missing scenes
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"

audiobook / score / experimental / ambient

“There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s haunting chronicle of crippling depression, The Yellow Wallpaper, is a cornerstone of weird fiction. First published in 1892, it has now been given an unsettling yet empathetic treatment courtesy of Robert Hunter (score) and Linda Jones (narration) that skillfully brings the listener into the tale’s interiority and demonstrates its timelessness.

Weaving sound into patterns that gradually reveal themselves like those lurking in the titular wall covering, Hunter’s score pairs with Jones’s graceful delivery to masterfully guide the listener through the nameless narrator’s insular world. The listener is invited to examine the wallpaper, first with revulsion, then with inquisitiveness, and finally concern until the time arrives to find out what lurks within—or behind—the hideous wallpaper. The listener experiences the oppressive weight of an ever-shrinking world with its attendant lack of stimuli, obsessiveness offering the only escape.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860 – 1935) was an early feminist and sociologist, with complicated views both progressive (resisting a patriarchal society) and regressive (espousing eugenics). Though largely remembered today for The Yellow Wallpaper, she also wrote nonfiction, poetry and songs. Written after a severe bout of postpartum psychosis and the subsequent “rest cure treatment,” The Yellow Wallpaper was groundbreaking in its examination of the stigma and misogynist attitudes surrounding women’s mental and physical health. At the same time, The Yellow Wallpaper triumphs as an early work of weird fiction that would subsequently influence the development of the genre.

Robert Hunter has been creating music under a variety of monikers and in various projects, like Conversations About the Light, Occulted Sound, Self Spiller and Snares of Sixes. His current project, missing scenes, has released five albums of lunar-infused dreamscapes. The Yellow Wallpaper opened his eyes to how deep the well of weird fiction runs, which combined with a childhood love of soundtracks, inspired him to create a score of creeping unease that by turns evokes the feelings of paranoia, curiosity and fragility that live in the heart of the tale.

Linda Jones is an award-winning narrator and actor with over 100 audiobook narrations to her credit. Her intuitive, empathetic reading of The Yellow Wallpaper brings its complexities to life, revealing a tale that is just as relevant now as it was upon publication.

Together, the creative team of Hunter, Jones, Saprophial (artwork), Marius Sjøli (layout), Theo Howarth (mixing), and James Plotkin (mastering) deliver an inspired treatment of Gilman’s story that enhances its themes while what awaits in the wallpaper grows ever more perceptible.