In an effort to familiarise myself with the inspiration for Blarke Bayer’s The King in Yellow, the proto-Lovecraftian collection of short stories of the same name by gilded age goth Robert W. Chambers, I chanced upon a YouTube explainer with the Ulysses-tier runtime of nine hours by a guy called Flawed Peacock. Initially I took this as some metatextual allusion to the ruinous obsession that surrounds Chambers’ play-within-a-story (also called ‘The King in Yellow’), though the theory was quickly dispelled after seeing that our man also has a fifteen-hour filibuster on a video game called Hypnospace Outlaw. This eye-watering level of detail can be seductive but, after losing days at a time to Wikipedia vortexes that start with a page like ‘Tokugawa Shogunate’ and somehow arrive at ‘Hay fever in Japan’, I had danced my last dance with that devil.
Fortunately, it didn’t take nine hours for a leaf through some long-lapsed copyright to see where Blarke Bayer, aka My Disco guitarist Benjamin Andrews, was coming from. Where the book’s first reference to the play ‘The King in Yellow’ depicts the sinister Solaris-like twin-sunned city of Sarcosa where ‘cloud waves break’, the album wastes no time with its own Dantean scene setting. ‘Angelus’ chimes in a brief opening matinee call of church bells before the droning guitar weight of ‘The Yellow Sign’ and ‘In the Court of the Dragon’ comes to bear with batteries of cresting feedback one imagines lashing the shoreline of some knackered guano island. The establishing shot of foaming Gaian wrath finally breaks into the first sense of human life with the concrète interlude ‘Behind the Lake’. Here, what sounds like a manic rummage through kitchen clutter evokes the scene of wading through household memories pulverised beyond recognition in the wake of a tidal wave. (If you’ve listened to My Disco, you’re probably well-acquainted with this flair for bleakness.)
In the second half, the abstracted textures mutate into more discernible motifs, suggesting a move from the churning external chaos into the internal worlds of paranoid delusion that haunt the King’s unwitting acolytes. ‘The Last King’, my favourite cut of the record, could almost pass for regal fanfare if it weren’t drenched in a dreamlike smear of Jack Nitzche-style reverb, as if the king’s band were announcing him from the bottom of a well. In a manner befitting the delirious self-idolatry described in Chambers’ opening tale ‘The Repairer of Reputations’, Andrews warps the song’s disarmingly consonant melody into the blurred promise of a mirage. ‘Black Stars’ and ‘The Mask’, meanwhile, recall the blunted percussion and hallucinatory choral work of Mica Levi’s ‘Zone of Interest’ OST, creating an impression of dense baroque detail buried under muted frequency ranges and whittled transients.
Where the first side favours the rumbling feedback and searing resonances that are more typical of Blarke Bayer’s prior output, the latter section showcases equal proficiency in more nuanced world building. Here, Andrews’ foregrounds his agnostic approach to punishing guitar strings; one that has seen very capable forays into black metal (Kilat) and grindcore (Agents of Abhorrence). It is this versatility, combined with the source material and the echo-rich terroir of the studio space in an Aussie gold rush town church, that lends itself easily to a cinematic quality.
In specific film terms, I couldn’t help thinking of Ari Aster’s recent COVID-era schizo-noir Eddington while absorbing the two (or is it three?) Kings In Yellow. There is an eerie modern day relevance to the book’s ‘future’ 1925 New York white ethno-state, complete with an Epsteinian conspiracy to blackmail scandal-ridden fat cats that entrances wayward souls who are hungry for heroics. Add a little pandemic the mix, and you can easily recognise this as the same QAnonian derangement syndrome that hyperventilates through cyberspace and consumes Eddington’s protagonist. Listening to Blarke Bayer’s surging apocalypto, I imagine that Aster, a champion of scoring with established avant-gardists who play with demon-conjuring levels of intensity, would easily find common cause.
Whether Andrews was more concerned with the timeless gothic intrigue of The King in Yellow or its bleak modern portents, the album serves both ends well. This is no easy feat when literary or politically inspired titles can so easily feel unmoored from the feel of the music they ornament.
