Having lived for a long while as a literary hermit, it had escaped my attention that serious composers had begun to embrace the works of H. P. Lovecraft as inspiration, much the way the fin de siècle composers embraced the slippery and shifting poetic landscapes of Maeterlinck.  Not until my nephew dragged me into the virtual world of Second Life, and took me to the marvelously realized town of Innsmouth, where I heard the strange mélange of 1930s radio, spoken word, and dark and lustrous orchestral music, did I come to understand that the musical landscape had altered in way that the somewhat primitive and backward communities of film, television, and science fiction fandom had ignored completely.

More recently, at Sunday tea, Lezlie Kinyon, editor of Coreopsis Journal, asked if anyone knew any music reviewers.  My wife, Diana L. Paxson, pointed out that I had been a pretty busy theater and music critic for several newspapers in the 1970s, and thus I was introduced to the music of Tim Rayborn, who I am sure I must know as a person but was not aware of as a composer.

Working under his nom de musique of Eidolorous, the first collection of pieces to come to my ear is Fragments of Thanatos, a set of seven compositions inspired mainly by H. P. Lovecraft, but also paying tribute to Frank Belknap Long and Ambrose Bierce.  The music is classified as dark ambient, and it certainly qualifies as that, but I think it is somewhat more.

Most ambient music seeks to avoid the thesis and arsis structure to which the latter day human consciousness has been trained.  These pieces, though not programmatic, do move though time in a linear fashion. One of the definitions of music that has been used is ‘the aural structuring of time,’ and ambient music in general defies that particular definition: while one walks away unfulfilled if one does not hear the last movement of a Beethoven symphony, the goal of most ambient music is to leave you with no feeling of loss if your walk into and out of the elevator at any point in the composition.  I do believe that Eidolorous can be taken that way, but more importantly, I think the music can be taken also as segments of time, structured time, in the same way that any sonata can be perceived.

It is important here to understand something about H. P. Lovecraft as inspiration.

While Lovecraft was a master of linear plotting, his strongest power was the evocation of mood.  One does not leave a Lovecraft story with a sense of clear action from point A to point B, but rather with a feeling of what it was like getting from point A to point B.  Mood and atmosphere overwhelm the reader and the plot alike.

That, I think, is what Eidolorous is attempting with this music.  A vaporous sense of movement carries us through each piece and we are surrounded by echoes and touchstones of the story or poem, but the overall experience is one of ineffable beauty and horror.

While “Upon a Moonlit Road” (the Bierce entry) is fashioned from pitifully human fragments, like a desperate attempt to restore normality to a grim and pervasive reality, there is nothing much human or humane in the alien intrusion of “Whispers in the Dark.”  “At the Shores of Madness” begins with a festival (perhaps a bit too bright for the decadent dwellers of Innsmouth) but then descends into a muffled aquatic sound world, only to be transformed again as we approach the desired true home of the Old Ones.

In “A City with No Name” we hear dream-like drifts of melodies that might, after a thousand years, transform in Arabic music.  As al Hazrad stares at the ruins of the once great city the forces that destroyed it emerge to overwhelm his sanity, and finally to leave the city once again alone and forgotten in the sands.

Eidolorous manages a skillful blend of sound throughout.  He has a definite voice, and you won’t mistake him for Mimaroglu, but you will catch the references to Schubert and Birger-Bloomdahl.  He blends his electronic sounds and his musique concete with his traditional orchestra in a way that keeps you listening attentively.

Of course, not much of this will be important if you are engrossed in a game of “Call of Cthulhu,” but that is one of the wonderful things about music.  It serves a multitude of purposes. Telemann is mostly ambient, Beethoven is mostly attentive, and Mozart can be both.

The second collection to be reviewed is called Telesterion.

While Fragments of Thanatos was released in 2014, Telesterion is from 2019, and there is a difference not only of subject matter but a world of subjective difference as well.

To begin with, let’s get the title out of the way.

In more than a thousand years nobody ever divulged what happened in the Telesterion.  The only people who purported to tell what happened were people who never experienced the initiation.  The very best reports are therefore at least second hand, and I suspect not very good. That nobody ever talked should tell us that whatever did happen there must have been pretty overpowering.  Think of it: in more than a thousand years, it was important enough that nobody spilled the beans!

I have been to the ruins of the Telesterion, and the complex leading up to them, and I can assure you there is no way anybody could even guess: though there are a lot of guesses, to be sure.

When one reads the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, one gets the impression of various events widely spaced.  But when one gets there, the little bridge mentioned in the narrative is actually right before you get to the Telesterion.  The ‘rude jests’ would have been just before you entered into the Holy of Holies. From a light-hearted moment at a little bridge over a little creek, one would have gone directly into the immensity of the place of initiation:  a kind of theater around a small central structure. Thousands of people crowding in for… What?

There is no roof over the place today, only ranks of step-like seating of stone, much the color of Pentalic marble, like the Parthenon in Athens.  The hot sun burns down where possibly in Ancient Times there was sealed-in darkness, and in the summer the song of cicadas makes the air buzz. The scent of oleander, the bitter laurel of the Ancients, sweetens the air.

Up the hill is a cliff with a ‘cave.’  Actually, just a depression in the side of the cliff, not much of a cave at all.  Below is the temple of Pluton and Athena, with a huge brick-lined pit for Chthonic offerings.

The Roman additions to the site are mainly restorations and attempts to connect personality cults to the Mysteries.

The physical evidence is overwhelming, but it tells us nothing.

Therefore, it’s anybody’s guess what went on.

The music which Eidolorous has composed must therefore be taken as a very personal expression of feeling: and that is what Eidolorous does extremely well.

The first piece of this set, Stimuli, is my very favorite of all the pieces to which I have listened today.  There is a feeling of excitement, of anticipation, of anxiety, that speaks well of people rushing toward an experience to which they are committed, about which they expect great reward, but about which they are also fearful.  There are Greek dance rhythms exploding into the soundscape, but they are heightened, made frenetic, as if you are dancing toward ecstasy but feeling that maybe you are going too far, maybe just not going to make it. This is a very exciting piece of music!

The second piece, Kathodos, again uses dance rhythms, but they are almost insanely redoubled in their ecstatic frenzy.  This is a descent, a place where there is no turning back. Think of being at a rave where you suddenly realize you don’t know where you are, that you don’t know the way out.  Is this really where you wanted to be? Have you been carried off? Do you have any idea what is going on? –No, you don’t!

In Nadir the darkness comes on full.  It is strangely comforting, like the feeling that you have lost all control and you don’t have to make any more choices, it is all taken care of, it is all over.

Exspes may or may not be the resolution.  This is my second favorite piece of all.  It carries with it a feeling of majesty, a feeling of the presence of divine forces beyond any control.  But now we are a part of it, and whether that is light appearing or whether we are now enfolded in a new reality, it is not ours to understand, it is only a new state which we can seek to grasp.

I may very well be reading a lot into this that the composer did not intend, but then, as I said up there at the top, Eidolorous does subjective emotion extremely well.  What I got out of it may not be what you get out of it. –It is a frequent experience of writers to hear from readers what was meant in a story, and it is often a complete surprise to the writer.  It is a not-infrequent experience for a writer to be berated by a scholar or critic for not meekly submitting to the analysis of said critic or scholar, who clearly knows much better what the writer was attempting than does the writer.  It is from that kind of experience that I make my protestations that that what I got out of the music may not be what you get out of the music, or for that matter, what the composer intended to put into it.

I recently had reason to listen to Roger Norrington’s original recordings of the Beethoven nine symphonies played on original instruments with the original tempi, as Beethoven marked them.  What amazed me was the emergence of Beethoven’s sense of humor. We all know that the first symphony opens with a joke, but what got to me was how that ebullient sense of fun suffused not only the first, but the second, and even the third.  A couple of centuries of performance and tradition have coated Beethoven with a gloomy shadow that, perhaps, the composer did not intend to be there at all. So, when I make all those observations above, it may be that I am doing Eidolorous as great a disservice as Toscanini did to Verdi.

But it is my hope that this review will get you to listen to the music itself, have your own emotional response, and, maybe most importantly, provide some support for this excellent composer.