In a few months, in the summer of 2026, it will be 100 years since Howard Phillips Lovecraft wrote his most famous story: The Call of Cthulhu.

Published two years later, this text would become the pivot of a significant part of HPL’s work, known as the Cthulhu Mythos. Today, this body of work occupies a substantial place in popular culture, especially since the publication of the famous eponymous role-playing game in the early 1980s.

It should nevertheless be noted that H. P. Lovecraft’s popularity is much greater in France (and in Europe) than in the United States.
There are several reasons for this, among them the interest that the Surrealists took in strange literature and the tireless promotion carried out by the controversial publisher Jacques Bergier in the 1950s, who produced the first translations and at the same time created a largely false yet still persistent myth around Lovecraft: that of an author as mad and misanthropic as his heroes, initiated into the occult sciences and the recipient of forbidden knowledge.

If I am telling you all this, it is because last winter I immersed myself once again in Lovecraft’s writings, in a remarkable french translation produced by David Camus for Mnémos.

As I delved into this superbly edited collection, I discovered the true depth and subtlety of an author far too often caricatured for his stylistic heaviness.

Simply put: it was as though I were reading Lovecraft for the first time, through texts I nevertheless believed I knew well, having read them many times over the past thirty years.

Let us return to the music…

Alongside these readings, I continued recording projects on my modular system. Experiments with patch concepts, tinkering with new plug-ins, a great deal of time spent trying to tame the Xaoc Odessa, and occasional participation in the challenges organized by the French-speaking home-studio community led by Ivan Cohen.

A few elements began to emerge from these sessions, the most concrete outcome taking the form of a strange piece whose creation I described in detail in a previous article.

Even though, at the time, I had not consciously made the connection (obvious in retrospect) between my current readings and my musical project, it seems that Lovecraftian inspiration, carried by David Camus’s elegant translation, was already very much present.

Little by little, I found myself with a substantial mass of heterogeneous sonic material, within which I could sense a form of coherence that I was unable to bring into focus.

This piece, “too long and too dark,” unexpectedly became the key that unlocked my reflections on the coherence I had been trying, in vain, to give to my previous recordings.

Suddenly, what had seemed to me a heterogeneous collection of unfinished tracks with no connection between them appeared instead as the ideal foundation for a larger project in which each piece would be linked to a Lovecraft story.

Thus emerged a six-part concept album, beginning on the dreamlike shores of Kadath and ending in the urban darkness of the visionary tale Nyarlathotep (if there is only one Lovecraft text you should read…).

Six pieces drawing their inspiration from six texts with shifting atmospheres. After the Dreamlands, the listener is carried into the profound melancholy of The Strange High House in the Mist, the ancient mysteries of The Nameless City, the fantastic world of The Whisperer in Darkness, and the horror of The Colour Out of Space, a prelude to the inevitable finale described in Nyarlathotep.

So I submitted the album, and it was immediately accepted by Cyclical Dreams. It will now join a catalog that is both rich and discerning, home to artists as talented as Rodrigo Passananti, Small Chief, Michael Brükner, DaFou and Thaneco, to name but a few. Needless to say, it is a great honor for me to become part of such a remarkable label.