered Mr. Hesson from the Math Department. We find Mr. Hesson has many layers and many passions. He shares with us here his interest in a particularly uneasy music genre.
By Middle-Upper School Mathematics Teacher Mr. Eric Hesson
In some small way, I believe that an essential part of the modern human experience is our attraction to fear. As much as we may hate the feeling, we seem to delight in confronting it on our own terms. Art and entertainment has thus been fashioned to sate this hunger, to deliver an experience of fear within the bounds of relative safety. This is seen most obviously in horror, a genre typified by portrayals of intense shock and terror. But there is also art which incorporates a more subdued sort of fear. A muted dread, a slow suspense, a gentle lacing of anxiety into the mundane. This is the aesthetic I wish to explore here – a style in art (and particularly music) which I truly love – an aesthetic of paranoia.
Paranoia is an omnidirectional fear – a fear of everyone and everything, of danger lurking around every corner. But since it is diffused so broadly, its potency can be diluted, allowing it to fade into the background. Paranoid art uses fear in this way – as a constant, a ubiquitous tonal center. While horror juxtaposes extremes of tension and release, paranoid art marries the two, weaving tension in consistently with the calm. It makes the fear inescapable, but dials down its intensity so it can be appreciated merely as ambiance.
In certain eras in recent history, an aesthetic of paranoia has found its way into mainstream popular culture, driven perhaps by sociopolitical unrest or widespread fear of the future. The 1990s were one such time. As the decade went on and the millennium drew closer, fear seemed to creep into the zeitgeist more and more – fear of the rapid transformation of society via computers and the internet, fear of the year 2000, fear of catastrophe and apocalypse. Many films and series produced at the time echoed this anxiety, perhaps most notably The X-Files. Its opening credits sequence is a perfect encapsulation of 90s paranoia.
We see the same kind of paranoid futurism in much of the electronic music produced in this era. Records by The Orb, Meat Beat Manifesto, The Future Sound of London and others leaned into a dark, anxious tech-noir aesthetic, reflecting both the excitement and the fear surrounding rapid technological growth.
To this day, the paranoid aesthetic continues to thrive in electronic music. I find it works especially well within the realm of ambient techno, a genre characterized by hypnotic rhythms and atmospheric soundscapes. While the simple, repetitive beats in these tracks create a bedrock of comfort, paranoid vibes can be woven into the mix through the pads, reverberations, arpeggios and melodic loops.
This is the style that appeals to me the most – a manifestation of paranoia within an atmosphere of relative calm; a subtle soundscape suffused with creeping dread. I find this muted, surface-level exploration of fear to be incredibly captivating. Indeed, it gives me a sense of confidence – it reflects the anxiety I experience in my daily life, but in a way that is safe, comfortable, easy. It makes the anxiety feel less oppressive by recontextualizing it as a part of something beautiful.