Anthony DP Mann reads the weird fiction Carcosan classic to a score by Goblin keyboard manipulator Maurizio Guarani on this reissue from Cadabra Records

The King in Yellow sat on my bookshelves for years without being read. Perhaps like various characters that populate Robert W Chambers’s collection of short stories, I feared the volume’s reputation and understood that it could plunge me into depths of cosmic horror. I could become as Jill at the end of The Stone Tape, ascending to another realm while concurrently descending to death. I instinctively wished to avoid becoming unravelled by exposure to that unspeakable place Carcosa. Although the more mundane explanation would have it that it’s not possible to read everything all of the time. Why can’t each of these scenarios be true?

Regardless of the before, I now exist in an afterwards where I have read The King in Yellow. As yet, no one has presented me with a black onyx clasp, I haven’t visited a repairer of reputations, nor has anyone in my circle donned the Pallid Mask. There is time enough for all of that, I suppose. Since I have now taken a step closer to the sort of understanding that dooms rather than enlightens by listening to the Cadabra Records production of the collection’s central tale, “The Yellow Sign”. It’s an intense experience that sustains high levels of unease, yet there is also a lightness to Anthony DP Mann’s telling that lends the story an immediacy and relatability. Mann keeps the narrator as upbeat as possible throughout, which is a smart decision that is in keeping with the source material. The narrator may be a painter, but his experience of the world is tethered to the quotidian and so the terror that appears to be descending upon him cannot, he reasons, be real. Therefore he lies to himself without knowing it, laughs off the horror, and remains buoyant until it is no longer possible to be. His tone is that of a man no longer as genuinely excited by the world as he thinks he is; he has taken to overcompensating. Channelled through Mann, his voice is an American vernacular that grounds him, rather than another choice that would overtly signify the Gothic.

Goblin keyboardist Maurizio Guarani based his score on four themes that he alternates “with no interruption”, according to the liner notes. It’s an approach that works weird wonders, maintaining another narrative layer that supports the reading but also tells its own story. The piece opens with synth sustained ominousness. There’s no creeping build up; Guarani doesn’t take tentative steps into the darkness. One might think that would leave no place left to go, but by introducing themes then finding ways to pull them together and apart, the score remains supple.

Stabbing thriller music less haunted and hunted than, say, Bernard Herrman’s score for Vertigo enters the picture, but instead evokes a sense of the everyday on the cusp of adventure. This causes a suitably disconcerting effect, especially when paired with Mann’s lively delivery. Which gets at the slow beating heart of Chambers’s story and how it terrifies beyond its array of death images. An organ sounds as if it is being transmitted from the 1890s; its lone figure playing his dream fugues in a pristine New York place of worship, flickering in and out of realities. The music loops in on itself like an Escher painting, which parallels the journey of the characters, who experience slivers of future past signifying ends that have already arrived. The wall to wall score provides no doors to get out by.

“In spite of myself, a chill passed over me” says the narrator at one point. A statement that speaks of the cumulative power of the story and the inevitability of the listener succumbing to it on this recording. It also seems to speak of Chambers himself. He let the horror in, but turned away from weird fiction, even appearing to abandon it halfway through The King in Yellow collection, which loses its supernatural intent shortly after the heights of “The Yellow Sign”. Or is this a manipulation of reality that has bled out from the fiction? It seems to me that the dangerous “second part” of the book within the book is literally unreadable in our realm. Although one cannot claim it is safe to read or listen to “The Yellow Sign”.

Psilowave is the sole UK and European distributor of Cadabra Records. Concrete Islands readers get 10% off one copy of the Psilowave Translucent Night Blue Vinyl retail edition of The Yellow Sign by using the code “concreteislands” on their website.

The reissue with all new artwork and jackets is available exclusively from Cadabra Records US.

The Yellow Sign Psilowave UK Euro Variant Trans Blue
Stewart Gardiner
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