Ivory Bunker Recordings

A couple of days too late for Lovecraft’s lesser feast, and aeons too late to change the fate of the Earth being invaded by some Elder Gods and Great Old Ones…. yes, I’m setting the tone for some eldritch horrors here:

I was young and I needed the trouble, so what better than to wake up great Cthulhu and go mad… And thus it came to pass that back in 2004 my debut album, The Necrophonicon, was spawned.

It’s not, nowadays, the oldest album of mine available online as some like Alien Audio Absurdities or Dubnihilism were recorded earlier, they just never saw a release until years later. But it was, following a couple of compilation tracks and remixes, my first full length release at the time. In its original form it came out on CD (ISO13) on Isolate Records, a pioneering US electronic/IDM/Breakcore label run by mastermind Wai Cheng aka Optic, who sadly passed away in 2006. “On The Verge Of The Best Madness So Far” was originally intended as follow up release on 12″. More on that in an upcoming post.

For logical reason The Necrophonicon was labelled a Lovecraftian thing (that, in the opinion of some at least, shouldn’t be). The name was inspired by the Necronomicon, here becoming the book of dead sounds. I liked the idea of “killing sounds”, as literally a lot of the sounds on the album where samples that were “killed” – mangles, mashed up, distorted, resynthesized until their original life had left them, and they took up some form of zombie- or afterlife. There are also a number of tracks that all are lovecraft inspired – Miss Cthulhu84, Innsmouth Rock-A-Doodle, Frozen Deserts (with its vocal sample from an audio-play of At The Mountains of Madness) or Tentacle Ballet.

But it also had more general pulp & some sci-fi influences – Battle for the 10th Planet, I did it for Satan… and some weird La Vey inspired bull-isht bits Luciferette and I. I certainly saw it more as a pulp/sleaze/b-movie kinda thing, than strictly Lovecraftian. And now you all know…

Recently, after almost 20 years (yay, anniversary in October 2024 – may need to think of something for that), The Necrophonicon has entered the realm of Streaming Services:

Also Apple Music; Youtube Music; Youtube; Amazon and Juno Download, amongst others.

Hardcore adepts, of course, will buy via Ivory Bunker Bandcamp!

For those after a bit more trivia – the very first Lovecraft story I read was “Cool Air”. I found it in a collection of horror stories in our school library. Yes, school libraries are important! I was, however, already familiar with the name from its very prominent feature on cover of Iron Maiden’s legendary Live after Death album… Among my favourite stories are Dreams in the Witchhouse (which I’ve adapted for a compilation, the name of which I still find unspeakable… I mean, we all know how scared of anything to do with sex HPL was…); Dreamquest for Unknown Kadath, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Mountains of Madness (one of those books, along with William Gibsons Neuromancer that I make a point of re-reading every couple of years) and In The Walls of Eryx. But there are, of course, many more.

Soon, quasi part 2 on this topic, a bit of background on “On The Verge Of The Best Madness So Far”. Stay tuned (or out of tune, as long as you keep vib(rat)ing… f’thagn