The thunderous pipe organs that have thrilled listeners for hundreds of years had their origins in the hand-held pan pipes of antiquity, aligning a series of simple flutes into a harmonic progression.

History records that the first mechanical pipe organ was used at a Roman coliseum in the 3rd year before Christ.

In contemporary culture, the pipe organ is equally bound to the divine and the demonic, having been a beloved part of Western worship for centuries (the oldest existing pipe organ is said to be at the Castle chapel in Sion, Switzerland, dating to 1390) but equally familiar as part of the gothic horror of The Phantom of the Opera, the dark fantasy of Walt Disney's Fantasia and the baroque sci-fi of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

The most well-known classical piece of dark pipe organ music is Johann Sebastian Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, which is said to have been written early in his career in the uncharacteristic "stylus phantasticus" of Buxtehude, possibly as a transcription from a compostion for violin.