Apocryphos :: Atrementia (Cryo Chamber)

Atrementia was composed exclusively with circuit bent hardware, home-made oscillators, pedals and electric guitar fed through analog processing. Your memories are dressed in black. I can see them, you cannot hide from my lost eyes. What I hear are warm, analog noise and looped pedal drone balance light and dark, for day dreamers and long nights of reflection.

Slow motion falling upside down deep in a dark hole

I have gouged out both of my eyes. Do not do this to yourself, I am here to tell you this. I regret my misguided pathetic mortal actions. The music is fantastic, great and spooky and weird. Slow motion falling upside down deep in a dark hole, into a cave miles below the surface of the Earth. That is why I am here. I love the long slow dark deep rumbling and the scary varieties of darkness. But once I saw that urgent frightened eye, I was lost. Just look at it, what am I supposed to do? That eye will not stop looking at me, I close my eyes and there it is, I open my eyes and it never blinks. I have planned for a long time not to gouge my own eyes out to make it stop looking at me. I could not sleep. Night after night. How many millenia? The eye still keeps dominating my thoughts. To create is to destroy is to create…

Atrementia was composed exclusively with circuit bent hardware, home-made oscillators, pedals and electric guitar fed through analog processing. Your memories are dressed in black. I can see them, you cannot hide from my lost eyes. What I hear are warm, analog noise and looped pedal drone balance light and dark, for day dreamers and long nights of reflection.

Spirits continue to interact and evolve ::

The life eye once knew is not over, yet spirits continue to interact and evolve. I regret the loss of my eyesight but now the sounds are much more vivid. Now something slowly comes out of the sacred Earth, “Grave Ascension“ (4:40) gives a grim dark low hum buzz. Gong buzz hum, “Solus Viator“ (8:50). I am alone, a traveler reaching into the unknown, following another new low hum buzz into the biggest darkest cave. I long ago lost the path. Since I am blind forever now, I am guided by the sound of power tools in the cave, I am screaming over the grinding ringing metal. Marching drones combine in alarm high and low, an attempt to communicate with spirits. Come with me, it feels like an oncoming dementia, but something is strangely off…nothing that written words can compose into a substitute reality.

“Tornomov“ (9:00) Pronounced “tohr-noh-mawf” has a weird hollowness and makes you think of the distant future. Machines drone while choirs sing slowly, some new machine makes screeches and screams, tearing metal in the distance highlighting a perpetual anxiety. There is no use in dwelling on past remembrances as your mind’s only remaining eye has blanketed those fragments of identity in Atrementia.

Another increasingly deeper cave opens below me, as I fall I hear things crashing, “Leaden Waves“ (9:09) also there must be a choir and a piano in there somewhere. I hear sounds of buzzing hums from dark deep ocean crags, they roll in slow motion going down. I feel panic, a train arrives but why can’t it stop? 

Dismal male choirs rise, the extreme new density roils and bleeds chaos, I feel the fury of gigantic forces that are probably too slow to be effectively dangerous. A melodic melancholic piano joins the combination of sounds. I continue to fall. All is lost. I don’t remember how this happened. In my mind’s eye I start to stink and decay.

Cautiously approaching the forest in the dark ::

Somehow I am animated again. Cautiously approaching the forest in the dark, I hear strings and voices chanting or singing, “An Internal Wilderness“ (11:10) perhaps a meeting of people who are gathered to receive messages from ghosts or to listen to a spirit medium discourse with, or to relay messages from spirits.

Hopeful, and in a strange way, I am still alive. The next world then becomes quite painful, grinding buzzing headaches of foul intensity slay my soul until I find calm sweet horns under the horrible grinding. The pressure builds and lingers. The journey to finding the source of fulfillment will be atramentous in scope, but like all great things…they must be built from ruins.

For the closing theme, this might be some actual music (melody, tempo, etc.). I think I hear a guitar, a piano, a lyrical dialog, “Noc/Tuam“ (3:39). Soon a dark grim deeply reflective growing hum recedes as the melodic aspects expand. Now deep drones and an insane melody bring together my sadness. Always alone, at last falling, the walls are too steep for finding the bottom.

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Apocryphos released Atrementia from the Cryo Chamber on August 20, 2024, the 232nd day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; back then 133 days remained until the end of the year. One day later, August 21, heavy rainfall coupled with a surge of water released from a dam in India’s Tripura, resulted in severe flooding.

Atrementia is available on Cryo Chamber. [Bandcamp]