I Monster is a collaboration between spoken word artist David Yates (also known as Dolly Dolly - who I’ll be returning to in relation to another Lovecraftian Thing at a later date) and music students from Leeds Beckett University. A Dollop of HP (the title of which, for non-UK residents, obliquely references a traditional culinary aspect of British culture) comprises of readings of Lovecaft’s The Music of Erich Zann and Dagon, as well as two of his poems (The Garden and Nemesis), all framed by an evocative incidental score of electronic music.
This is very much in the vein of recent British hauntological electronica, and encompasses some eccentricities of that genre: the music accompanying Nemesis seems to be emulating the theme music to classic 80s technology TV programme, Tomorrow’s World; nonetheless, it does work extremely well - Yates performance is especially bleak and menacing: think Lovecaft read by an official from some sinster British ministry delivering the three-minute warning at the height the Cold War (again, more about which in a later post). This could turn out to be one of my favourite Lovecraftian spoken-word pieces - here’s hoping we hear more Lovecaft from I Monster in the future (I, for one, would relish a complete rendition of the Fungi from Yuggoth sonnet cycle).
Available for download via Bandcamp, for the hipsters and audio-retroists amongst you, this is also available as a limted-edition cassette tape (which I must admit I’m rather tempted by).
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