Far Out There Christmas Soundtrack: Tabitha (Patreon)

Okay, here we go. This is probably the biggest departure from any of the original Character Soundtracks, and it’s at least partially a matter of grim necessity. Tabitha’s regular musical preferences are very much in the Stoner/Doom Metal direction. Lots of Black Sabbath and bands who wish they were Black Sabbath. Sadly, there’s just not a lot of Stoner Metal Christmas songs out there, short of Bob Rivers’ “Iron Man” parody “Santa Claus,” and I can’t exactly stretch that one out to a full playlist. Instead, this is one of those situations where I’m forced to dig a little deeper and figure out what OTHER musical interests Tabitha might have, or at least try to retroactively logic these musical selections into making sense.

Thankfully, I struck gold with Douglas Leedy’s synthesizer interpretation “Silent Night.” Another track off of Leedy’s A Very Merry Electric Christmas To You album appeared over on Avatar’s playlist, thought that version of “Deck The Halls” follows most of the album down the same kitschy, gimmicky, novelty paths that most late 60s electronic albums trod. “Silent Night,” however, is a very different beast: a droning, slowly-oscillating, almost Ambient piece of alien noise. From what little I’ve found out about the guy, this seems to be a more accurate reflection of the experimental music Leedy spent the bulk of his career on, real Mad Scientist music. Indeed, I seem to recall reading the suggestion that Leedy wasn’t even using a familiar Moog synthesizer on this, but rather some kind of homemade Frankenstein of wires and oscillators. That doesn’t seem to actually be the case, but I can see why somebody would believe these sounds came out of something even weirder than the already weird primordial synths of the day. So yeah, this sound obvious fit with Tabitha’s “screwing around in a lab” agenda, and honestly the droning aspect makes for a logical extension of the drawn out Stoner soloing. If the Metal is Tabitha’s goofing around/having fun music, then this electronic noise would be her serious/grown up music… to the extent that Tabitha is capable of being “grown up.”

Unfortunately, I really struggled to find more Christmas music that fit the exact template that “Silent Night” established. As I said, there were other holiday synth albums coming out around this time, but they all leaned into the bouncy, cheesy, “Switched On” mood rather than the Ambient drone I was looking for. To get more of that, I had to look to, well, Ambient music, or more generally the nebulous “New Age” genre. After the world-conquering success that Mannheim Steamroller found in the Holiday market, a whole swarm of post-hippy, crystal-wearing, granola-eating types who’d normally never have anything to do with the ultimate fusion of Christianity and capitalism were suddenly all “Yes, I’ll have some of that, please!” As a result, there’s a pretty decent selection of Christmas albums out there that sound like that store at the mall that sells the weird candles, and I’m not just talking about stuff from the late 80s, either. Case in point, we have “Christmas Prayers” by Jonn Serrie, from an album that seems to have been issued under several different names, but still came out no earlier than 2002. Actually, “Christmas Prayers” is a medley of “I Wonder As I Wander” and “Carol Of The Bells,” plus more than a little extra waves of spacy sounds splashed all over them. Admittedly, this brand of Casio preset Ambient music isn’t anywhere near as Mad Sciency as the pure electronic noise of the Douglas Leedy song, but it’s generally as close as we’re gonna get. And if nothing else, it totally sounds like the kind of music you’d have heard on some SciFi Chanel special in the mid-90s, so that’s pretty on brand.

Even better is “What Child Is This” by Geodesium, aka keyboardist Mark C. Petersen. This will sound like a joke, but Geodesium literally exists to make soundtracks for planetarium shows, and that’s exactly what this take on “What Child Is This” sounds like. Again, there’s a bit more digital sterility than I’d like, but it once again sounds like convincing background music for an unusually SciFi holiday special, so it works pretty well in this context.”

More directly applicable to the “Mannheim Steamroller wannabe” narrative I presented earlier is “Tree Of Life” by Teja Bell, whose New Spirit of Christmas album actually did come out in the late 80s. It’s not so much droning in the sense of the notes being stretched out an especially long time, but more in the sense of a deliberately ethereal-sounding composition. It’s also one of the few fully original compositions here, doing a great job of evoking a sort of “snowfall in the middle of the night” atmosphere. I’ve plugged this song in one of my Christmas Songs You Don’t Know About blogs, so of course I’m gonna find an excuse to try and get it a bit more exposure, right?

And speaking of more exposure, we next have the EXTREMELY obscure little ditty “Christmas Synth Medley” by Planets as Archers… who I know absolutely NOTHING about. I don’t even remember where I originally encountered this little keyboard demo, I’ve just had it in my iTunes library for years now. As the name implies, this is a medley of several different holiday standards: “O Holy Night,” “O Come All Ye Faithful” and “Silent Night.” Yes, again, but it’s the shortest bit of this little workout, so it doesn’t have time to really wear out its welcome. I’ll admit that this is pretty clearly the most amateurish recording of the bunch, but it still fits that electronic/science fiction mood Tabitha would go for here.

And speaking of Science Fiction, we next have an ACTUAL Mannheim Steamroller tune with “Above the Northern Lights.” This is another song I’ve gushed about in earlier blogs, so I’ll try to avoid repeating myself too much. The sound is very much of the droning, spacey variety, which works out quite nicely for a song all about viewing the aurora borealis from above. This is literal space we’re talking about here! It doesn’t get more SciFi than that!

And in conclusion, we wrap things up right back where we began: with another Douglas Leedy track. Hey, I said MOST of A Very Merry Electric Christmas didn’t fit the vibe I was looking for, not ALL of it. “The Coventry Carol” is one of those melodies that really lends itself to this kind of sparse, alien electronic arrangement. Granted, this one isn’t quite as straightforward as “Silent Night” was, busying itself up with some ill-advised attempts at not-harpsichord flourishes in the middle verses. Still, the foundational melody is echo-y and distant and gurgle-y in ways that really do sound like some kind of supercomputer chugging away at the far end of a laboratory. I think that’s a good way to wrap things up, it’s probably the kind of sound Tabitha usually passes out to every night.

And, or course, if we’re talking about Tabitha now, that MUST mean we know what the next two blogs will be, right? RIIIIIIIIIIGHT?

Tabitha's YouTube Christmas Playlist