Cthonicist

‘I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness.” - Crawford Tillinghast, ‘From Beyond’. Available online at: https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/fb.aspx H.P.Lovecraft was an ardent follower of the leading edge science of his day. His short story ‘From Beyond’ may be the first to take Einsteins speculations and extrapolate from them what horror...

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...

“My heart is like a hand grenade, honey, I’m primed to explode.” - The Mad Bomber. Made with these apps and others on iPad: Moog Mariana,Relic Waves, Needlepoint, Speakers, Atom, KB1, Scaler

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.

“I died on the operating table, apparently. Fifteen minutes, they said. I went to Heaven. It was raining. Then they brought me back. Heaven is over-rated, I think.” - The Englishman. A modular diversion for a Sunday afternoon: one live take into AUM on iPad from a Intellijel Palette case, made using Beads granular in oscillator mode, Pique on bass drum, and O&C on sequencing. Knobs twiddled, no ke...

The Fourteenth Book is entitled, “What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?” It doesn’t take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period. This is it: “Nothing.” - Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

‘No one thinks witchcraft - the real heavy stuff - happens in places like council estates. They’re wrong.” - the Witness. A good old fashioned Dark Ambient drone track, made entirely with apps on iPad.

“Home is the hunter from the hill: Fast in the boundless snare / All flesh lies taken at his will / And every fowl of air.”: A.E. Housman, after R.L. Stevenson. Cernunnos, the stag-antlered Celtic god of the forest, the archetypal Green Man, Herne, Jack-In-The-Green… be wary if you meet him, one moonlit night on a forest path. His allegiance is to the world of nature, not Man. Created solely with...

“So David Lynch walks into a bar and says”’hey barkeep, what’s the speciality of the house?’ And the barkeep says…’ “ Messing with the modular today and somehow seemed to be channeling fragments of some kind of sleazy Lynchian cabaret tune, such as might have been low in the mix at Le Silencio, the club/bar/cabaret/whatever the hell it was from his enigmatic masterpiece Mulholland Drive. Recorded...

If you go down to the woods today… Sigur is apparently Icelandic for ‘triumph’ or ‘victory’. Sigur Ros is a band whose distinctive sound I very much like. This piece sounds nothing like them, and has nothing to do with Iceland, but the band did provide the inspiration for my favourite preset for the amazing new iPad synth app King Of Digital. And I used it a lot here. So: Sigur it is.

“In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.” -Douglas R. Hofstadter. Live bass badly played into a series of manipulated loops, recorded and mixed in AUM on iPad.

“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.

‘Vigrid the plain is called, where in fight shall meet Surt and the gentle Gods” - Vafþrúðnismál . Long foretold, at the plain called Vigrid, in the time called Ragnarok, the greatest of all battles ends in defeat, and death for almost all the gods. Knowing this, yet still they fight: bravely, hopelessly, as their Wyrd demands. Death is not denied, even for Aesir. One question only: for them, as f...

…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.

Final Girl: the character that continues to survive. For Halloween 2023: An, ahem, ‘exclusive preview’ of my contribution to an AudioBus Forum challenge being wrangled by @sevenape: to produce a compilation album of seasonally appropriate tracks by forum members (IOS music makers all), in time for Halloween. For sale on Bandcamp. All proceeds to the international medical relief charity MSF, buy li...

“Uncertainty management is the process by which individuals create meaning or understanding in situations in which something unpredictable, unusual, unexpected, or out of the ordinary occurs and when there is a need to determine the appropriate meaning.” - management textbook. Made with a single instrument: a £10 electric kazoo (!), from the bass drone to the ‘guitar’ stabs. Yes, really. Recorded...

Transgress. Transcend. Transfer. Effected loops played live from a 3 string cigar box guitar, into AUM on iPad.

Unexpectedly, I saw a photo of my long ago ex. He has grown old. As have I. A brief meditation on the transitory nature of all things. Created entirely in AUM on iPad using a combination of manipulated vocal samples and instrument apps.

A piece built using samples of ancient Northern European instruments : the Celtic Carnyx war horn, the skin drum of the Sami tribes of Scandinavia, and the Norse Tagelharpa three string bowed lyre, augmented with a totally ahistorical gong (a Far Eastern instrument, it didn’t reach Europe until the 1600s) and vocals somewhat reminiscent of the ancient Kulning style of Scandinavian cattle-calling....

“If a mirage cannot be traced to the known upon this earth, one supposes that it is either a derivation from the unknown upon this earth, or from the unknown somewhere else.” - Charles Fort Another noise/ambient experiment . The only instrument used is the noise app Giant Isopod, variously filtered and effected, plus a found sound wav of valve distortion made by Chris Krupa: https://on.soundcloud....

Mysterium: The hypothetical source of a galactic radio transmission at 1665 megahertz; in alchemy, an elemental or pure form of something else. The purest of all sounds, its elemental form, the sum of all sounds is - noise. Created with Giant Isopod and NoInputMixer in AUM on iPad

An exercise in actual unaided live composition, played and recorded into AUM on iPad from a MIDI piano. It sounds kind of… horrible, actually, and not necessarily in a good way. Sick, infected, somehow. Discordant. But my, for want of a better word, aesthetic, is that I am driven by random processes, and must commit wholly to them once begun. The process, the music, took me in this direction today...

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

Pitch for an imaginary movie: a retired cop, succumbing to Lewy Body dementia in his care facility, has visions of demons he sees killing the other residents as they sleep. Blaming his dementia, no one believes him, thinking the deaths are natural, the demons existing only in his disintegrating mind. Then again, maybe he isn’t just seeing things - but seeing *things*…

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 instrumen...