The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.71: English Heretic Visitors Guides: Passport to the Qliphoth

English Heretic’s Visitors Guides:Your Passport to the Qliphopth appeared in my postbox this morning - a reissue of a CD which I believe was first released in the mid-2000s. Whilst initially not explicitly Lovecraftian, the snaking tentacles on the cover - along with what I think is an image taken from one of only two explicitly Lovecraft-themed artworks produced by Austin Osman Spare - infer Lovecraft’s influence on this piece of experimental-occultural electronica; in addition to which, the following online sleeve notes locate the album's five tracks within those increasingly familiar intersections between Aleister Crowley, LAM, Kenneth Grant, and the UFO phenomenon - intersections to which Lovecraft’s work is (oc)culturally salient:

'In 1919, Aleister Crowley achieves rapport with an entity of extra-terrestrial intelligence, LAM, via an opium  laced vision, The Amalantrah Working. Close to death, he passes on a portrait of LAM to his acolyte Kenneth Grant. London 1949, Gerald Gardner and Grant attempt to bring down the power from alien sources on the site later occupied by Centre Point. In 1980, Rendlesham, Suffolk, becomes a Centre Of Pestilence prophesised by mediums in Grant's occult lodge of the late 1950s. Is the epidemic of alien visitations following the dropping of the Atomic bomb in August 1945 due to a cataclysmic upheaval in our cosmic consciousness... are these entities really energy spectres, dakinis and distant cousins of Lovecraft's Outer Ones? In a mind expanding voyage through England's Qliphoth, we are proud to present a series of Visitor's Guides: audio recordings and aural assays, the radioactive samples of researches at the cold war citadel of Orford Ness, the site of the suspected UFO crash landing at Rendlesham, the ruins of Dunwich, a witch lair at Brundish, the carnal tunnels of Soho.’

I have to say that, after listening to it, I was rather unsettled to discover that four of the tracks from Your Passport to the Qliphoth were recorded at sites which I had myself visited in the mid-to-late 2000s - as part of my own speculative investigations into the strange entanglements between the eerie Suffolk landscape (and some of the weird Lovecraftesque folklore which clusters around Orford Ness), contemporary ufology, and Lovecraftian esotericism...