Music In Diabola

Lately I've been spending an inordinate amount of time listening to what I believe to be the only record of its kind: a concept album based entirely upon Lovecraft and his writing. The album is titled Cacophony and was released by the band Rudimentary Peni in 1983. As the band name implies, it's doubtful that HPL would have found much enjoyment in something so discordant (Gilbert & Sullivan it ain't), but if one has a taste for progressive and utterly experimental punk rock, Cacophony is a rich and rewarding experience.

Rudimentary Peni are viewed as cornerstones of the anarcho-punk movement that flourished in Britain in the early 80s as a reaction to Thatcherism, but they always considered their music to have more gothic overtones, and they've been justifiably claimed by the deathrock community as well. After two EPs and one full-length that focussed primarily on socio-political issues, Cacophony's sole focus on Lovecraft was taken as an esoteric and almost fanciful departure from the band's previous work. The complexity and richness of the subject matter led to radical experiments with form and sound that transcended the boundaries of traditional punk (at the time of Cacophony's release, punk in Britain was depressingly starting to fall in line with a rigid series of self-imposed rules and expectations). In the words of the band themselves, Cacophony is "less an album of songs than it is a full soundtrack to an anarchic play. Each 'act' is inextricably linked to those before and after it, often by unaccompanied spoken word." The spoken word sections sample from Lovecraft's fiction and letters, and include early critical pannings, an overlapping jumble of all the pen-names used by Lovecraft, a slovenly barked reading of the drinking song from "The Tomb". The music (which includes Lovecraftian lyrics) that these sections bracket is delivered in brief, discordant sections that traverse through a variety of styles and tempos.

It's been trendy to drop Lovecraftian references into punk and heavy metal albums for some time now, but usually this consists of little more than a muttering about Cthulhu or the Necronomicon at some point, with no thought or mention of the context of those creations, let alone Lovecraft's corpus and life as a whole. Cacophony goes to great lengths to not only frame the passages of pure Lovecraftian horror properly (heavy vocal distortion is applied to a passage from "The Whisperer In The Dark" to replicate the horrid buzzing voice found on Akeley's phonograph), but also to explore as many aspects of Lovecraft's life itself as possible. His ode to the Kappa Alpha Tau fraternity of cats, youthful ruminations on suicide, late acceptance of the New Deal and "aristocratic socialism," and innumerable other personal tidbits find their way into Cacophony. Between the richness of the subject matter at hand and the band's willingness to pursue and discover its aural counterpart, regardless of where that pursuit led them musically, the entire album has a disarming sense of fun, play, and liberty.

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