Spin

A cosmic horror doom setting of H.P. Lovecraft's Azathoth — the blind idiot god at the centre of the cosmos. From the debut album Cyclopean Frequencies.

Cyclopean Frequencies album art

The Story

Azathoth is the blind idiot god at the centre of everything Lovecraft wrote. He appears first in the fragment "Azathoth" that Lovecraft began in June 1922 and never finished, and again more fully in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (written 1926–27, published posthumously in 1943), where he sits enthroned at the ultimate centre of chaos beyond ordered space.

In Lovecraft's cosmology, Azathoth is not evil. Evil would require intention. He is the daemon-sultan — vast, mindless, blind — around whom the outer dark writhes in one endless spiral. He is what would be everywhere if it stopped dreaming.

Around him, in a perpetual circle, the amorphous flute-players play. Their music is thin, monotonous, maddening. It has always been playing. It cannot stop.

Because if it stopped, Azathoth would wake.

And the universe is Azathoth's dream.

He is referenced across the wider Cthulhu Mythos — in "The Whisperer in Darkness," "The Dreams in the Witch House," "The Haunter of the Dark," and in many of Lovecraft's letters. Nyarlathotep is his messenger. Yog-Sothoth stands at his gates. The blind idiot at the throne is the older thing, the deeper thing, the thing there was no need to name until there was.

The Track

  1. Azathoth in miniature

    Spin is Azathoth in miniature. The spin is everything. The light folding in is a black hole. The idiot is the idiot god at the centre; as he stirs, the universe glitches. The second verse is the pipers who surround him — keep the rhythm, keep the time — because if the melody breaks, the sleeper wakes, and the sleeper waking is the end of it. The cosmos exists only as long as they don't stop.

    The lyrics run through twice. The second pass hits differently, once you know what "the sleeper is going to wake" means.

Lyrics

  1. At the centre of the spin
    Where the light is folding in
    The idiot begins to stir
    The universe begins to blur
    Keep the rhythm, keep the time
    Riding on the edge of the line
    If the melody should break
    The sleeper is going to wake

Listen

Spin appears on the album Cyclopean Frequencies.

Other Tracks on Cyclopean Frequencies

  1. 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 →

  2. Alien Stone

    Draws on H.P. Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space." A meteorite falls on a Massachusetts farm, and something not-quite-a-colour bleeds into the soil, the water, and everything living. 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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