Dark Ambient and H.P. Lovecraft were made for each other. Some of these tracks are directly inspired by his uniquely bleak and discomforting fictions, others more tangentially connected perhaps, via mood or sound or mental image only.  But it is an absolute truth that none of this selection of some of my published work would be here at all but for the dark and thrilling vistas of the imagination his stories opened for me so many years ago…

Going Underground - Lovecraftian Dark Ambient by Cthonicist

“Old! Old! Old!” he would moan over and over again, “great God, they are older than the earth, and came here from somewhere else.” - H.P. Lovecraft, The Mound.

Created live on Moog Sound Studio 3 (Mother 32, DFAM, Subharmonicon), recorded and edited in Wavebox on IPad

Dolmen

“Deep in my dream the great bird whispered queerly
Of the black cone amid the polar waste…” 
H.P. Lovecraft, The Fungi from Yuggoth

Created using multiple instances of Fluss, the new granular audio mangler app from Hainbach and Bram Bos for the ipad

On Arcturus I Listened To The Ice Sing

“Spirits of Destruction, Speed of Grief, I command you: come out of her now!” - extract from an exorcism. In Greek mythology, the Erinyes, aka The Furies, were female chthonic deities of vengeance, born of the union of Night and the Earth, dedicated to the destruction of any who broke a sacred oath. People called them The Kindly Ones, in hope of avoiding their attentions.
Created from an original sample, processed in Tomofon.

The Kindly Ones

“The object was some fifty feet in length, of roughly cylindrical shape, and about ten feet in diameter. It was unmistakably a gilled fish in its major affiliations; but with certain curious modifications…” - Lovecraft & Greene, ‘The Horror At Martin’s Beach.’

Created with apps in AUM on IPad

The Thing We Found

“Ganzfeld: imposing a uniform space over the entire visual field. By altering your sense of sight you deprive your brain of sensory input. It begins to improvise. This may produce disturbing hallucinations. Some researchers also believe it also enables extra sensory perception.”

Made in AUM on IPad. No keyboards harmed in the making of this piece.

Ganzfeld Effect

“You can’t keep running away from love. Eventually, it will catch up to you.”

Created solely in apps on iPad. No keyboards, guitars, drums or human vocalists harmed in the making of this piece. Trigger warning re theme of stalking.

Someone To Watch Over Me

“I wrecked trains because I like to see people die. I like to hear them scream.” - Szilveszter Matuschka 

In September 1931 Matuschka was apprehended at the scene of the wreck of the Vienna Budapest Express, in which 24 people died and over 100 were severely injured. He had engineered the wreck, and others before that. The all too perverse motive for his bizarre crime soiled the front of his trousers. Imprisoned for life, he disappeared from prison during the closing stages of World War 2. His fate remains unknown.

All music and sound effects created  entirely in AUM on iPad, using several instances of the iVCS3 app. No other instruments used.

Closely Observed Trains

Ars Goetia, compiled in the 17th Century from material centuries older, is one of five books of the Lemegeton, The Lesser Key Of Solomon, an occult text filled with hermetic secrets. Ostensibly, the book details the true names of 72 demons. ‘Goetia’ is Latin for witchcraft, or a charm:  specifically, for the summoning of demons. Deliberate Mis-spellings ensure the text, if used, is very much at the readers own risk… made in AUM on IPad using Hilda, Noises, Cascade, and others.

Ars Goetia

“ Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn: "*

*In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming - H.P. Lovecraft, The Call Of Cthulhu.

Made in AUM on iPad, apps inc. Hilda, Broohahaizer, Models D & 15

Great Cthulhu

“Is this really all there is?” - Sir Gawain
“What else ought there be?” - The Green Knight

Completed in response to an AudioBus Forum challenge, in turn derived from Paul David’s YouTube guitar challenge. Created entirely with fx & IPad ‘tape manipulation’ techniques using Paul David’s original guitar backing track found here: https://youtu.be/8Bt3RYy6Y-Y as the sole source material. No instruments used.

The Challenge

“When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written.” 
- Henry Miller, Tropic Of Cancer.

Live improvisation using Soma Labs Rumble Of Ancient Times and Meng Qi’s Wingie II resonator. Recorded in AUM on iPad.

Chaos Machine

Q: What is Zero Input? A: “The zero input response is the natural response of a system to its initial conditions, that is, how the system behaves without any external inputs.”

An experiment, then, electronic music without synths. A piece made entirely in iPad app Noinputmixer, https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/noinputmixer/id6449369200, which simulates a hardware mixer feeding back, no other instruments used, making it… electroacoustic, I guess? Headphones recommended. Everything you hear is generated manipulating this feedback within the mixers own architecture. Multiple File Player loops captured on AUM, mixed live to AudioShare

Zero Input

Browning Hi-Power sidearm. Single action. Double stack. 13 rounds 9mm Parabellum.

There are many tracks on SoundCloud, but this is mine. Vocals by Elevenlabs AI. Noises by Arpie and Koala. Recorded live on iPad into AUM  and mixed to AudioShare

Higher Power

…Or is it me?

From a Lyra 8: no other instrument was used in this hardware jam/improv, combining Soma Labs great weirdness machine with their equally weird ‘drifting memory station’ looper, the Cosmos. (I admit it, I love Soma Labs gear.) Outboard limited to just Alteza reverb on the iPad, the piece recorded live in three overdubs to AUM.

My Friends Have Grown Weird

“The wound is the place where the light enters you.” - Rumi, 13th Century Poet and Sufi mystic

Composed and performed entirely with apps in AUM on iPad.

The Place Of Light

A non-monetised non-remarketed collage piece featuring fair-use audio clips from the movies The Shawshank Redemption, Marathon Man and Conspiracy Theory, and readings from the prescient Carl Sagan’s final work, The Demon Haunted World.

The Demon Haunted World

R504, The Kolyma Highway, part of the M56 route, is a road through the Russian Far East, connecting Magadan with the town of Nizhny Bestyakh, passing close to Oymyakon, reputedly the coldest continuously inhabited place on earth. Built by forced labour under Stalin, the gravelled highway is estimated to have cost upwards of a million lives, the bodies buried beneath the road surface. Which is why it is known as The Road Of Bones.

Road Of Bones

“All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.” - Captain Ahab

Some Part Of A Whale ?

“This is all it takes for people to plunge into insanity: one night alone with themselves and what they fear most.” -Thomas Olde Heuvelt

Give A Name To The Horror You Have Always Felt

“I sank nearly to the lichened earth, transfixed with a dread not of this or any world, but only of the mad spaces between the stars.’ -H.P. Lovecraft, The Festival.

Ancient Galaxies

Officially, the facility known as Project Winterkeeper, approximately 5 miles east of Attu Station, Alaska, is a seed bank, a storehouse of plant germ lines hoarded against apocalypse. Following an unspecified incident in August 2010, however, the nearby coast guard station was evacuated, and both facility and island abandoned. Unofficially, rumours persist that the large dome, censored in public satellite imagery, still houses a craft - or possibly a being - of unknown origin. 
Loops and live mix from No Input Mixer app on iPad . No instruments used!

Winterkeeper

“We are all roamers of vast spaces and travellers in many ages.” -  H.P. Lovecraft, Beyond the Wall of Sleep

Made in AUM, on iPad. No keyboards were harmed during the making of this piece.

Beyond The Wall Of Sleep

“But as in wailing there's nought availing, And Death unfailing will strike the blow, Then for that reason, and for a season, Let us be merry before we go.” - John Philpott Curran

A Wall, Wailing

Zona incerta, the ‘zone of uncertainty’ : a region of the brain of which nothing certain can be said. Its functions are mysterious; unknown. So unknown, it doesn’t even feature in many anatomical textbooks. It is suspected it may have something to do with the way we make, or interpret, memories. But this is speculation.

Recorded live in AUM on iPad using 3 instances of the synth app Hilda

The Zone Of Uncertainty

I do not advise you visit Hekate Station.

Korg Volca Modular recorded into AUM on IPad.

Hekate Station

It is said that the snow at Hekate Station appears quite black during the long Arctic nights.

Obsidian Snow

Hey, you remember what happened to Doveland back in the 90’s, right?

Doveland Wisconsin

Doveland, Wisconsin

In 2017, artist James Brindle created a photo piece, ‘Autonomous Trap 001’. This consisted of creating a salt circle around his self driving car, a familiar magical technique to contain summoned spirits. The vehicles’ software, interpreting the salt as a circle of No Entry signs, was unable to move the vehicle from the circle. Any familiar with the Loa spirits currently manifesting as autonomous AIs on the web will not have been surprised at this early proof of their existence, nor their vulnerability to the oldest of reality hacks.

Machine Spirits

“…a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man…vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws…” H.P. Lovecraft, At The Mountains Of Madness.

Cyclopean Halls

Sci-fi author William Gibson suggested that in the blackest depths of cyberspace, the line between rogue AIs and supernatural beings - for instance, the Loa of Haitian and Louisianan Voodoo - grows thin. 

This image appeared as the final iteration of the ‘negative space’ created by an AI art program prompted to produce ‘the opposite of Marlon Brando’. Wording in the scene apparently read ‘Loab.’ Repeated iterations took the image into ever darker scenes of gore and horror. Disturbingly, any sufficiently determined exploration of ‘negative space’, from *any* source, seemed always to arrive ultimately at ‘Loab’, in a scene of horror.  Researchers are at a loss to understand why the image recurs, or why it named itself ‘Loab’.

And thus, the first true demon of the AI age reveals itself to us, invoked through the incantatory magic of prompt engineering.

Loab

The Experiments: Dark Ambient. Hauntology. A Craft of Love.  

NEW ALBUM: ‘Norsecraftian’, links below. All tracks available free of charge for use in your own artistic works: videos, games, movies, theatre etc, in return for a namecheck. Request in the comments & I’ll be in touch.

All tracks composed on an IPad or modular,  arranged on iPad or Ableton.

Cthonicist

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