Releasing peacefully one (good) release every month, Cryo Chamber marks its territory each time a bit more in the dark ambient landscape. The boss Simon Heath seems to have a flair for promising projects coming from various horizons : from the infected sounds of Neizvestija to a background of touristic journey near Karachay to the paranoid schizophrenia of
Aseptic Void, including the nordic cruise to the borders of reality by Mystified, concepts and sounds vary while scrupulously following the cinematic specifications of the house.
But it seems that it was not enough. How could they go further ? By making a collaboration almost label-wide, of course. Lucky you, that's precisely what we'll talk about right now.
Most of the artists who published on Cryo Chamber were called up on
Cthulhu.
And contrary to a lot of speculations, it's not a triskaideca-split album (dat word) that showed up, but a unique colossus where the 13 participants (or rather twelve and a half,
Sabled Sun and
Atrium Carceri being the two artistic egos of Heath) brought their own outlook of the inescapable creature from the lovecraftian literature. As each person was free to implant his ideas where he felt like it and to change other's, the single track verging on 80 minutes is not segmented in 13 distinct parts but emerge well and truly as a balanced work where the influences cohabit in symbiosis, erasing the differences for a result whose value is worth more than the sum of its parts.
Sometimes mistaken for the
Kraken because of his cuttlefish head,
Cthulhu shares nevertheless the same aquatic home as his scandinavian cousin, and might be locked in the submarine city of
R'lyeh, in the Pacific, waiting for his release at the end of a favourable stellar convergence...Which doesn't prevent himself from unconsciously besiege Humans' minds, filling them with a feeling of permanent anxiety.
And these two main features of the Great
Old One are ubiquitous in the eponym composition of what could possibly be the biggest collaboration in the dark ambient genre.
A contained reverberation brings up the claustrophobia peculiar to the abyssal explorations through the whole track, and other-worldly sounds imperceptibly open a gate towards a fantastic dimension, where the powers at stake simply overstep us. Dumbfounded witnesses who can only hope to not turn into collateral victims.
The tone is set from the first minutes ; we barely have the time to be placed in a vessel submerging towards the oceanic depths that the distant calls of
Cthulhu run through the hull, like a warning of what is awaiting for us if we decide to carry on diving. This epic lasts more than 50 minutes, where the aquatic sound elements and drones succeed one another at the pace of the marine currents diverting us from our course and of the creatures crossing our path, as we inexorably close in on
R'lyeh. But beyond the concrete representation of the worrying environment in which we progress, Cryo Chamber depicts as well, through surreal sounds and distressing atmospheres, the inner struggle we conduct against our most elementary fears : the dread of confinement, the advance towards the unknown, the uncertainty concerning the outcome of the events, or the ubiquitous insecurity… How could we not wonder about our situation, where our cocoon of life comes down to a bubble trapped in a metallic enclosure, making headway in a lethal environment as far as the sonar can hear ? We can't fight against these questions eating us away, and it's not
Cthulhu that will complain about it.
At the end of the 53th minute, we reach the climax of the track when the monster creates an impossible submarine storm, where we are engulfed in a maelstrom before losing any landmark, any consciousness, any hope. Our waking seems gentle, lulled by long waves of small amplitudes pictured by scattered piano notes and ethereal drones, filtered by the calm waters surrounding us. But this vision of brief fullness was evidently only a trick from
Cthulhu, taking pleasure in suggesting what appeases us the most in order to make the return to reality even more unbearable.
We never left our submersible. The aquatic currents had nothing natural, and it's not a layer of metal that will withstand it ; but the time has not come to give in to our fate, the beast wishes to take advantage of our last minutes to amplify and overemphasize our fears to suck what's left of vital essence in us. Noisy metallic layers permanently resonate in the remains of the ship, before our minds are surrounded by indistinct calls that can only come from the
Purgatory. A foretaste of our future coming as fast as it darkens.
This gigantic work ends as it began, with the threatenig call of
Cthulhu and its characteristic sounds, closing a cycle and announcing the beginning of the next, as the link of a chain far too big for us to realize that we are part of it. A bit like the
Cthulhu Mythos that, yet created in the 20's by Lovecraft, lasts and is still reinterpreted today in the popular culture, and inspire a lot of artists in their works.
Among them, Cryo Chamber definitely took up the audacious challenge of a colossal collaboration, that could have turned into a bet too ambitious or poorly balanced, but moved in the end into a consistent project accurately illustrating one of the most famous creatures of the classic fantasy literature.
« In his house at
R'lyeh dead
Cthulhu waits dreaming ».
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