Explore the Grandeur of the Terrible God Tsathoggua

The Lovecraft compilations have become a welcome yearly traditional release from Cryo Chamber, each one standing alone on its own collaborative merit; each one a showcase of individual talent from the various artists associated with the label, while also being exemplary pieces of collaboration, weaving the delicate nuance of each musical vision into one longform narrative. This year Cryo Chamber delivers Tsathoggua, nearly two hours of textured soundscape and ambient drone featuring twenty artists on the roster - the full list of included acts is included on the album’s Bandcamp page. As stated in the album credits, this is not a compilation, but a collaboration, a joining of creative influence and intuition among those involved.

Tsathoggua is that “amorphous, toad-like god-creature mentioned in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon” (“The Whisperer in Darkness”, H. P. Lovecraft), worshiped by the Voormis who have their beginnings traceable to Hyperborea and that ancient time of forgotten Atlantean mystery, and just as the texts relating to the ancient deity, this collaborative effort contains elements of both ancient mystery, and awe-inspiring dread. The album begins with perhaps the strongest and most imposing introduction of the entire Cryo Chamber Lovecraft Discography, a rhythmic pulsing, tenebrous with its almost martial industrial characteristics, yet having depth to give the music an intimidating grandeur, while stabs of brass and low horns add a dire inflection to the timbre of the music. The album is presented as two whole tracks, each with a runtime of nearly one hour in length, and each artist involved in the collaboration weaves their input throughout the entirety of the musical presentation. The artists are credited on the album page, however, there is no specific time at which the artists “perform” - this is a collaboration, a cooperative musical tapestry meant to be embraced and consumed as a whole. 

The Cryo Chamber Lovecraft Collaborations are not a only a showcase of the artistry among the artists on the label, but they are quite simply some of the best attributions to the Lovecraft Mythos; a fitting thing, really, since much of the fiction and impetus for description of Lovecraft’s stories relied on the imaginations of the reader, of things too horrible to comprehend by the human mind and therefore too difficult to put into words - these collaborations allow the imaginations of the listener to form the pictures of those terrible entities in their own minds. Featuring artwork by Simon Heath, and a narrative journal written by Alistair Rennie, Tsathoggua is the ninth collaborative album in the Lovecraft Discography and you can purchase it in CD Digibook and digital format on the Cryo Chamber Bandcamp page.