Alien Stone

A cosmic horror doom setting of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space" (1927). From the debut album Cyclopean Frequencies.

Cyclopean Frequencies album art

The Story

Lovecraft wrote "The Colour Out of Space" in March 1927 and first published it in Amazing Stories in September of the same year. He later described it, in a letter to a friend, as his own favourite of everything he had written — the story that came closest to the truly alien effect he had spent his career chasing.

The setting is the hill country west of Arkham, Massachusetts. A meteorite falls one summer on the farm of Nahum Gardner. Scientists come from Miskatonic University to study it and find that it behaves incorrectly. It will not cool. It shrinks in size when cut. Every test destroys their samples. Inside it is a globule of a colour that does not appear on any spectrum — a hue that can be seen but not described, that seems to belong to a light which should not exist in this world. When the sample is broken open, the globule escapes and vanishes.

Over the following months the farm turns wrong. The fruit grows large and glossy and tastes of nothing. The Gardners' cattle wither and die. The vegetables come out of the ground with shapes that should not be possible. The plants glow faintly in the dark. The colour spreads through the soil, through the well water, through the very substance of the place.

The Gardner family go mad in sequence. Mrs. Gardner first — screaming that something is drawing life out of her. Then the two youngest sons. Then Nahum, sitting in the kitchen, dying slowly while a friend watches him crumble into grey dust. The last thing Nahum says is that it lives in the well.

On the final night, an official party comes out to the farm. They witness the colour rise from the well into the sky — and go home, back to wherever it came from. But part of it stays. A patch of blighted ground remains, a place where nothing grows. Locals call it the blasted heath. It spreads a fraction of an inch every year.

The horror of the story is not what the colour is. The horror is that it cannot be understood in human terms at all — it is not malevolent, not intelligent, not a creature. It is a form of life so alien that its presence alone is enough to poison a world.

The Track

  1. The colour that shouldn't exist

    Alien Stone follows the meteorite from the moment it falls. The first verse is the arrival: silent, no fire, no sound, no turning back — the stone sleeping in the water, drinking from the well, seeping into the roots, feeding on something the universe needs.

    The chorus is the colour itself — a shade of light that shouldn't exist, crawling up out of the morning mist, glowing on the branches, burning a hole in the back of the mind. Nothing that sees it can look away.

    The third verse is the collapse: the harvest bitter, the cattle dead, the wood crumbled to ash, the brilliant magenta fading to grey. The outro is the aftermath — the colour shooting back to wherever it came from, and the ash blowing away over the blasted ground. Nothing but grey. Nothing but grey.

Lyrics

  1. A stone falls down from the absolute black
    No fire, no sound, and no turning back
    It sleeps in the water, it drinks from the well
    A silent invasion, a sickening spell
    It seeps in the roots and it poisons the seeds
    Feeding on something the universe needs
    A shade of light that shouldn't exist
    Crawling up out of the morning mist
    The trees are glowing, the branches twist
    We stare at the shine, we cannot resist
    The color is creeping, the color is blind
    Burning a hole in the back of the mind
    The harvest is bitter, the cattle have died
    There is nowhere left in the cellar to hide
    The wood turns to ash and it crumbles away
    The brilliant magenta is turning to grey
    It leeches the soil, it breathes in the air
    A cosmic spectrum beyond our repair
    Turning to ash…
    Blowing away…
    Shooting back up to the cosmic decay…
    Nothing but grey…
    Nothing but grey…

Listen

Alien Stone appears on the album Cyclopean Frequencies.

Other Tracks on Cyclopean Frequencies

  1. Spin

    Draws on H.P. Lovecraft's Azathoth. The blind idiot god at the centre of the cosmos, whose maddening piping keeps the universe turning. Read more →

  2. Silver Cylinders Fly

    Draws on H.P. Lovecraft's "The Whisperer in Darkness." The Mi-go — fungoid crustacean beings from Yuggoth who harvest human brains into gleaming metal cylinders for transport between worlds. Read more →

  3. Transit Yellow

    The title track. Draws on Robert W. Chambers's The King in Yellow. The play that drives its readers mad; the tattered king; the lost city of Carcosa. Read more →

  4. Violet Bleed

    Draws on H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dreams in the Witch House." Non-Euclidean geometry as a route between worlds. Read more →

  5. Sarnath

    Draws on H.P. Lovecraft's "The Doom That Came to Sarnath." A curse that arrived after the memory of what caused it was gone. Read more →

  6. The Beast

    Draws on H.P. Lovecraft's "The Outsider." The narrator who climbs from the tomb into a candlelit ballroom and sees, in a great mirror, what the guests are fleeing from. Read more →

  7. Hound of Tindalos

    Draws on Frank Belknap Long's "The Hounds of Tindalos," a foundational Cthulhu Mythos story of the entities that dwell in the angles of time and hunt through the smoothness of curves. Read more →

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