Cthonicist

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.’ Re...

“…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.

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 A...

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

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

I do not advise you visit Hekate Station. Korg Volca Modular recorded into AUM on IPad.

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

“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

“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.

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...

“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.

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

In Norse mythology, two wolves, Skoll, the one who mocks, and Hati, the one who hates, chase the sun and the moon through the sky. It is not clear which divine animal chased what, but it is nevertheless believed that it is from this mythological origin that the real world ice halo optical effect of a double or triple sun which may occasionally be seen derives its’ name, as Skoll or Hati close upon...

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

‘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.