Artist: Various
Title: Ithaqua
Type: Album
Label: Digital / CD Cryochamber
This two hour, 2CD package is another in the wonderful and long historied series of Lovecraft based collaborations that Cryo Chamber have released since 2014s brilliant Cthulhu debut. My favourite is still 2015’s ‘Azathoth’ release as I have a long and deep obsession with the blind, idiot god of nuclear chaos but it’s marginal. I have (I think) two gaps from 2023 and 2024 but otherwise they all sit nicely on my shelf and are a goto section for dark ambient and unease.
So that’s a potted history. The other thing that is important to note is that these are not splits, they are actual collaborations between 15-30 or so artists collaborating over the ether and shared spaces. I have listed the artists involved in this below so check them out…
But how do you describe two hours of ambient music in any meaningful way? Well I clearly decided to either challenge or humiliate myself in the final review of 2025. But the thing is this is such an incredibly cohesive piece despite all these moving parts and would be a prize in any collection.
It is a strange, as you’d expect, but oddly earthly cold album. Though we are dealing with, in the broad sense, the Mythos (despite the Windwalker’s roots in indigenous folklore) it has an immediate feel of being a part of this world. Just one bent out of shape, and space perhaps, by the presence of this Great Old One. There is the hint, just the hint, of the folk rhythms of the peoples who have lived in his shadow and his breath for thousands of years but the unsettling noises, the rattle and the off kilter melodies that rise and fall through the slowly swirling winds.
There are hints of voices; worshippers, or those lost in the icy embrace of the Ithaqua is unclear as the freezing sound, the whiteout noise of the blizzard and storm, but it quickly becomes a a frightening and empty place. Empty save for the space itself which is this elusive Great Old One.
Something about the layering throughout the two hours offers a sedate, monolithic pace and yet the paradox is that it feels composed of nothing but the cold light air itself and a sense that, outside, this is a whirlwind of motion, an unstoppable current. It is forever shifting though; but always a sense of movement and of current. And of size. The music has boundaries but where you stand in relation to them is impossible to tell in the cold, whispering gyre. It is air that you breathe but you can feel it chilling in your chest and the taste is too fresh to be akin to the air you were breathing a moment ago.
I think this is one thread that I followed too much; the idea that it is something which hides within the very air you know and breathe and yet when you are snared within, though your body knows that this air is different your soil recoils at its touch and not just from the high, mountainous cold it contains.
We get moments of notes, of sounds that again and again hint at the cosmos, that though it mimics our world and the weather it is far removed from it. It is beyond a mere mimic though. It is a Great Old One and it does not copy, it alters and twists and weaves what should never be into the fabric of our reality. And the music does just this. It offers a sound that we think we know but the layers, the construction, rubs against our minds in a way that leaves us in no doubt that this is, indeed other.
Lovecraft wrote about things which walk that should never have learned to crawl. But the Ithaqua neither walks nor crawls. Nor does it fly. It moves. It moves through our reality in those high, cold places at a pace that take aeons to move a mile and yet creates gales in its wake.
Cold, still and yet full of unnatural motion, this addition to the Cryo Chamber Collaborations is for my money the best since Azathoth (barring the two unkowns I have yet to acquire) and had me reaching for the heating dial.
Have I succeeded in a review here? I don’t know. Only you can tell me that. But if music offers images and worlds to blossom in your mind this is what the album created.
Gizmo
Ithaqua | Cryo Chamber Collaboration | Cryo Chamber
Artists:
Council of Nine
Northumbria
Alphaxone
Atrium Carceri
Skrika
RNGMNN
Ruptured World
Neizvestija
Planet Supreme
Keosz
Dronny Darko
ProtoU
Gydja
Ugasanie
Burma Project
Primal Era Worship
Sjellos
SiJ
Kristof Bathory
Walking The Liminal Space 