H.P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror reissued as a 3XLP set and is now on sale
H.P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror has just been reissued in a remixed, enhanced and expanded 3XLP set as a 2nd edition by Cadabra Records! For this reissue I wrote and performed additional musical themes as part of the soundtrack with the intention of intensifying the pacing and creating more of a tension-filled and foreboding musical flow within a superior overarching mix. Andrew Leman gives a pitch-perfect performance of one of the most celebrated cosmic horror stories in all of weird fiction. I was thrilled to score The Dunwich Horror and revisit it for this updated version. Cadabra Records founder Jonathan Dennison has once again assembled an even more magnificent multi-record set that is a real joy to experience.
For the soundtrack, I played a wide variety of instrumentation that includes nylon-string acoustic guitar, electric guitar as well as an array of different synthesizers, harmonium and banjo. It's definitely one of my favorite releases and soundtracks to date out of everything I've had the distinct pleasure of working on for Cadabra. The music was marvelously produced by Barry Knob who also played some amazing electronic bass and creeped-out Mellotron parts. Todd Mendelsohn's contributions to the score really shine. He played some wonderful and highly atmospheric additional keyboard parts and arrangements along with a series of deeply hypnotic programmed drums. Stephen Quaranta added some extra potency into the mix with a haunting piano line that snakes through the harmonium-led theme along with a fantastic drum machine part that is a one-off variant of the main synthesizer-based theme which closes out the story and the final side of the set.
The art for this release by Karmazid is nothing short of mind-blowing as he has brought The Dunwich Horror to life in a way that will live on for many years to come. Josh Yelle's beautiful hand calligraphy once again expertly corresponds with Karmazid's art.
H.P. Lovecraft and weird fiction authority, S.T. Joshi provides an illuminating essay about The Dunwich Horror.
Jonathan Dennison has gone to great lengths to make The Dunwich Horror 3XLP set a peerless production and it is a limited vinyl pressing of only 300 copies so act accordingly!
More details from the Cadabra press release:
H. P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror 3x LP set - Read by Andrew Leman, score by Chris Bozzone.
This is a complete overhaul, remixed with added scoring, a fully unabridged reading of one of Lovecraft's most beloved tales of cosmic horror.
* Limited pressing on 150 gram vinyl
* Printed on a deluxe triple gatefold jacket
* Essay by weird fiction scholar S. T. Joshi
* Newly commissioned art by Karmazid
* Hand calligraphy by Josh Yelle
The pairing of Andrew Leman's voice and Chris Bozzone's music for The Dunwich Horror shows just how much respect and admiration these two have for what is one of the absolute core stories in H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. If ever there were a story which laid out so much in such a succinct fashion, this would be it.
Over the course of four LP sides, the tale of Old Whateley's strange offspring, Wilbur, is told, and the harrowing story is one of ever-increasing tension and madness. It is therefor appropriate that Bozzone's main theme for The Dunwich Horror is one of circular alarms, the sound of synthesizer seeming to doppler in and out of the speakers as if hearing a far-off tornado siren. The tones of alert, warning all at a distance that something – or some thing – is out there, wreaking havoc, is only too appropriate to the account related here.
At the times when the tale is relating elements of a mysterious nature, as when the monstrous creature first escapes and become the titular horror, Bozzone uses a classical guitar to create a sense of pastoral dread. The sound is beautiful, but undeniably ominous, the plucking of the strings placidly announcing the terror which is lurking somewhere in the forest and hills just beyond reach.
When interior scenes of learning and knowledge take place, Bozzone's synths take on an ecclesiastical aura. The sound is akin to one of a small church organ. While there are no scenes which take place in or near a house of worship, knowledge is very much the Whateleys' religion. It might be a hideous inverse of what one might think of as worship, but the ever-ongoing quest for more enlightenment as to what lies beyond human understanding is very much equivalent in Lovecraft's telling.
Hearing Leman read from the Necronomicon at length is a hair-raising experience. The reader's voice is doubled by a static-filled echo, as if coming from somewhere outside this dimension, being relayed by both Leman himself, but also channeling the Great Old Ones, as he recites, “The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen,” from the book written by Abdul Alhazred.
Less terrifying are Leman's myriad voices for the many personages populating Lovecraft's saga. The reader finds voices and accents for each, every one of them distinct in accent, age, and affectation. Merely hearing a line or two from one of these individuals means that an image is instantly generated in one's mind eye, so vividly accurate are they.