Al-Azif

Al-Azif, inspired by the horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, is not a soundtrack to any given story by Lovecraft–-it is an attempt to directly give the sounds and music of Lovecraft's universe, an attempt to make audible the role that music and sound play in so many of Lovecraft’s' stories; and an attempt to depict the warping of Euclidean space as it is invaded by the vaster spaces of which this universe is but a temporary pocket or twist…
The album was composed using now-obsolete versions of Acid Pro and Sonic Foundry, built up from samples of Pierce's own voice, a rainmaker stick, a set of pan-pipes rescued from a dumpster, the University of Wisconsin carillon tower and similar “guerrilla” samples, which were endlessly tweaked, and in cases, using a series of pitch shifts on a single sample, built up as virtual melodic or percussive instruments. This strategy was partly to turn very familiar things into something quite different than they had been, and partly because Pierce is not competent to play any instrument except, perhaps, a theremin.
Al-Azif, the original name of the famed and feared grimoire "Necronomicon", literally means "the sound of insects on a clear desert night"–for the original author, The Mad Arab Abdul Al-Hazred, knew that those voices-in-the-night weren't insects at all, but demonic voices capable of delivering sanity-rending wisdom to those with the ears to hear it.