The Red Tower

CADABR-66 2020

LP

The second collaboration between reader Jon Padgett and musician Chris Bozzone is another adaptation of Thomas Ligotti’s writings. This triumvirate of reader, musician, and writer is a coming-together of individuals who are all on their own superlative talents, but when combined, form a particularly powerful collective

At the outset, Bozzone’s music swirls and eddies like “the gray emptiness” and “desolate horizon” which surround the titular Red Tower. There’s an energy here, matched by the intensity of Padgett’s reading. Together, they create an impression within the mind of the listener that this speaker could be either an exceptionally excited party, delighted to have the opportunity to share this tale or someone who has possibly succumbed to the lunacy of the “hallucinatory” accounts told to them, “rendered in borderline gibberish.”

   Given the narrator’s repeated referral to his own degeneracy, it is far more likely the latter, and we are hearing the tale of someone whose mania is total. As the tale descends from that desolate plain on which the Tower sits, delving deeper into the bowels of the building, several stories beneath the earth, the music becomes that of droning terror, and Padgett’s reading takes a matter-of-fact turn rendering all the more horrific that which he is describing. Never should any sane creature tell explain a “murky vision of graveyard […] a subterranean graveyard surrounded by a crooked picket fence” in anything less than horrified tones.

Of special interest on this LP are the tracks on the album’s second side, as it marks the second adaptations of Ligotti’s “I Have A Special Plan For This World” and “This Degenerate Little Town,” both of which were first performed by the band Current 93 in the early ’00s. The original “I Have A Special Plan” was read by the band’s David Tibet, who is himself a poet, and “This Degenerate Little Town” was read by the author himself, with music which is discrete, blended as it is with the readers’ voices.

While those recordings were marked by tape delay, pauses, and not a little bit of reverberant echo, here Padgett’s voice is in the forefront, marked by a weathered, raspy edge to his voice in the former and a world-weary sadness in the latter. This vocal stylings transform the pieces from their previous interpretations as the rambling rantings of a discombobulated madman to ones which are terrifyingly direct, especially in the case of “I Have A Special Plan.”

   Bozzone’s music for these two pieces has unique elements which come out of the ether to disconcert and charm. The disconcerting aspect comes in “I Have A Special Plan,” where a music box is so closely recorded that one can hear the ratcheting sound of the gears unwinding, adding mechanical dissonance to what would otherwise be charming beauty. The quiet desolation of “This Degenerate Little Town” is counterbalanced by spare piano, reversing the pattern of the track which precedes it.

**Credits:**

Written by Thomas Ligotti

Artwork by Jason Barnett

Score, liner notes by Chris Bozzone

Liner notes by Matt Cardin

Read by Jon Padgett

Deluxe heavy weight tip-on gatefold jacket

8 page booklet with new essay by author Matt Cardin

18" x 24" promotional poster

**Variants:**

Black ???

Subscriber (Red swirl)

I Have A Special Plan for this World (Opaque orange mix, 70 copies)

This Degenerate Little Town (White with blue swirl, 40 copies)

Splatter (xx copies)

Wax mage (xx numbered copies)

Test pressing (25 numbered copies)