Just when you thought it was safe to back into the Spook House for the Late-Night Monster Show, The Howling return with our latest two-track EP. This digital release offers radical new takes on two tracks taken from our recent Wormhole album Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway.
Track A is a video version of ‘The Skydivers’, The Howling’s deadpan exposition on a spectacularly lacklustre movie melodrama, backed by the throbbing of a customised street rod engine. Combining the original studio version of the track with visuals specially prepared for a recent live performance, ‘The Skydivers’ offers all the highs and lows of this moody soap opera in which people either fall in love or throw themselves out of planes. The Howling would like to acknowledge with grateful thanks the expert role played by our Executive Producer Lori E Allen in the final stages of preparing this video for release.
Track B is a pounding live version of another track taken from The Howling’s Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway release. ‘The Picture of A Picture of Dorian Gray’ pays tribute to a 1970s Italian soft-core porn adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s classic novel. Using keywords scraped from the IMDB entry for the movie, The Howling reconstructs Wilde’s narrative as a fragmented sequence of plot points, themes and images. This recording was made in the teeth of severe technical problems at the Horse Hospital in London on 3 November 2023 and turned out to be greatly enhanced by them. This live version also includes a spoken-word introduction written by me for live performances of the piece but not featured on the album version.
‘The Skydivers’ video c/w ‘A Picture of the Picture of Dorian Gray’, live at the Horse Hospital is out now from The Tapeworm and can be found here.
Described in The Wire as ‘the missing link between John Cage and Suicide’, The Howling is a collaborative project I started with sound artist Howlround devoted exclusively to their shared love of text, audiotape and trash.
We have presented work at Iklectic and the British Film Institute; and our track ‘David Gest, Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor’ was prominently featured in the Loewe SS24 catwalk show during Paris Fashion Week. We’re still not sure why.
The Howling – ‘The First Name in Excitement!’
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