The Lovecraft Sextet Tell a Horror Story on ‘In Memoriam’

Jason Köhnen has had Bong-ra, Mansur, the Thing with Five Eyes, Voodoom, the Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble, the Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation – and more that I’m not mentioning. But now, Köhnen has found yet another handle through which he can create his unique blend of murky ambient sounds and slow swing. It’s called the Lovecraft Sextet, and he has truly taken the namesake to heart.

Just like fellow Denovali labelmate Thomas Bücker’s Bersarin Quartett, Köhnen’s Lovecraft Sextet is likely not a sextet. Without knowing too much, I believe it’s mostly him and the occasional outside helping hand. But this new name’s debut album In Memoriam is a companion piece to a short story of the same name, also written by Köhnen, which comes in PDF and audio form. As an album all by itself, In Memoriam is a pretty one-dimensional experience. Paired up with the short story, it’s a more satisfying product overall.

The subtitle of Köhnen’s story is “A Lovecraftian Tragedy”, so you know that he won’t mind being accused of aping the infamous horror writer’s style. “They circled the sealed casket like flocked crows, as quiet and still as the dead.” True, funerals aren’t known to be lively affairs, but Köhnen’s music and imagery and the woman’s ominous voice reading the story plunge the party’s mood to new depths. Without giving away too much, I’ll only divulge that In Memoriam’s protagonist is a blind orphan and its antagonist has tentacles.

The MP3 of the story has Köhnen’s music in the background. Still, it is enhanced by sound effects, enhancing passages like “…who had wrapped its limbs so lovingly around her parents, ripping them to shreds, their innards turned inside out and their ruptured bodies perforated by what seemed an arsenal of tentacle-form piercings that had drilled all life from them both”. If that’s too much for you, there’s always “[T]ongues licked her skin, eliciting tiny imperceptible shivers of pleasure,” which is accompanied by similar noises.

There are no such sound effects in the album proper. There are only two different songs at play here, each getting remix (for lack of a better word) movements named “Vocalis”, “Musicorum”, and “Ambientum”. These are more-or-less self-explanatory. “Funebre Macabre” is a waltz so slow that, if you weren’t listening closely, you’d swear it was moping along an even-numbered meter. Its “Vocalis” features a female operatic voice buried in the back of the mix, making it no more important in the big picture than the lightly brushed percussion.

The “Musicorum” track swaps out the voice for what could be a soprano saxophone, and the “Ambientum” takes the percussion out entirely, letting an echo-laden piano work its way around the main figure. “De Mysteriis” starts out as a death march but eventually bends into a death waltz not unlike “Funebre Macabre”. This time the “Vocalis” features a distant male voice while the “Musicorum” goes back to the soprano sax. The “Ambientum” track does a more thorough job of hiding the piece’s identity than the previous one, making it the most interesting five minutes on the album. Piano, harp – or perhaps a harpsichord setting on a keyboard – flutter through the air, creating a moment that Köhnen may or may not have meant to be bittersweet.

In Memoriam is an exercise in creating variations on a theme. The album and short story together is an exercise in true, blue heart-on-your-sleeve mixed media. I usually dismiss the idea as music existing for background purposes, but with In Memoriam, Jason Köhnen has created a fitting foreground for his new musical adventure. Hopefully, his next venture under this name will take it all to another level.