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Various

The Black Stone – Music For Lovecraftian Summonings

Label: Eighth Tower Records

Format: CD

Genre: Experimental

Out of stock

Someone claims that H.P. Lovecraft did not like music. He may have suffered from undiagnosed musical anhedonia, a disorder where a person gleans no pleasure from music or sound. The first story that comes to mind when one thinks of music in the “Lovecraft universe” is The Music of Erich Zann (1921). The music in The Music of Erich Zahn, is the kind of frenetic, and frightening music he had always experienced: [...] It would be useless to describe Erich Zann's music on that horrible night. It was the scariest thing I had ever heard, because now I saw it in the face and I knew that his inspiration was fear. He tried to make noise: to keep at bay, or to suffocate, something that was outside [...] [The Music of Erich Zann.  There are many stories in which Lovecraft uses a musical interlude to divert the reader's attention from what is going on. This trick can be found in the story The Rats in the Walls (1923), during which the protagonist listens to chamber music from a gramophone, and he then hears other sounds, other noises. His obsession leads to his inevitable descent into madness. He initially assumes the sounds were coming from rats scratching the walls. Soon thereafter, the protagonist learns Nyarlathotep is the culprit, described as the crazy and faceless god who screams blind in the darkness and is accompanied by two amorphous and idiotic flutists to steal the music scene.  Also, the ruler of the Lovecraftian Universe, Azathoth, known as The Blind Idiot God represents the primordial chaos at the center of the Universe. His presence is always accompanied by “accursed fruits, and drums”:  [...] the last incorporeal fog of the creeping chaos that blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all the infinite, the irrepressible demon, the sultan Azathoth, whose name no mouth dares to utter, who hungry grits his teeth in dark and inconceivable spaces that are found beyond time, between muffled blows of drums that raise reason, and the monotonous lullaby of cursed flutes [...] [The Dream-Quest of the Unknown Kadath]  Whether Lovecraft liked music or not we can’t be sure, but we’re sure that music played an important role in the nihilistic world he created. His stories often evoke an entire universe of “possible musics” - dark ones of course. Eighth Tower Records dedicates a second aural tribute to the Providence Master to be called "Black Stone. Music For Lovecraftian Summonings" (the first one was “In Tenebris Scriptus - A dark aural tribute to H.P.Lovecraft”), This forms part of an ongoing project originally initiated to create a musical Lovecraftian universe. 

Details
Cat. number: ETR028
Year: 2020
Notes:

Comes in 6-panel digipack.