Music
H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear” Coming to Vinyl
Update: Pre-order information has been added.
Cadabra Records has announced that they will be releasing a spoken word vinyl of H.P. Lovecraft‘s “The Lurking Fear” with Andrew Leman, co-founder of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, providing the reading. The artwork, which you can see below, was done by Alan Brown.
The limited 12″ will be pressed in a run of 500 of which only 350 will be available for sale (100 are already pre-sold and 50 for personal label reasons) on July 8th. Pre-orders will go live Friday, June 3rd.
An excerpt from S. T. Joshi’s liner notes reads:
Reading Lovecraft can on occasion be a guilty pleasure. When we encounter a sentence like this from The Outsider – “It was a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable”- we are inclined to smile as well as to admire the verbal pyrotechnics that can create such a cascade of evocative adjectives. Especially in his earlier years, Lovecraft enjoyed experimenting with this kind of over-the-top horror, and the results are some of his most entertaining stories. The Lurking Fear is one of these.
Written in November 1922, it was the second of Lovecraft’s professionally published stories. Weird Tales, which was the haven for most of his later tales, would not be founded until March 1923; and Lovecraft – who was not even sure he wanted to be a “professional” writer, if that meant churning out hackwork according to market specifications – wrote The Lurking Fear in response to the pleas of a friend, George Julian Houtain, who wanted just such a blood-and-thunder narrative. Houtain had begun a semi-pro magazine (which Lovecraft later called a “vile rag”) entitled Home Brew, subtitled “America’s Zippiest Pocket Magazine.” Most people don’t know that Home Brew was a humor magazine, full of articles, sketches, limericks, and other matter poles apart from Lovecraft’s usual brand of supernatural horror.
From the official press release: “Dark ambient/industrial outfit, Theologian, backs up Leman’s conveyance of the awesome story, supplying an appropriately macabre and unsettling score.“
It’s a new day, and you’ve got new John Carpenter to listen to. John Carpenter, Daniel Davies and Cody Carpenter have released the new track He Walks By Night this morning, the second single off their upcoming album Lost Themes IV: Noir, out May 3 on Sacred Bones Records.
Lost Themes IV: Noir is the latest installment in a series that sees Carpenter releasing new music for John Carpenter movies that don’t actually exist. The first Lost Themes was released in 2015, followed by Lost Themes II in 2016 and Lost Themes III: Alive After Death in 2021.
Sacred Bones previews, “It’s been a decade since John Carpenter recorded the material that would become Lost Themes, his debut album of non-film music and the opening salvo in one of Hollywood’s great second acts. Those vibrant, synth-driven songs, made in collaboration with his son Cody Carpenter and godson Daniel Davies, kickstarted a musical renaissance for the pioneering composer and director. With Lost Themes IV: Noir, they’ve struck gold again, this time mining the rich history of the film noir genre for inspiration.
“Since the first Lost Themes, John has referred to these compositions as “soundtracks for the movies in your mind.” On the fourth installment in the series, those movies are noirs. Like the film genre they were influenced by, what makes these songs “noirish” is sometimes slippery and hard to define, and not merely reducible to a collection of tropes. The scores for the great American noir pictures were largely orchestral, while the Carpenters and Davies work off a sturdy synth-and-guitar backbone.
“The trio’s free-flowing chemistry means Lost Themes IV: Noir runs like a well-oiled machine—the 1951 Jaguar XK120 Roadster from Kiss Me Deadly, perhaps, or the 1958 Plymouth Fury from John’s own Christine. It’s a chemistry that’s helped power one of the most productive stretches of John’s creative life, and Noir proves that it’s nowhere near done yielding brilliant results.”
You can pre-save Lost Themes IV: Noir right now! And listen to the new track below…
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