Thawhold by Cellapse

We’ve spent years dragging our cellos through static and seismic hum, mapping the world’s deep anxieties. With *Thawhold*, we turned inwards, or rather, downwards – into a drowned future museum, a vault of forgotten human warmth. This album wasn't just about making sound; it was about excavating. Each piece is a fractured artifact, a memory suspended in water and silt, waiting for a current strong enough to coax it back to light.

The process was rigorous. We’re still pulling sound from subduction zones, feeding accelerometer readings into the bow’s pressure, making every note throb with a literal geological pulse. But this time, it’s not just the familiar creak of glaciers or the infrabass pipes shaking your ribs; it's about what happens when those monolithic drones begin to bloom. We started in funereal greyscale, a slow crawl through what felt like an ancient, waterlogged foyer. The raw silence, the children’s choir murmuring reversed logs, the lone cello note processed through our failing Caldera chain – it's all part of the sediment.

From those indistinct, silted portraits where names vanish into echoes, a stubborn flicker emerges. It’s a child's toy, hardened in forgotten kilns, somehow radiating warmth. That's where the four-note chant began to surface in the hum of the cellos, hushed at first, a whisper of "We remember / We release / We rekindle / We rise." This isn't some quick fix for grief; it's a slow burn, a hard-won fight against entropy. The joy here isn't frivolous; it's seismic, earned through every bowed note and every infrabass thrum. You’ll feel the pressure build, like air in a pressurized chamber, as the overtones stack – a library of lost knowledge crumbling to ash, each flake a whispered title. And then, that core, where everything bursts open. It's nine minutes of that chant, looping, building, adding brighter distortion, the choir joining in, pushing against the valve amps until it's just this undeniable wall of hope. We never thought we’d create something hailed as the "happiest feedback loop," but here we are. This wasn't just about the darkness; it was about the aftershock, the luminous spray of shattered light as a frozen world begins to give way.

We kept the palette stark: four cellos, our valve preamps, infrabass pipes. The occasional Baltic throat drone, doubled by the children’s choir, adds this ancestral weight. And the subtle gospel cadence from our friend on cymbals, it grounds the whole thing, a human pulse amidst the tectonic shifts. We even experimented with tuning forks, letting their resonant hum turn entire spaces into giant resonators. This album, *Thawhold*, is our way of understanding that delicate balance – how collective memory, even fractured, can fuel a renewal. It's our most direct exploration of eco-grief, yes, but also a testament to cathartic joy. We want listeners to feel that chest-rattle, that familiar tectonic therapy, but also to leave with a sense of hard-won triumph, that flicker of light after the collapse. It’s heavy, yes, but it offers a different kind of weight – the weight of potential, of resurgence.

Hear the tectonic shift. We make cellos howl, pulling grief from the planet's core. It's a seismic purge.