CHATEAUGAY LAKE STEAMBOAT GAZETTE CO.

The blizzard raged outside The Wendigo Research Shanty (in reality, my ramshackle experimental music studio), a symphony of frosted fury conducted by a ravenous Frost Wendigo. Its icy breath gnawed at the eaves, whispering threatening promises of forgotten blizzards. Inside, perched precariously on a teetering ladder, I wrestled with a belligerent roof leak. As frigid rainwater drizzled down my neck, a glint of forgotten gold caught my eye.

There, nestled amongst the moldering remnants of my once-vibrant abstract post-Dada-neo-expressionist phase (inside a cardboard castle now devoured by industrious mice, their tiny utopia nestled snugly within the shredded remnants of a faded, time-worn, chewed-up, blue Navy Band UNITAS t-shirt, a souvenir of bygone days and distant lands), lay a treasure trove of a bygone era. My prized archived collection of dusty cardboard boxes, their surfaces marred with the cryptic scribblings of a madman – myself, thirteen years past.

With trembling fingers, I unearthed these sonic treasures, the air thick with the pungent scent of forgotten dreams and repurposed potential. Inside, nestled amongst petrified iron-oxide magnetic tape and defunct hard drives, lay sonic phantoms of my past: the ghosts of experiments conducted long ago, on the wild frontier of electroacoustic music.

A jolt of electricity, a prayer whispered to the long-dead gods of technology, and the antique machine stirred. My old Revox tape deck lurched and whirred to life, its mechanical heart straining against the weight of decades as it fought inertia like an ole curmudgeon — namely, myself!. A hiss, a crackle, then a sound both beautiful and horrifying, a chorus of unearthly timbres woven with the jarring laughter of a broken machine. My own laughter, perhaps, echoing from the abyss of forgotten nights.

The music, oh the music! It was a maelstrom of sound, a cacophony of manipulated loons and howling Wendigos, vs. the unrestrained wild, distorted guitar notes of 3BC channeling loons, their primal cries transformed and distorted into an aural nightmare.

Memories flooded back, vivid and unsettling: the feverish nights hunched over the bubbling face of my Wendicomp modular synthesizer, coaxing tortured sounds from its metallic womb. The frigid expeditions across the ice-bound expanse of Chateaugay Lake, capturing the primal howls of the Wendigos as they danced beneath a fractured moon. The endless pursuit of a digital god, the creation of algorithms that wove nightmares into sonic tapestries.

And then the visuals. Fractured dreamscapes flickering on a long-dead monitor: warped, glitching glimpses of Chateaugay Lake, its surface a canvas of writhing colors. Polly Hoy’s flower garden, once a riot of vibrant hues, now rendered in shades of decay and madness. A symphony of chaos for the eyes, a descent into the liminal space where reality frayed and imagination took flight.

“Imaginaria Vermolique Sonat,” the title echoed in my mind, a testament to the madness of youth, a haunting immersion into the grotesque beauty of the world beyond the mundane. As the weird, spastic groove faded into a chilling silence, I sat enveloped in the shroud of nostalgia.

But the silence wouldn’t hold. The blizzard still raged, the Wendigo’s call echoing through the night. It was a challenge, a siren song beckoning me back to that liminal space. Perhaps, amongst the detritus of those forgotten tapes, lay undiscovered treasures, sonic secrets waiting to be unearthed. With a newfound fervor, I reached for another box, the call of the loons and the rhythmic scratching of the Wendigo on my roof a potent invitation. The journey back to “Imaginaria Vermolique Sonat” had begun.