Various Artists

*200 copies limited edition* Eighth Tower is here to celebrate Dracula on the book’s 125th Birthday. Two books, since first publication, have never been out of print. One is the Bible and the other is Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Dracula is the embodiment of Satan for the Victorian age. The character is sinister. He is cunning. He is repulsive, sickening in fact. He is quite different to the suave gentleman that any of the films depict him as. He is an old man who grows younger when gorged with blood. He is a walking, rotting corpse, the opposite to us and a reminder of our own mortality. He is arrogant, psychopathic and obsessed with imperialism.

Perhaps the novel’s popularity has always been in its ability to make one feel like order has been restored through a strong empathy with the characters. We feel that we have become part of their existence through reading their diaries, letters and hearing their phonograph recordings. There is a real element of hope in their words and in their practices, we even see technology used to aid their war. Therein is progress alongside the knowledge of the past, looking to the future to dispel the shadows and bring us light where once we only saw fear in darkness. We can see the war of civilisation versus our baser instincts, not only in the fight against the sexual charge in the vampiric bloodlust but also in the ability that our heroes have to prevail against the animalistic forms that Dracula brings.

As the Bible this is a book full of temptations and resistances that gets to the core of the psychological war inside us, as we fight our own inner biblical adversary, subdue the satanic beast within us and aspire to righteousness. To celebrate this modern myth Eighth Tower has called musicians from various countries and asked them their musical interpretation of the Dracula myth. Either gloomy soundscapes or electroacoustic compositions, all the pieces are inspired by chapters, scenes, or characters from Bram Stoker’s novel.