Cryo Chamber Collaboration :: Ithaqua (Cryo Chamber)

Nineteen shadow-bound composers unite for a two-hour Lovecraftian descent into Arctic dread—an immense dark ambient ritual where bowed strings, frozen winds, and unseen beasts awaken the terror of H. P. Lovecraft’s Mythos and the howling presence of Ithaqua.

Where wind becomes watching horror

A 2 hour dark soundscape recorded by 19 ambient artists to pay tribute to H.P. Lovecraft‘s Mythos. But these are no ordinary hour long tracks. Bowed strings, wind with haunted eyes, deadly fauna, a lingering atmosphere that goes on forever. Careful listening is rewarded by more details and vivid possibilities.

Ithaqua‘s cult is small, but he, or it, is greatly feared in the far north. There are other things—terrible things—which it likewise made clear; and still other things of far greater terror at which it hinted hideously without making them clear or even fully believable. Those who join this cult are granted immunity to extremely cold temperatures. I cannot yet believe fully in the supernatural, yet I fear none the less that I am lost. But I am not wholly sorry; either for this or for the loss in undreamable abysses of the closely written sheets which alone could have explained the music from the Cryo Chamber. Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way. How can such sounds be described with human words?

“They followed a trail heading north towards the abandoned ruin of Fort Maurepas. Bélanger’s team had come this way in the morning, 15 men with half a dozen horses. The trail wound its way alongside the Winnipeg River through the deep woods of the Manitoban south-east. Under the canopy of trees, their faces glowed red and grey in the mottled light of dusk. The gush of the river was accompanied by the clashing debris of the ice floe. Slabs of ice slid and spun in slow circles, groaning and clacking like the grinding teeth of sleeping monsters.” ~Excerpt from Ithaqua Booklet

The 2CD album comes in a Deluxe 16 page Hard cover DigiBook. Artwork is served on Matte Laminated pages that makes the colors deep and preserved. The journal was actualized by Alistair Rennie, with art by Simon Heath. Council of Nine, Northumbria, Alphaxone, Atrium Carceri, Skrika, RNGMNN, Ruptured World, Neizvestija, Planet Supreme, Keosz, Dronny Darko, ProtoU, Gydja, Ugasanie, Burma Project, Primal Era Worship, Sjellos, SiJ, Kristof Bathory; these 19 artists linked studios and sound for over a year so that they could work with each other.

Somewhere I learned that Ithaqua is one of the Great Old Ones, a horrifying giant with a roughly human shape and glowing red eyes, believed to prowl the Arctic waste, hunting down unwary travelers and slaying them in a gruesome fashion. The figure beside me seemed less like a lifelong friend than like some monstrous intrusion from outer space—some damnable, utterly accursed focus of unknown and malign cosmic forces. Fearful denizens of Siberia, Canada and Alaska often leave sacrifices for Ithaqua; not as worship but as appeasement. Ithaqua is believed to have inspired the Native American legend of the Wendigo and possibly the Yeti, and has been reported from as far north as the Arctic to the Sub-Arctic, where the First Nation Americans first encountered him. I was haunted by the weirdness of this music.

Listening for the first time, an acute terror rose within me, for here were anomalies which nothing normal could well explain. Each transmitted idea formed rapidly in my mind, and though no actual language was employed, my habitual association of conception and expression was so great that I seemed to be receiving the message in ordinary English. I half fancied I heard a sound myself; though it was not a horrible sound, but rather an exquisitely low and infinitely distant musical note. I fear that something is happening down in the dark below. The whisperer is panting, and pauses for breath. I say nothing, and when he resumes his voice is nearer normal.

Echoes from the Arctic void ::

“Ithaqua 1” (54:45) —

 

It starts and ends in a dark sad cave with lots of lost echoes, and a prescient bowed string instrument. Of this subterranean desert many strange and unbelievable marvels are told by those who pretend to have penetrated it. We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. As I descended the stairs myself, I became suddenly aware of more sounds in the great room below; sounds of a nature which could not be forgotten. In the future, this music is rigidly suppressed by the authorities of most countries, and by all branches of organised ecclesiasticism. I staggered back in the dark, without the means of striking a light, crashing against the table, overturning a chair, and finally groping my way to the place where the blackness screamed with shocking music.

I hear the strange machines, but where are they? Flight may be useless, but what else can one do? Into what strange hell of a living nightmare am I plunged? The sound of weird lyric melody was what aroused me. But here, things come and go, such as electronic insects or calling creatures. They emerge for a time then are gone, we are lost, down in a deep cave that hides even deeper places somewhere in the dark ahead. The subway still runs down there. Chords, vibrations, and harmonic ecstasies echo passionately on every hand; while on my ravished ears burst the stupendous spectacle of ultimate beauty. Sometimes the strings are awesome, very mournful and doom inspiring, as if we were trapped by buzzing creatures talking to each other. Too often a grain of incredible truth lurks behind the wildest and most fantastic of legends, way off in the distance some music can be heard, an orchestra with strings or another device to sound like one.

There is a new throb in the darkness, it feels like all is just about to transform again, the drum takes form and off we go, desert winds and sand grow into monstrous proportions. I must somehow prepare for a storm of intensity and strange creatures possibly preparing for battle or is that just how I think? I want to forget the siren infants calling urgently in the dark, maybe they are just singing an old song they know. There is nothing close enough to bite me now, but most things change quickly, usually they stay in the shadows and beguile. Later some of the constant listeners will weigh each statement, correlate it with the known facts, and ask themselves how I could have believed otherwise than as I did after facing the evidence of that horror—that thing living inside the speaker?

To end this longest (so far) of tracks, the sounds are mostly the hissing of rainbow sand and distant flying machines working hard, the flying saucers are echoing and sending signals back and forth. They say that we will soon have new machines, and there are more hooded waving monsters calling. At the edge of the settlement, there is a melodic net woven over the edges which shift and fade out, new forms emerge, further down the tunnel we go. Fade to black.

“Ithaqua 2” (55:46) —

 

There are horrors beyond life’s edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man’s evil prying calls fall just within our range. There may be ghost winds reaching around inside old houses and dark abandoned places. The beast is in the cave just below us now. Can this be wholly an hallucination? Are we down in a cave or lost in outer space? There are strange portals to exchange presences, something new has arrived with new buzzing and whirling, plus the steam vent sounds. I know that there are lots of creatures in this wet cave. They are most likely investigating us under cover of darkness, they live here so they can probably easily spot us. And as I stood there looking in terror, the wind blew out both the candles in that ancient peaked garret, leaving me in savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium before me, and the daemon madness of that night-baying viol behind me. Am I going insane?

And through this revolving graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods—the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is gnarlymost. I was yet more certain that none of these harmonies had any relation to music I had heard before; It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not; but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth – water and bamboo fragments clicking with enhanced reverberation, and that at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which I could hardly conceive as produced by one player.

I could make out nothing in the dim half light, so I edged back into the hall, the dwarf figure clumping mechanically after me but pausing on the inner door’s threshold. Outside and nearby the beast calls and howls at the moon, adding harsh electronic grunts and maybe painful ragged breathing, they move much slower than we do, and they never completely stop. The newest creature slithers and hisses its way here, closer, and sounds even more lethal, chimes tingle sprinkled sparsely, the beast swims yet closer and grows darker. The little robots start to dance. The beast is very close, inches from my ear, only now at the gates there are hundreds of hooded monks and they are chanting together. Now a glittering cathedral with an old pipe organ and strange echoes, clanking a little now and then. Eventually, things quiet then strange flying machines buzz a bit. Reaching the bottom of the stairs, I switched on the light, which did not this time cause the noise to subside.

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Ithaqua is available on Cryo Chamber. [Bandcamp]