THE DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is the title of a novella by H.P. Lovecraft completed in 1927 but published posthumously in 1943, a few years after Lovecraft's death. Apparently, the book is the longest of many stories to feature his protagonist Randolph Carter and is considered part of his Dream Cycle series. I have yet to read the novella but I have a copy and was looking at it a few months ago and found myself drawn to the title and the titles of the chapters. I have read some Lovecraft and enjoy his work but I have mostly liked the titles to his work, perhaps sometimes a bit more than the content. This particular novella inspired my LP's title and the track names as well but that is essentially where the inspiration ends. Not having read the book, I did not intend to evoke the story or any imagery in the actual content but rather interpreted the titles into songs based only on my impression of the titles themselves. So each track shares the same name of each chapter and some songs have a dark tone that could arguably evoke the sense of horror or dread typical of Lovecraft's work but otherwise the style of the album is probably less nightmarish than you might expect of music inspired by Lovecraft. Overall, the sound employs the ambient psychedelia and drone usually found in my work but each track feels quite different from one song to the next. The title track is a sprawling psych mammoth that flows through various slabs of drone and slowly thudding drums. Another track, "The Silver Key," is a heavily percussive piece with various layers of tribal drums, with a drone that melts into the next track "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", which sounds like freak folk with layered nonsensical vocals and delayed acoustic guitars. Meanwhile, "The White Ship" is a fuzzy '60s garage rocker with my attempt at an acid-fried guitar solo (sorta). As it may seem, the appeal of the titles lied in not only their horror genre nature but also the mystical and psychedelic quality of the words themselves, dreamy evocations not uncommon in Lovecraft's work.

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THE DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH