In Search of Unicorns: A Horror Soundtrack Mix by VÍZ
Hungarian Transylvanian artist Réka Csiszér aka VÍZ with an irresistible soundtrack for Halloween, following the release of her sumptuous second album ‘Danse Des Larmes‘ earlier this year.
Here we are again; the great Autumn maelstrom, the Winter prelude. The air now crisp, trees have shed their leaves, the wind gathers and rustles through your bones like some elemental form of post-Summer retribution. All those sunlit city breaks, pub garden jollies and poolside Aperols are a distant memory now, distilled into IG carousels you’ll never look at ever again. To everything there is a season.
With colder, more forbidding climes, there’s a compelling case for art which feels just right for this time of year, the kind of music and film which can accompany us, as we come to terms with shorter days, longer nights and the kind of weather that makes your face go numb. With Halloween right around the corner, it’s time for an odyssey into the eerie and the uncanny, courtesy of Hungarian Transylvanian artist Réka Csiszér aka VÍZ.
Born in East Germany, raised in Vienna but with roots in Hungary, Csiszér studied cello at the Vienna Conservatory, before obtaining a masters in vocal work and performance art from the Zurich University of the Arts. She’s pursued her own aesthetic path ever since, across prolific, multidisciplinary works which span live film soundtracks, theatre and film music, as well as her own intimate, eldritch output as VÍZ.
Gothic, lustrous and hallucinatory, her music as VÍZ sounds like the meeting point between Coil, Julee Cruise and some esoteric giallo soundtrack. Influenced by Transylvanian folklore, noise music, science fiction, horror and the avant-garde, Csiszér contends with ideas surrounding memory, trauma and identity, creating a world as dark and unearthly as it is breathtakingly beautiful.
Earlier this year, Csiszér released her second solo album as VÍZ entitled ‘Danse Des Larmes’ via cult Greek label Heat Crimes. Inspired by the concept of ‘Eastern European melancholy’, it’s a phantasmal masterwork of creeping drone, sleek synthesis and elegiac vocals. On ‘Vali 2.0’, one of its many exquisite highlights, Csiszér pays tribute to the Hungarian composer Mihály Víg with a rendition of ‘Kész az egész‘ (loosely translated as ‘It’s all done’), a song by Víg featured in Béla Tarr’s 1987 film Kárhozat (an acclaimed auteur and another of Csiszér’s compatriots). Heart-wrenchingly evocative, it’s a siren song for the ages, on an album as poignant and haunting as anything released this past year.
To acknowledge the album, and to herald Halloween in the right way, we asked Réka to put together a mix, and she didn’t disappoint. Here she stitches together a mixtape of horror soundtracks featuring sounds and excerpts from films including The Exorcist, The Night of the Hunter, Eraserhead, Videodrome, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Stalker, Possession and many more. Titled In Search of Unicorns, it’s a miraculously cohesive, pitch-black ride through lurid, monolithic synthesis, psychoactive noir, electro-acoustic artifice and snatches of iconic dialogue. You’ll hear spine-tingling nursery rhymes, mystical resonances, cavernous underworld echoes and Dennis Hopper imploring people to go on a joyride. It’s the next irresistible soundtrack to your nightmares. Listen if you dare.
The artwork for the mix is a painting by Polish artist Aleksandra Waliszewska.
With music from:
The Exorcist
The Night of the Hunter
Maniac
Scream
Eraserhead
Videodrome
Begotten
Les Garcon Sauvages
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
O Sidarta
Stalker
Possession
Funérailles Des Vampires
Daughters of Darkness
Rosemary’s Baby
Crash
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
Repulsion
Santa Sangre
Suspiria
Onibaba
The Cat O’Nine Tails
Repulsion
Beyond the Black Rainbow
