Cthonicist

“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...

A collaboration with Christian Krupa, guitarist extraordinaire: https://on.soundcloud.com/WdmwY

“I have seen the dark universe yawning Where the black planets roll without aim, Where they roll in their horror unheeded, Without knowledge, or lustre, or name.” - H.P.Lovecraft, ‘Nemesis’. Inspired, obviously, by the best Lovecraft film which had nothing to do with him, Paul W.S. Anderson’s 1997 cosmic horror masterpiece, Event Horizon. Moog Sound Studio 3 hardware (Mother 32, Dfam, Subharmonico...

“I thought the little house was lonely when I saw it, and that like myself, it was conscious of its meaningless nature before the great sea.” Lovecraft’s last published collaboration before his death a year later was this eerie 1936 story, mainly authored by 18 year old R.H. Barlow, of a fragile artist - not unlike Barlow himself - possibly losing his mind in an off season oceanside cabin. Created...

“Our order possesses the key which opens up all Masonic and Hermetic texts.” - Carl Kellner, chemist, industrialist, occultist. Founder of Ordo Templi Orientis - Order of the Temple of the East, a.k.a. O.T.O, later taken over by the Great Beast himself. Aleister Crowley. That key was sex. Specifically, sexual magic rituals. It always comes down to sex in the end… Various apps recorded live in AUM...

“Through the desolate summits swept raging intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic wind; whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping.” - H.P. Lovecraft, At The Mountains Of Madness A trip out for the amazing Moog Moogerfooger FX apps, (filters, phasers, saturators, delays and more) variously working on Decent Sampler instruments in AUM.

‘In this paper we explain the process of constructing intelligent devices based on atomic switches, in which the behavior of atoms determines the device functions, by integrating them with nanoarchitectonics. “ - Takashi Tsuchiya et al 2022 Appl. Physics Express 15 Sometimes I have to pinch myself to realise I live in a world where things like this are now real, not sci-fi. So: a hardware jam: liv...

According to mythbusting site Snopes, the ‘Crying Baby' Serial Killer Victim Lure is an urban myth, circulating since January 2003, purportedly relating to a serial killer operating in the Baton Rouge area of Louisiana, USA. It suggested the killer would leave a doll rigged with a tape recording of a crying baby on the doorsteps of lone women, to lure them out. Coincidentally two later-convicted s...

A true tale of travelling in the rust belt. Vocals: Natural Reader Free. Accompaniment: me Full transcript available here: https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/56924/i-m-a-believer-in-fate-so-a-speakers-enhanced-slice-of-raw-fact-nothing-happened#latest

“I found the Artefact, scavenging The Zone, dodging the patrols. Obviously an Outsider device, their creepy mix of tech and biology, worth something to someone, I bet. What it did I had no idea, but seeing myself reflected in it’s metal surface, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, though long dead or decommissioned, it was somehow *looking* at me…”

“All I ask of living is to have no chains on me, and all I ask of dying is to go naturally.” - Laura Nyro Live iKaossilator app jam transferred to Launchpad app and augmented with effected loops

Three horned face. 12 tonnes in weight, 30 feet long. 68 Million years old. A very common dinosaur: the armoured, herbivorous ‘cow of the Cretaceous’ would still beat the T Rex it shared habitats with in a straight fight, because physics. The initial clash has T Rex down, probably impaled. An ambush? Possibly, a different story. A live hardware jam using a PO33 sampler, SOMA labs R.O.A.T, and Wing...