H.P. Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward 8XLP boxed-set "Early Bird" now on sale!
Cadabra Records has just started “Early Bird” sales on an extraordinary 8XLP boxed-set of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward!
Andrew Leman has given the performance of a lifetime voice acting Lovecraft’s essential short novel.
It was an absolute joy and an exhilarating experience to compose the soundtrack for this 6 hour beast! For the score I played a vast assortment of analog and digital synthesizers along with acoustic and electric guitars, piano, banjo, harmonium, electronic string arrangements and drones. Barry Knob has masterfully produced the soundtrack as well as provided some beautiful electric guitar drones and additional keyboard arrangements on some of the themes. Christopher Ashley/Slasher Film Festival Strategy has also composed some amazing themes for select and key passages over the course of the tale. Exclusive to the “Early Bird” pre-order is an additional LP of instrumental themes from the soundtrack and this sale is the only way to get this vinyl release.
Weird fiction expert S.T. Joshi has written a wonderful essay contextualizing the importance of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and an overall assessment of the story within Lovecraft’s body of work.
Karmazid and Zakuro Aoyama have both supplied hallucinatory, timeless and masterful art for the boxed-set.
Jonathan Dennison, the founder of Cadabra Records has once again aimed for the stars and has reached them with this glorious work of art! I can’t wait for everyone to soon experience all of the hard work that has gone into this release.
Additional information from Cadabra:
HERE we're offering "Early Bird" sales for "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" by H. P. Lovecraft. This project is our most ambitious yet, as it's our first 8xLP set. Read by Andrew Leman and scored by Chris Bozzone with Slasher Film Festival Strategy, this production will include beautiful art by Karmazid and Zakuro Aoyama. Extensive liner notes by S. T. Joshi and much more. The 8x LP's will be housed in a custom box and will include an 8x page booklet and a poster. Exclusive to our "Early Bird" sale will be a color vinyl variant limited the exact number of pre-orders, and a "Themes" LP at cost ($15). This "Themes" LP will not be avaialble outside of this "Early Bird" sale.
Prices are as follows:
"Early Bird" set - $225
Your purchase helps this project get off the ground and supports the label more than you know.
"The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" will be ready for shipping in late Fall.
Package Includes:
* Limited 8x LP pressing on 150 gram colored vinyl
* Full unabridged reading of H. P. Lovecraft's masterpiece
* Tip-on box
* 12x pg booklet
* Essay by weird fiction scholar S. T. Joshi
* Liner notes by composer Chris Bozzone
* Newly commissioned art by Karmazid and Zakuro Aoyama
* 24" x 36" promotional poster
* "Themes" LP exclusive only through our "Early-bird" offer
An excerpt from Joshi's liner notes:
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward was written at almost the exact midpoint of H. P. Lovecraft’s relatively brief literary career. Composed in perhaps as little as five weeks in the early months of 1927, this 51,000-word short novel is a kind of Janus-figure in the Lovecraftian corpus—a work that simultaneously looks backward, both to the tales that Lovecraft wrote in the first decade of his career, beginning with “The Tomb” in the summer of 1917, and looks forward to the dynamic stories and novellas of 1927–36, including his tales of the Cthulhu Mythos.
The longest of Lovecraft’s fictional works, Charles Dexter Ward is also his most personal. Even those readers unfamiliar with the basic facts of Lovecraft’s biography can scarcely doubt that the opening pages, describing Ward’s birth and upbringing in the old colonial town of Providence, Rhode Island, are thinly veiled allusions to his own childhood. Providence, indeed, becomes a kind of character in its own right in Charles Dexter Ward. Lovecraft was well aware of the witchcraft panic that had tainted the early history of Massachusetts, but he was likewise aware that Rhode Island—founded as a haven for the religiously unorthodox by Roger Williams in 1636, and as a counterweight to the Puritan theocracy of its northern neighbor—was, as it were, providentially free of the religious neuroticism that led to the outbreak of the Salem witch trials of 1692. For fictional purposes, however, it was convenient for Lovecraft to allude in his novel to the unsavory history of Massachusetts; indeed, we will find that the Salem witchcraft may have played at least an indirect role in the inspiration and writing of the novel.