Kathedral Event Center. June 2-3, 2023
The Nightlands Festival was one of the most singular events ever attended – an artistic quest through darkened sonic spheres only navigated by that surest vehicle — which is the single human voice. The dream of Jonathan Dennison, this “Celebration of Literary Nightmares” ran just one weekend this past summer. Dennison is the founder of Cadabra Records, an imprint of Spoken Art founded in 2015, an amalgam incorporating soundscapes with art and scholarship to complete each vinyl artifact. Held at The Kathedral Event Center—which operated as a Catholic church in a previous incarnation—the mid-century architecture was witness to a truly different sort of religious experience…
An Artists Alley reminiscent of the best pre-2013 NecronomiCons included Dave Felton, Matthew Jaffe, Jeremy Hush (purveying copies of Ekphrastic Beasts, a creature compendium for gamers which he contributed to), Paul Romano and Josh Yelle. Also vending was Matt Bartlett (whose work was performed in a pre-show reading midweek) and Mike “My Middle Name is HORROR” Hunchback (editor of Pulp Macabre). There were festival exclusives available from Cadabra and its publishing extension Chiroptera Press. Fittingly, a chapbook was created to mark the proceedings by Felton – “The Festival” – which was put into hands gratis of that inestimable illuminator.
The introduction of S. T. Joshi to the crowd opened the festivities. His presence alone was reason to attend this weekend as it has been far too long since he was a listed participant in any convention on The East Coast. Joshi gave a verbal foreword to the first spoken word performance, that being M. R. James “Count Magnus”. With a projection of Matt Jaffe’s painting for the Cadabra release (CADABR-91 [2022]) behind him, Robert Lloyd Parry, arguably THE James impersonator, gave a nuanced reading of “Magnus”, with any pauses and occasional silences in his delivery only adding to a perfect whole.
Next up was Jon Padgett delivering Thomas Ligotti’s “The Clown Puppet”, to these eyes apparently from memory (CADABR-86 [2022]). Jon (aka Dr. Locrian), a veritable Ligottian Evangelist, was a revelation himself. If you ever have a chance to attend one of his initially hilarious cum insidiously harrowing interpretations, do so with no hesitation. British character actor Lawrence R. Harvey followed with his fine rendition of Edogawa Rampo’s (A Japanese writer whose name is a takeoff from Poe) “The Human Chair” (CADABR-20 [2018]) accompanied by Slasher Film Strategy. His voice cut through the shadowed rafters of Kathedral like a knife out of a sheath.
After that was the first of the two panels scheduled in the Festival, this initial conversation being on “The Craft Behind Cadabra”. This writer did cameo interviews with Padgett, Harvey, Jonathan Dennison, and the next performer on deck, Andrew Leman of The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society. They all described the process involved in creating each Cadabra product, starting with Dennison and how he chooses which particular voice to go with each record followed by the other panelists describing their initiation to the label.
Andrew concluded Friday’s schedule with a presentation of “The Lurking Fear” (CADABR-005 [2016]), giving a haunted account from the very first paragraphs. Even after the end of the first day, this reviewer remained gripped, enraptured, yet
I was not alone, for foolhardiness was not then mixed with that love of the grotesque and the
terrible which has made my career a series of quests for strange horrors in literature and in
life.
Mention must be made of Chris Bozzone, a soundtrack composer who started working with Cadabra in 2017. His contributions to our group pilgrimage provided the cohesiveness to the entire weekend’s aesthetic.
A repeat of Friday’s lineup doing equally strong material was the only way Day Two of the Festival could compare. Our love of horror and literature did not go unrequited! In some cases, performances even surpassed in intensity. Lloyd Parry’s reading of Cadabra’s upcoming release of Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” held one increasingly spellbound up to that last cadence of “turning over and over on the waves like an otter”. Jon Padgett effortlessly managed another star turn with “Mrs. Rinaldi’s Angel” (CADABR-97 [2022]). Laurence Harvey previewed an upcoming label release which includes Baudelaire’s “Litanies to Satan” (one of the high points of the Festival). Credit Where Due was paid in the second panel “The Art of Cadabra Records” including Felton, Jaffe, Yelle, Hush and Romano with additional teasers for a Cadabra release of “The Rats In The Walls” (a 4-lp boxset!) and Chiroptera Press publications of Thomas Ligotti’s Noctuary and Crampton, with art by Paul Romano and Dave Felton respectively. Andrew Leman brought us all home at the end of the night – to Dunwich that is.
If the idea of sitting through two days of Spoken Word is still hard for you to visualize, let me accentuate: it just sang. This choir in the Kathedral – voices in performance and the response of attendees, all testifying to The Weird Aesthetic as one – made visible that dream that we will hopefully wake to again somewhere in years to come.