Council of Nine: Exit Earth
Cryo Chamber
If ever a real-world event cried out for a Cryo Chamber treatment, it's the one involving the 1997 suicide of thirty-nine members of the Heavens Gate cult. To refresh, the incident occurred on March 22nd in Rancho Santa Fe, California after the group received a Red Alert “from the level above human” informing them that with the massive Hale Bopp comet advancing close to earth's atmosphere the group's members should abandon their human bodies to “beam up.” In response, the cult's leader, Marshall Applewhite, instructed the group to ingest applesauce laced with Phenobarbitol, after which the members, lying supine on bunks, sporting black clothing and Nike tennis shoes, and covered by shrouds of purple fabric, awaited death to be, in their eyes, liberated at last from the pain and suffering of their earthly sojourn.
It's this memorable event that Maximillian Olivier has adopted as a creative springboard for a six-track audio interpretation. It's not the first album Olivier's released on Cryo Chamber, by the way: the California-based producer's issued a number of Lovecraftian nightmares since founding the Council of Nine project in early 2010. This latest creation is as refined an example of Dark Ambient as one might hope to find. Atmospheric in the extreme, the material exudes a mysterious, ethereal quality that convincingly suggests portentous transmissions originating from faraway realms. Immense washes of synthetic origin unfurl across limitless expanses as wordless vocal exhalations softly intone alongside them. Unease creeps in disturbingly as the recording progresses, culminating in the deeply unsettling “Exit Statements,” which in its final moments takes on a rather Popol Vuh-like character. Atmospheres of a different sort emerge within “This World Has Not Been Kind,” with glassy bell textures shimmering alongside swishing sounds that suggest the back-and-forth movements of a handsaw.
Still, as solidly crafted as Exit Earth is, one part of me wishes Olivier had incorporated more explicit connections to the Heavens Gate phenomenon, not so much that the project would have turned into an overly literal representation but enough that the material would feel more specifically tied to the event. Though a few blurry fragments of voices do emerge within “Above Human,” for example, the track might have been more engrossing had pronouncements spoken by Applewhite, for example, been woven into the musical design. In not connecting the material more directly to the cult and the mass suicide event, the result thus feels like a little bit of a missed opportunity. Exit Earth could have been a definitive audio treatment of the Heavens Gate event; as it stands, it's an excellent example of Dark Ambient production whose sounds could be representative of any number of possible subject matters.July 2018