13 Sunday Feb 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
Lovecraft is being translated into the indigenous languages of British Columbia. The latest is “The Cats of Ulthar” in Chinook.
Yay, I know a word in Chinook now. A cat is a ‘puspus’, presumably derived from ‘puss-puss’.
12 Saturday Feb 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Two raw AI Wombo Dreams, illustrating ‘Lovecraft viewing the 1925 eclipse’…
06 Sunday Feb 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings, Podcasts etc.
The Weird Studies podcast’s latest Episode 115 drifts into the observation lounge of Brian Eno’s famous and seminal album Ambient 1: Music for Airports.
This album followed the instrumentals on Another Green World and Before and After Science, and the instrumentals on the Bowie collaboration albums. It then heralded a small but perfectly formed set of such music spread across three solo albums and two made with Cluster.
Much of this then-new type of music could certainly evoke a sense of big weird empty landscapes.
The introductory listening-list of albums would be, in date order:
Another Green World (just the instrumentals)
Before and After Science (just the instrumentals)
Low (with David Bowie, just the instrumentals)
Heroes (with David Bowie, just the instrumentals)
Then the albums:
Ambient 1: Music for Airports
Music for Films
Cluster & Eno (with Cluster)
After the Heat (with Cluster)
Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror
An argument might also be made that Eno’s early lyrics are also profoundly weird, if in a dreamy ‘British surrealist’ way rather than horror-shocker kind of way. But that’s for another post.
05 Saturday Feb 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings
The Deutsche Lovecraft Gesellschaft’s report for January 2022 notes two items of interest.
Their free open-source Lovecraft RPG now has a website at https://fhtagn-rpg.de/. The site is in dual English/German, but the rulebook translation to English is not yet complete. As part of this overall project they have a wiki and are currently calling for German-language wiki contributions about the writers Lovecraft classed as his ‘idols’ during his lifetime.
They also notice what sounds like a substantial German screen/theatre piece which will open a major festival in early May 2022…
The summer season of the Kreuzgangspiele begins on 5th May 2022 with a special premiere for Alexander Ourth and Ulrich Westermann’s theatre project based on the work of American author H. P. Lovecraft, considered the most important author of fantastic horror literature of the 20th century and one who influenced numerous successors. There are performances in the Regina Lichtspiele on 5th, 6th and 7th May 2022, each at 8 p.m.
02 Wednesday Feb 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Dream by Wombo, which is the art-generating AI I’ve been tinkering with to make some of the recent pictures on this blog. The trick is not to accept the often rather-icky raw output, and to use it as the starting-point for a makeover.
After a while you get a feel for what can be ‘built on’. As you can see here from a comparison of the raw and final of the recent ‘Young Conan’ picture.
‘Final’, to which one might still add some crawling ‘undead’ creeping up the rocks behind Conan, and more detailing on the clothing and hair.
‘Raw’, promising but only a starting point.
31 Monday Jan 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
L’Atelier des Flammes Noires has been invited to show at the Japan Expo in France in February 2022, and have an…
exhibition inspired by the cult universe of famous American writer H.P Lovecraft
They’re master leather craftsmen, “specialized in costumes and props”.
30 Sunday Jan 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
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30 Sunday Jan 2022
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts
Bobby Derie has a new excellent blog post giving an account, with plenty of letter extracts, of Helen V. Sully’s 1933 visit to Lovecraft and the New York Circle.
What did she play, though? A quick tickle of Archive.org puts some detail on her talents as a musician, at least in terms of what she played (and thus was likely teaching by 1933). It shows her playing publicly in a string quartet in both 1923 and 1928. 1921 also saw her playing the piano in public. In her music review for the Auburn Journal for 1st August 1935 she reveals her own instruments, calling herself “a violinist and pianist”. This was in the context of the success of the first annual Carmel Music Festival, in which she had participated and played in public.
Lovecraft had also been a child violinist, arduously practising for two years (1897-1899, aged 7-9) under close professional tuition… until it “became such a nightmare” and a complete nervous rejection of classical music set in. He would thus have had a certain appreciation of the training needed in youth to later become a public performer on the violin. Interestingly Lovecraft had kept his boyhood violin…
Three or four years ago I picked up my little neglected violin, tuned it after purchasing new strings, & thought I would amuse myself with its sound, even though I did no better than a rustic village fiddler.
One then wonders if he still had it when Sully arrived? And if she stringed and tuned it up and played it for him? Although he tells Sully in a letter, discussing another musician she had seen, that…
my unmusical ear would be deaf to much of the subtle & unique charm of the rendition.
In a letter of about the same date to Galpin he similarly remarks…
I wish to Hades I had facilities for hearing music well-rendered
The Music of Erich Zann
28 Friday Jan 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Picture postals
If Lovecraft had been able to send back picture-postcards and pages of notes from his dreams…
26 Wednesday Jan 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
The inaugural Chaosium Con is happening in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, on the 8th-9th April 2022. Booking now, and I’d imagine it’s a ‘must do’ event for Lovecraftian RPG players.
Possibly also of interest to RPG players, NecronomiCon Providence is set to start selling passes from 18th February 2022, in anticipation of an August convention.
25 Tuesday Jan 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A curious bit of prog-rock Lovecraftian history and a new interview, new on the prog-tastic Psychedelic Baby magazine’s website…
The legendary underground album ‘Tips zum Selbstmord’ by Lovecraftian prog rockers Necronomicon was originally released in a complex fold-out cover in 1972. The band formed in Aachen and was one of the few progressive groups that dared to perform songs in their native language. [English was then the default language for pop/rock in continental Europe] Lyrics and the band name were taken from the legendary H.P. Lovecraft.
Uninteresting cover artwork, from a Lovecraftian perspective. But possibly the music still has appeal for German Lovecraftians?
06 Thursday Jan 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings
Eldritch-con 2022: A Horror and Fantasy Game Writers’ Convention. In November 2022, including the possibility of…
a unique, luxury pre-convention travel package – a rail journey from Paris, France to Bucharest, Romania upon the Venice Simplon Orient Express [including] a live-action role-playing experience created by Sean Branney / the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society