H.P. Lovecraft
Il sogno e l'incubo. Vita e opere di H.P. Lovecraft

Black Widow of Genova releases a tribute album to the Solitaire of Providence, demonstrating how his influence on the musical world has always been very strong. The booklet of Il sogno e l’incubo. Vita e opere di H.P. Lovecraft is simply spectacular. The illustrations show us the bizarre sculptures of Andrea Bonazzi, a dark and peculiar figure, a talented sculptor and visionary of Lovecraftian mad deities. We also find some drawings by Luca “Laca” Montagnani. The booklet also extensively discusses the magazine Studi Lovecraftiani curated by Pietro Guarriello, one of the leading Italian experts on H.P. Lovecraft. Cesare Buttaboni instead focuses on the musical influences of the Solitaire of Providence. In the limited vinyl edition, a biography of Lovecraft written by Paul Roland is also given as a gift.

This album contains numerous references to the crazy Universe of HPL, starting with the legendary Death SS with the track "Necronomicon" that explicitly refers to the notorious “pseudobiblion”. A special mention certainly goes to the English minstrel Paul Roland, a great and eccentric admirer of the supernatural and the bizarre (who in the past dedicated his personal homage to Lovecraft in the album "Re-Animator" with effective pieces like “Charles Dexter Ward”, “Arkham”, “Cthulhu”, and “Abdul Alhazred”). Paul Roland is present here with the tracks “The Cats Of Ulthar” and “The Music Of Erich Zann” (a story set in Paris talking about an incomprehensible music leading to madness coming from the abysses of the Cosmos). The Witchwood, with “La maschera di Innsmouth” (also authors of a beautiful video for the track), set to music an undisputed Lovecraftian masterpiece story while Mortiis, with his peculiar gloomy sound, ventures into the novella (from Lovecraft's early artistic phase) "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath". Other Lovecraftian classics like “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward” are presented by the Blue Dawn and Vitam Aeternam. La Janara ventures into the extra-dimensional universes of “La casa stregata” populated by the creature Brown Jenkin, a rat with a human face. The Dunwich with “At The Mountains OF Madness” present what was perhaps Lovecraft's greatest effort, a novel (in my opinion, too slow) where he poured a lot of energy and which was rejected by the magazine Weird Tales. Eminence Noir and L’Impero delle Ombre set to music “Dagon”, a 1917 story very important within the Lovecraftian “corpus” constituting the first example of the powerful mythology he invented (though, in this case, it references a deity really worshipped in more or less remote times). There is also a musical version of “The Colour Out of Space”, considered among his most successful and sci-fi closest texts, describing a horror from the stars leading to an actual human tragedy. Worth noting is also Il Segno del Comando with "X'n-yan", a collaboration with writer Zelia Bishop (but practically only a product of her genius) which plays an important role in the development of the Cthulhu Mythos, the Salem Cross with “Red Hook”, the latter dating back to his New York exile period, the The Magik Way with the dreamlike “Hypnos”, the Runaway Totem with “Nodens”, the Soul of Enoch with “Festival in Kingsport”, and La Stanza delle Maschere with “Aria fredda”.

I don't hesitate to define “Il sogno e l'incubo” as one of the most beautiful musical tributes I've ever listened to. The iconographic context of the work makes it unmissable. Available on Black Widow's website at the following link: https://blackwidow.it/.