H. P. Lovecraft's The Outsider & The Beast in the Cave LP Read by Andrew Leman, score by Anima Morte
Specs:
* Limited pressing on 150 gram vinyl
* Printed on our deluxe heavy weight tip-on gatefold jacket
* Newly commissioned liner notes by S. T. Joshi
* Newly commissioned art by Jeremy Hush
An excerpt from S. T. Joshi's liner notes:
Lovecraft reports that he wrote his very first story, “The Noble Eavesdropper,” around the age of six—and takes care to note that it was “pre-Poe.” What he means by this is that when he stumbled upon the stories of Edgar Allan Poe at the age of eight, he was so overwhelmed that his previous interests—in the Arabian Nights and Greek mythology—fell to the wayside for “the miasmatic exhalations of the tomb!” But if he found Poe’s work engaging, it was not reflected in the stories he wrote from 1898 to 1902. These tales—notably “The Mystery of the Grave-Yard” (c. 1898) and “The Mysterious Ship” (1902)—betray the influence, not of Poe, but of the dime novels that Lovecraft was apparently reading in great quantities. The first-named tale is not even supernatural, but a moderately clever mystery story starring a know-it-all detective, King John.
It was only with “The Beast in the Cave” that any tale of Lovecraft’s can truly deserve the designation “Lovecraftian.” It contains many of the essential features of the classic tales he wrote in the final decade of his life: the relentless focus on the terror that descends upon a lone individual; the weird but not explicitly supernatural nature of the horrific entity; and, of course, a prose style that displays the pervasive influence of Poe but modifies it with a leavening of contemporary science.
Liner notes by Anima Morte:
The stories of “The Outsider” and “The Beast in the Cave” could not be more opposite in character and yet so appropriate as two sides of the same disc. One illustrates an abstract gothic dream of freedom, the other a distinct physical confinement.
In terms of musical tone “The Outsider” really called for a dark melancholic signature. With the subject’s very being sprung out of loneliness, I felt a good starting point was a motif I had reworked from Schubert´s Winterreise song cycle, a motif called einsamkeit, which translated from German means loneliness, and strikes just the right tone of bleakness. Throughout the score it is the strings pulling the heavy load in a romantic style, since the story is carrying a much lesser focus on possible rational explanations than usual for a Lovecraft story.
On the other hand, “The Beast in the Cave” features a more methodic protagonist trying to make sense of his strayed wanderings and will not let thoughts of certain death bewilder his sanity. The very cave itself becomes part of the musical storytelling and features sounds ran through spacious and crazy delays for full effect of disorientation. Here the themes are conveyed by gritty lo-fi synthesizers like the Siel DK70 and Casio SK-1, whose ambience is aided by an abundance of percussive instruments, from the classical gran cassa and timpani to unique and archaic hand drums from the remarkable Roth-Händle collection.
Fredrik Klingwall
Stockholm, Sweden
June 2024
