Say One Thing, Play Another: The Strange Double Life of Musicians Who Claim to Hate Locrian

There's a specific kind of discomfort that happens when you catch someone contradicting themselves. Not in a gotcha way — more like the quiet, interesting kind where you start to wonder whether they even realize it's happening. That's the energy surrounding a conversation that keeps coming up in experimental music circles: why do so many composers loudly dismiss the Locrian mode in public while their own compositions quietly keep going back to it?

It's not a small irony. It's kind of a defining one.

The Mode Nobody Wants Credit For

For the uninitiated: Locrian is the seventh mode of the major scale, and it has a reputation. Theorists have called it the "incomplete" mode, the one that never truly resolves, the scale that refuses to behave. Unlike its siblings — your Dorian, your Mixolydian, your crowd-pleasing Ionian — Locrian sits at the end of the line with a diminished fifth as its tonic chord, which is basically music theory's version of a foundation built on sand. It doesn't settle. It doesn't give you the landing you want. And musicians, particularly classically trained ones, have historically treated it like a weird uncle at Thanksgiving: acknowledged, but not invited to sit at the main table.

So it's genuinely strange that when you start combing through the actual output of composers who publicly roll their eyes at Locrian, you find it tucked into intros, buried in bridge sections, stretched across entire movements. The rejection is verbal. The relationship is ongoing.

"I Don't Really Use It" (He Said, On an Album Full of It)

We spoke with a Brooklyn-based composer — someone whose work lives squarely in the experimental post-classical space — who spent the first ten minutes of our conversation explaining why Locrian doesn't really fit into his practice. He described it as "too angular for what I'm going for" and "more of a novelty than a genuine compositional tool." Then, unprompted, he started humming a passage from his most recent release. We recognized it immediately. It was Locrian. Textbook, unambiguous Locrian.

When we pointed that out, he laughed — the kind of laugh that's half embarrassed and half genuinely surprised. "I guess I don't think about it that way when I'm actually writing," he said. "It just sounds right in the moment."

That phrase — it just sounds right — came up more than once across our conversations. It suggests something worth sitting with: that the rejection of Locrian might be happening at a conscious, intellectual level while the attraction to it operates somewhere else entirely.

The Performance of Good Taste

There's a credible argument that some of this is just posturing. Music communities, especially experimental ones, have their own hierarchies of cool, and being seen as someone who leans too hard on a "difficult" mode can read as trying too hard — or worse, being derivative. Locrian has been associated with horror film scores, doom metal, and the kind of cinematic tension that gets described as "on the nose." For a composer who wants to be taken seriously in certain rooms, loudly claiming Locrian as a primary tool might feel like admitting you season everything with liquid smoke.

So the public distancing might be, at least partially, a kind of reputation management. A way of signaling sophistication by rejecting the thing that unsophisticated listeners might recognize and label too quickly.

But that explanation only goes so far. Because the gap between stated philosophy and actual recording habits is sometimes so wide it stops being about image and starts being about something genuinely psychological.

When Your Hands Know More Than Your Brain

Muscle memory is a real thing, and for musicians who've spent thousands of hours at an instrument, certain patterns become almost automatic. Locrian's intervals — particularly that flat second and diminished fifth — create a specific kind of tension that the body can learn to reach for before the conscious mind has weighed in on whether it's a good idea.

One guitarist we talked to, based out of Chicago, described it this way: "I'll be noodling around on something and record a demo, and then I'll go back and listen and think, okay, how did I end up here? And I'll trace it back and realize I slid into Locrian almost by accident. It wasn't a decision. It was just where my hand went."

This is the part that gets genuinely interesting. If Locrian keeps appearing in the work of people who claim not to use it, and those people are often surprised to find it there, then the mode might be filling a function that the composer doesn't have a conscious name for. It's doing something emotionally or texturally that the musician needs — needs enough that their hands keep going back — even if their brain hasn't fully signed off on the relationship.

What Locrian Actually Does That Nothing Else Can

Here's the honest case for why composers keep returning to it: Locrian creates a specific emotional texture that is genuinely hard to replicate with other tools. That unresolved, hovering quality isn't a bug. For music that's trying to capture anxiety, ambivalence, grief without catharsis, or tension that the listener isn't meant to escape — Locrian does that better than almost anything else in the Western tonal toolkit.

And American music, right now, has a lot of use for exactly those feelings. We're living through a cultural moment where music that wraps everything up neatly can feel dishonest. The unresolved chord isn't a failure of composition. It's sometimes the most accurate emotional statement available.

That might be why, even among composers who intellectually resist the mode, it keeps showing up. Because the music they're trying to make requires it.

The Honest Contradiction

Maybe the most interesting takeaway here isn't that musicians are being dishonest when they dismiss Locrian. It's that the contradiction itself is worth something. The tension between what artists say they value and what they actually reach for in the dark of a recording session is a window into how creativity actually works — which is messier and less deliberate than any artist statement would have you believe.

Locrian, the mode built on irresolution, keeps appearing in the work of people who say they've resolved not to use it. There's a poetry in that. The scale that refuses to land has found a permanent home in the work of musicians who keep insisting they've moved on.

Maybe the hands know something the interviews don't.