In the same October as Faustus, Crowley wanted to make some recordings. On Friday 16th he went to Star Sound Studios at 17 Cavendish Square (LANgham 2201), where he recorded his ‘Hymn to Pan’ and the First Call in Enochian, the angelic language of Renaissance magicians Dr Dee and Sir Edward Kelley. Perhaps ironically, Star Studios had been the meeting hall of the Theosophical Society, an organisation of which Crowley had a very low opinion. It lived up to this inauspicious start on the following Monday, when Star refused to cut Crowley's 78rpm disc or let him have his recording. There may have been trouble about money, or perhaps they understood enough of ‘Hymn to Pan’ to decide it was obscene.
Crowley did better on his familiar territory of Bond Street, where he went on the 27th and recorded the First and Second Enochian Calls at Levy's Sound Studio, 73 New Bond Street (MAYfair 8521). These survive.1
Louis Umfreville Wilkinson remembers a reading of these same texts after lunch with Lady Aberconway: “more than once I have seen him under the sudden stress of his inspiration. He was controlled, I was sure of it then, by something that was in truth religious, that had the quality, the motive force of Oriental religious ecstasy… he read aloud to us from an enormous Magical Book which he supported on his knees. What he read to us was in a strange language, a language unknown. It was of a singular vibrant beauty and power… ‘What is that language?’ [Lady Aberconway] asked. ‘It is the language of the angels,’ replied Crowley.”
Crowley performed his reading and recordings in a deliberately sonorous, incantatory voice that he called his “Magical Voice”. There are varying accounts of his normal voice. Viola Bankes describes it as light and high, and Yorke remembers his telephone voice was quite high and pleasantly melodious, while his former secretary Israel Regardie remembered that outside of the Magical Voice, “Crowley in reality possessed a thin, effeminate, rather squeaky voice. This was one of the most obvious areas where his homosexual component emerged. I would never have thought that his was a strong masculine voice, capable of booming out a sonorous invocation.”
Arthur Calder-Marshall and Anthony Powell remember his voice as more nasal and Cockney, although Cockney is misleading today. It seemed Cockney to them, compared to the rather extreme, cut-glass standards of pre-war upper class speech. Certainly Crowley wasn't out of the very top drawer (a man as snobbish as Powell would have noticed this at once). But he wasn't today's idea of Cockney either. And to many of the working- or lower-middle-class women he picked up, part of his appeal must have been that he seemed like a ‘real gent’.