beneath the stairs
By neon liminal on May 31, 2026 8:58 pm
A little break from trance music this week for some ambient-horror, which doubles as my submission for the RMR Discord Challenge. The short composition - 3 minutes - is part of the requirements for the challenge.
The challenge this month was "found sound ambient", which, in a nutshell, meant an ambient composition incorporating "found sounds", like foley and field recordings, and either ones you recorded yourself or found elsewhere. I have been wanting to fuck with some ambient-horror for a while, so this seemed like a prime opportunity.
My house is very old, but not haunted, as far as I can tell (there is the incident of the poltergeist seemingly knocking over a 1kg glass blender jar nearly onto my feet and shattering into a thousand terrifying shards but we don't talk about that), however, it has lots of strange noises being very old and many of them come from "under the stairs". So I went about the house recording some of the sounds that seem quite haunted but are really just an old house.
This piece features a few of said recordings:
- two samples of stair-climbing, from beneath and above
- a yarn swift making a constant C# tone and rhythmic thumping
- a creaky door
- my nephew imitating a whistling tea kettle, with said tea kettle
None of these are very identifiable in the song. The mostly atonal-drone-atmospheres are made through a kind of stretching-plugin called Scaper, the knocks and steps have been generally fucked with to sound massive and booming, and the nephew has been transformed into something quite monstrous.
There are only two elements that aren't from the above recordings - five notes from a jumpscare synth lead courtesy of Dystropia, and a sub-bass drone to add just a tiny bit of tonal cohesion to the rest of the atmosphere. Everything else is these cell phone recordings I made manipulated inside Ableton.
Enjoy, if you can lol.
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I'm with jwh... imma look behind me before leaving 