Genre: Dark Ambient

01 Black Ashes of Extinguished Suns
02 The Kingdom of the Necromancers
03 Abominations of Yondo
04 The Forest of Evil Cacti
05 The Weaver in the Vault
06 Commoriom
07 Sanctuary of Unbroken Columns
08 The Last Continent

Abominations of Yondo is Kevin Busby (Carya Amara, Audio Space Research) and Cousin Silas, both of whom have had releases on the Earthrid label, and this self-titled CD is their tribute to Clark Ashton Smith, an author of fantasy fiction in the early years of the last century, and along with Frank Belknap Long, Robert Bloch (of Psycho fame), Robert E. Howard (Conan creator), August Derleth and others, also contributed and added to HP Lovecraft’s enduring Cthulhu Mythos. These stories, based on Lovecraft’s eldritch creations of dread gods, cults and forbidden tomes, mostly appeared in the pulp magazines of the 1930s such as Weird Tales and similar, and their appeal has lasted to this day. Lovecraft’s tales have hardly been out of print since, garnering themselves a devoted following; like many I am far more familiar with Lovecraft’s work than Smith’s, but I can guess that apart from stylistic and literary differences the essence of Smith’s work is very much the same. Let it be stated that I am approaching this album in light of his contributions to that cycle of Cthulhu stories.

Obviously Busby and Cousin Silas count themselves fans and have used his works as a source of inspiration; they have positively drenched themselves in the eerie atmospheres evoked by Smith’s writing. Admittedly there’s nothing startlingly new on here; there are the usual sweeping keyboard passages, chanting voices and slight atonalities combined with sound effects to create an appropriately eerie ambience. Quite frankly though the fact that it doesn’t break new ground is irrelevant – what matters most is the creation of dread atmospheres and eldritch airs, stirring up images of twilit worlds where abominable creatures out of time and space dwell; where humans are mere pawns in a cosmic game beyond their conception or understanding. This is exactly the kind of ambience the stories themselves elicit.

It’s a quiet album – there’s no bombast or heavy blankets of sound, just sweeping icy cold electronic keyboards, howls, gratings and breathings, coupled with a freezingly cavernous vastness. In fact this is one of the strengths of this album – the dread that is described in the tales of the Cthulhu cycle for instance was not necessarily of an overt kind; the ‘gods’ of the pantheon that Lovecraft and his small circle of writer friends wrote about were unseen presences lurking just behind the fabric of everyday reality, rarely glimpsed by humanity; the understated but menacing approach taken by AoY perfectly reflects this aspect of the stories. It’s as well to remember that the origins of the mythos he contributed to lie in the first half of the twentieth century and the stories were very much of their time, so any other way of going about it would have seemed wrong somehow.

In the end this is a good solid ambient album, with a sense of depth and atmosphere befitting the cosmic menace of the stories that inspired it, and it certainly wouldn’t shame your CD collection by having a place in it.