The Body and Raime's Halloween Shows in Brooklyn In music, creepiness is construct, almost totally in the ear of the listener. But a pair of shows on Halloween night in Brooklyn seemed, from a distance, as if they might be able to get beyond the usual camp-ghoul club nights - in which the audience turns up in costume and does most of the work - to achieve legitimate creepiness in and of themselves. Chad Batka for The New York Times Lee Buford, left, and Chip King, both members of the Body, performing on Halloween night at Saint Vitus in Brooklyn. Both shows were slow, heavy and post-everything: evoking exhaustion and wonder, but also industrial decay, old factories by the river, rusted objects of great weight and unknown use. One group was the Body, the metal-ish band from Providence, R.I., at Saint Vitus, in Greenpoint. The other was Raime, the electronic music group from London, at the dance club Output, in Williamsburg. The Body's recent records - especially the new "Christs, Redeemers" (Thrill Jockey) - have gained gravity with the addition of a choir and strings; the band puts serene and spiritual voices and harmonies alongside its own rugged blasting from guitar, drums and voice. But the Body's performances generally don't have the benefit of that contrast. At Saint Vitus on Thursday, it was just the meaty, bearded band: Chip King on guitar and vocals, and Lee Buford on drums, with the addition of a second drummer, Seth Manchester, and found-sound samples: speeches, rants, flotsam from an agitated culture. And something strange happened here. It's almost a natural law that two skilled drummers, playing strong in general tandem at medium tempos, sound good together - I mean good as in energizing, nourishing, sustaining. As go the Allman Brothers, so goes the Body. All it took was Mr. Manchester following Mr. Buford's patterns, and suddenly the Body was more than creepy: It was groovy, despite everything. What is everything? The music's obdurate vibe; the triple-layered distortion and bright slashes of feedback from the guitar, rendering harmony almost unintelligible; and Mr. King's trademark vocal strategy. He is the rare singer who might request of the sound man, as he did on Thursday, that his vocals be lower in the mix; then he positions the microphone at collarbone level and at least a foot away, and screams to be vaguely audible. It's different from the kind of singing that takes the audience into its confidence. It's singing that suggests that the singer has been abducted and held captive behind a wall. That's creepy, and their videos and press photos are creepier still, but the guys from the Body are also kind of japing performance artists. At the end, after a headlining set that lasted maybe 40 minutes, the band members abruptly cued up a mellowly anodyne version of "Suicide Is Painless," from the film soundtrack to "M.A.S.H.," over the P.A. system and, without skipping a beat, started packing up their gear. Raime's music, as heard on its record from last year, "Quarter Turns Over a Living Line" (Blackest Ever Black), is echoey and resonant, extremely careful but strangely paced; it uses sounds suggesting cello and drums and guitar, as well as purely synthetic sources. There's a lot of waiting but also a lot of payoff; it's leaking drama all over the place, from beginning to end. Unsurprisingly, the musicians behind it - Tom Halstead and Joe Andrews - care about visuals, too. Thursday's set at Output was Raime's first performance in New York with a visual element: superslow-motion vignettes, apparently shot in a former Portuguese ironworks, by the London-based Dakus Films. And this coherent, deeply centered set, dripped out in tempos and impact sometimes comparable to the Body's, also yielded something beyond creepiness: beauty. The visuals accompanied the dread and almost symphonic gorgeousness in the music, some of it taken from "Quarter Turns": you were never quite sure what you were seeing, but it involved blue-gray early-morning light by the water, blurry views of fire, a man covered in white dust. The enveloping sound system in the club allowed you to hear the music vividly, with focus and depth, as it moved along slowly and inexorably - every high-hat sound, menacing crackle and cloud of bass. And during a good stretch of it, many of the audience members - costumed and ready to dance - stood in place as the sound and film unfolded, as if they'd forgotten where they were and what day it was.