Taking the elevator down
Writing an "Inferno" concept album that isn't too dark or creepy
TLDR: A longer reflection with liner notes, and three new tracks.
When I became (in relatively short order) captivated by Dante’s Purgatorio and by synthwave music in 2021, I attempted to write and produce a concept album based on it under the artist name Dante 1981. Before I was even finished, I had people asking me if I was going to try and do separate albums for the other two parts of the Comedia. Well, sure, I guess. The Paradiso follow-up almost wrote itself, but I’ve been anxious and hesitant to start on the third part (or the first part really), and you’ll see why soon.
First of all, do I really want to spend the better part of the year trying to make art inspired by hell? Uhhhh, not really. As much as I’m a sucker for a lot of sad and melancholy music, I’m rather allergic to anger and despair.
Second, while Purgatorio is criminally underrated, half the high school kid’s in America have been assigned to read parts of Inferno, often completely missing the point along the way. (I know I did.)
Do we really need another Inferno concept album? (Probably not)
Thirdly, this is all ready well-worn ground. And I mean, REALLY well-worn. By whom? Metal bands of course! Goodness sakes, does the world really need another Inferno concept album? It would seem that death metal bands have this covered ten or maybe even a hundred times over. Just a quick search brought up the following wall of album covers.
Now, granted, most of these aren’t really based on anything from Dante besides the little map of the nine circles in the appendix. The few that are, well “loosely” is the adverb you’re looking for. It’s hard to tell though when not only are the lyrics indiscernible most of the time (sorry Ryan!), but also the names of the bands themselves.
So there are at least three great reasons not to bother making an Inferno synthwave album. But they are all of them overruled by… my own innate completionism! I MUST finish this project! I MUST tie up the loose ends! I cannot just let this trilogy sit two-thirds the way finished for all eternity!
But what to do? I really don’t want to produce dark or creepy music. I don’t want write music about hell, not even in a cautionary way. So how can I approach this?
Well, taking a cue from C.S. Lewis’s idea that hell is “locked from the inside”, I thought of how when one is enslaved by sin (in life), one is already receiving the punishment for that sin right now, to some degree. Sin is it’s own reward. In Dante’s imagination, each part of hell is filled with people who are stuck in their favorite besetting sin, though revealed for what it is in the heart and no longer clothed in pleasure or even utility.
I decided to follow suit and imagine the different levels as being “stuck” in a particular place, and then approaching it from an ironic or even humorous way. At the end of the day it’s an excuse to use the medium of music to throw something against the wall and see what sticks. I want to try to address serious topics that that are thought-provoking, but not grotesque. What does that look like? I’m still working it out, but here are the mostly-finished results of the first three tracks, after the straight-forward introduction I put together a year ago.
Limbo: What if hell was like being stuck playing unresolved Wagnerian diminished chords all day?
Anyone who has ever taken a music history course in college has probably had to study the opening of Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. If it was a theory class, you probably had an assignment where you were required to circle the infamous “Tristan chord” in the score. I’m not making this up! It even has it’s own Wikipedia entry. I looked back through my old university textbooks and this cropped up in nearly every one. Anyway, the point is that Wagner used a series of high-tension, unresolved diminished chords and he goes on and on and never resolves them. Well, he does sometimes, but JUST for half a beat before moving on. Anyone hoping for a nice fat V-I is gonna be driven completely nuts before the first intermission.
In the first circle of Inferno, Dante meets the virtuous pagans. They were truly the best people (without Christ) and in the afterlife they get what they believed was the best place, the Elysian Fields of myth. Except that it turns out the Elysian Fields are kinda “meh”. They are drab, boring, and lifeless. It’s inhabitants are spared the tortures of the fires below, but it’s not really much of an improvement. They are still stuck in a place of longing for God and of deep sadness and incompleteness.
I tried to put these two things together in this rather atmospheric echo of Wagner.
Lust: What if hell was being forced to listen to the Careless Whisper saxophone solo on repeat forever?
Watch any movie or TV show from the 1980s and you will know immediately when the love-interest woman guest star for that episode walked into the room. They were always accompanied by a sultry saxophone in the score. No motif is more cliché and no song captured it better than George Michael’s 1984 pop hit Careless Whisper. The image above is from the infamous Sexy Sax Man prank, where a shirtless dude walked around shopping malls and grocery stores constantly playing the Careless Whisper saxophone solo until being tackled by security guards. It was one of the first viral comedy videos on YouTube way back in the day and it still holds up.
That was my inspiration. I used the chord progression for Careless Whisper, played on a really cheesy sounding Yamaha DX7 electric piano patch. Then, I chopped up several (unrelated) saxophone riffs into a sampler and made several new melodies from the pieces. It’s kind of like a sexy elevator music broken record, drenched in shimmer reverb. If I had added a phaser to the master bus, it would probably become full strength vaporwave.
Consumption: What if hell was being stuck at a psytrance festival?
I’ve had people ask me that, since I enjoy electronic music like trance, have I ever been to a rave before? The answer is no, and that’s unlikely to change. It doesn’t help that I live in the middle of nowhere and if I wanted to go to a club or festival with trance music, I’d have to drive six hours to Seattle when hear Paul Van Dyke was in town or something. Also, what’s the point if you are committed to not consuming recreational drugs like MDMA or shrooms? One might as well just listen on a nice set of headphones at home and enjoy the sonic qualities.
So this is really just my attempt to make a track in the “psytrance” sub-genre. Most psytrance tracks contain some kind of meditative spoken word sound-byte during a break in the middle. This one includes a reading from the Greek NT of Revelation 18:23, which translates as:
Your merchants were the world’s important people.
By your pharmakeia all the nations were led astray.
That word “pharmakeia” is often translated as “sorcery” or “magic spells”, but it’s also where we get our word “pharmaceutical”. So, comfort drugs leading people astray? Sounds like something worth being wary of today. This could just as likely be sugar or video reels, or anything else we consume that lulls us to sleep spiritually. We don’t need more/different drugs to wake up. We need to hear the voice of God.
For the acid line chord progression on this one, I adapted an old favorite classical guitar etude from my college days into 4/4 time - Leo Brouwer’s Simple Study #6, which, incidentally was sitting on the same bookshelf as the Wagner score mentioned earlier.
So is this all a bit of a stretch? Probably. I’m going to keep going to the end regardless and see how it turns out! Thanks for checking in.
-Matt