Gothic Music

Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny traces sonic Gothic from the echoing footsteps in Gothic novels to the dark soundscapes of Goth club nights. This broad perspective importantly widens the scope of Gothic music from Goth subculture to literature, film, television and video games. This book also provides the musical and theoretical definition of Gothic music that lacks in current scholarship. Whether voicing the spectral beings of early cinema, announcing virtual terrors in video games, or intensifying the nocturnal rituals of Goth, Gothic music represents the sounds of the uncanny.

"Isabella van Elferen's book is original, witty, and provocative. Her approach is anything but reductive, as her epigraph--"Il y a plenty de hors-texte"--suggests. She considers music in a variety of media and her analyses are engaging and refreshingly jargon-free. This is a work that enters boldly into critical debate and is not afraid to speculate on broader philosophical issues. Van Elferen brings insights from the discipline of musicology into the field of gothic studies and, in doing so, very much enriches it."--Emma McEvoy, Westminster University