Death, rebirth and saxophones.
A look into brass instruments’ uncanny and underutilized ability to inject panic into a song.
artwork by Asher Stone.
The phrase “devil music” spans back centuries, long before it was used to dismiss whatever the kids are into these days. “Diabolus in musica” was the informal name given to the tritone interval (three adjacent whole tones) by clergymen for its unnerving quality during medieval times, an age in which music was dominated by religious ideology. Though often avoided in classical music and theory, employing the tritone creates moments of tension to be released with a return to more familiar tonic tones. Contemporary recorded music typically follows similar patterns in harmonic structure, but the wider accessibility that came with the modern musical era opened the door for stranger practices. Tense music is much more common nowadays and is explored through a number of different narratives and sound palettes, although I’ve found myself strangely fascinated by the use of brass instruments to accomplish this, a kind of sound uncommonly heard outside of jazz or big band contexts. As a family of instruments, their expressiveness and unique sound naturally grab listeners’ attention. The squeals, shrill pitches, and jarring melodic movement that brass instruments are capable of make it the perfect fit to instill discomfort. Throughout a few years of quiet obsession with this phenomenon, I found an interesting narrative pattern amongst several songs that employ brass in this way: many of them discuss the occult or the complexities of organized religion. A great introductory example of brass-induced anxiety, despite its themes not entirely aligning with anything particularly religious, comes from David Bowie’s final album.
Bowie’s last musical effort before his death in 2016, titled Blackstar, remains a masterclass in expressing existential dread through music. One look at the title track’s accompanying music video and the discomfort is more than evident. If the ten-minute song that shambles along above unsteady rhythms and eerie vocal harmonies hadn’t made that clear already, then the video’s many cult features might. Masked men on crosses, a solitary candle in a bleak-looking village, and bedazzled human skulls, among other oddities, decorate grim scenes of bizarre acts. Blackstar features quite a bit of brass instrumentation across its seven songs, but this musical phenomenon of unease is most plainly demonstrated in the song titled “‘Tis A Pity She Was A Whore.” An airy synthesizer provides a sonic bed for a group of background voices, pounding drums, Bowie’s calloused voice, and saxophones starting and stopping, oscillating on and off tempo. The instrumentation without the brass is strangely calming, giving Bowie plenty of room to croon about time personified as it beats and steals from him with lyrics like, “Hold your mad hands I cried,” referring to the hands of a clock. Around a minute and a half into the song, the saxophones take center stage and engage in a slow, absurd climb to the highest pitch register they can reach with no regard for the song’s key. The steady synthesizer and drums amplify the saxophones’ subtle injection of distress into an otherwise serene soundscape. It’s an ingenious way to paint a picture of an icon trying to keep his cool in the face of a terrifying unknown. Bowie tragically passed away two days after the album’s release, but his final recorded thoughts: his fears, regrets, achievements, reflections, and acceptances all shine in vivid detail on Blackstar, in large part due to its instrumentation. No corporate posthumous release could ever conceal this album’s perfection as Bowie’s last hurrah.
I’ve been using “discomfort” as a gentle term to encapsulate a lot of unsettling music, but it's a long way away from sheer panic. The occult is a mortifying and often dangerous thing, and The Mars Volta knew that. The El Paso progressive rock outfit, composed of frontman Cedric Bixler-Zavala and guitarist Omar Rodríguez-López, released Amputechture in 2006, and with it came a song called “Day of the Baphomets.” The twelve-minute beast of a track begins innocuously, with a funky bass solo over some percussion before erupting into a storm of noise, winding and churning. Instruments climb up and down scales, fall over each other, repeat themselves, and pass from ear to ear. A saxophone suddenly enters the fold, shrieking and playing whatever note it wants to play. The energy exuding from the saxophone makes it feel like it has a mind of its own, like the assumption that someone can tame this brass creature is ludicrous. Bixler-Zavala takes center stage for the verse, singing his usual gibberish with a shakiness in his high-pitched voice. Buried in the nonsense are lyrics about cult activity such as secret codes, performing sacrifices in service of some deity, and mass manipulation. Following the first verse, the storm of noise returns, with the saxophone somehow demanding even more attention than the first time. What seemed previously like advanced technique suddenly transforms into screams of pain that rise in intensity, sending shockwaves of anxiousness through the rest of the arrangement. Bixler-Zavala’s lyrics liken organized religion to a satanic cult of sorts, evident through the song’s name (Baphomet is a pagan deity associated with satanism) and lyrics like, “How long must we fold by hand/The nuns are burning wheels again” represent a rejection of prayer and the stifling of human progress, often visualized by the wheel. A conflict between resisting townsfolk and religious manipulation is reflected not only in the lyrics but also in the friction between the brass and the other instruments. One of my favorite moments in the song is when the guitar in the left ear trades outlandish solos back and forth with the saxophone in the right ear, eventually joining together to transition into the chorus, almost like a manifestation of a battle between two parties. Songs like this one make the band difficult to get into, but understanding that these rough conflicts are very intentional makes “Day of the Baphomets” an obtuse piece of art, like a morbid painting of a religious scene.
Up-and-coming post-punk group Maruja is another great example of a band exploring the complexities of faith and the human psyche by using brass as a tool for inducing anxious feelings. Unlike Bowie and The Mars Volta, the saxophone is a staple of the band’s construction and featured in nearly every song of theirs. Their limited number of members lets the saxophone steal the limelight on several occasions, singing frustrated melodies over backing tracks that induce the feeling of teeth clenched. Their 2024 EP, Connla’s Well, lets the saxophone exercise nearly every dimension of its chaotic potential. A song like “The Invisible Man” about mental health struggles features a slow buildup of emotions that bursts into a frenzy in which the saxophone belts notes at a rapid pace amidst walls of distortion. “One Hand Behind The Devil” on the other hand, starts and stops an onslaught of winding guitars while the saxophone plays a more ghostly role, crafting an eerie serenity to be broken by the gnashing instrumental around it. Lead vocalist Harry Wilkinson’s singing recalls the feeling of pressure building as he shouts over the reverberating saxophones: “Deep as the ocean, shameless outspoken/Aimless, unfocused and lost in life’s motions/Moment got stolen, faith had been broken/Hopeful, ain’t worth shit antisocial.” The lyrics are nihilistic and downtrodden, revealing a clash between dire impulses and moral objectives–a deep, unresolvable turmoil reflected in the subdued ferocity of the band’s sound. Maruja’s sonic portrayal of mental and societal decay is gradual and subdued, unlike The Mars Volta’s snarling mass of instrumentation–yet both approaches highlight brass’ ability to convey unease.
The phenomenon of brass-induced chaos is also explored in other contemporary songs, often grappling with religious/occult themes as well. The recently-disbanded black midi exercises this wonderfully on “John L,” a song about a flamboyant cult leader who is overthrown by his followers. The saxophone squeaks along to the guitar’s disjointed rhythms, emits shrieks amidst eerie quietudes, and taunts the listener as its shrill tone passes from left to right behind a mass of noise. The song is ridiculous and carnivalesque, almost as if the band is communicating that many cult leaders are just that and shouldn’t be taken seriously. Self-described “anxiety rock” band Squid also frequently incorporates saxophone into their trademark sound. A song like “After The Flash” is a perfect example of the saxophone being the agent of chaos in an arrangement. The rhythm chugs along as beautiful saxophone and synthesizer harmonies paint the background and twinkling guitars dot the canvas, but after a long synthesizer sequence, the saxophone unwinds the song’s structure with discordantly melancholic wails, and the whole machine comes to a screeching halt.
The realm of recorded music offers many more examples of anxious brass, but the ones I’ve talked about here capture the phenomenon quite clearly. A saxophone is an expected part of a jazz or funk group, and hearing it in this context serves only to raise the bar within the confines of its genre. A saxophone incorporated into a different context while still abiding by standard musical form and occupying its usual spot as a secondary instrument is a quirk–something unexpected but not much more than an accessory to a larger structure. A saxophone can challenge the listener to hear the uncomfortable and the downright unfathomable depictions of a faith degraded by unleashing every achievable dimension of its potential. It’s uniquely artful in a way that modern music often forgets. Erraticism within lyrics alone only goes so far in transmitting a state of mind, and one’s connection to a song extends beyond its verbal content. If used like this, brass can become the monarch of “devil music” in a distinctly terrifying way that challenges our evaluations of what emotional music should sound like.
edited by Aidan Burt.
artwork by Asher Stone.