'At The Mountains Of Madness' opens 'Weird Fiction' with eight and a half minutes at 142 BPM in C major, and the title is no accident: it's the novel Lovecraft wrote in 1931, the one about the Antarctic expedition that finds what should never have been woken. Yerba Divina, a Turin-based project that had already circled this universe with the 'Cthulhu' EP (2024) — mastering and artwork included —, turns eight titles from weird literature into eight psytrance cuts for Brahmasutra Records. Four of them are enough to read the map.
'Fungi From Yuggoth' is the most revealing pick of the lot. The source isn't a short story but a cycle of 36 sonnets written between late 1929 and early 1930, and the track answers in kind: 8:17 tagged at 75 BPM in Db minor, far below the 142-154 block that rules the rest. It's the moment the album stops running and starts describing.
At the opposite end, 'The Silver Key' is both the fastest cut (154 BPM) and the longest (8:31), held in F major: the brightest face of a record that rarely looks for one.
The closer is 'The Moon Bog', 7:55 at 92 BPM in Ab major. The story behind it, written in 1921 and published by Weird Tales in 1926, tells what happens to the man who drains a bog the locals begged him to leave alone. Ending there, at a restrained tempo and in a major key, leaves the album floating in that deceptive calm that, in Lovecraft, always comes right before the consequence.
The rest stretches between those four points: five cuts live between 142 and 154 BPM while three are tagged at 69, 75 and 77, so 'Weird Fiction' works less like a continuous set than like an anthology — each story with its tempo, each tempo with its own kind of fear.
Sources: Bandcamp · Wikipedia · Wikipedia
