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<<audio "intro" play>>
It was a fairly hand to mouth time, with a fortnightly girocheque from the government the only thing keeping me in baked beans, sherry and lemonade. Back then, the //absolutely cheapest// supermarket in town was an hour walk and a few hundred feet in altitude change away, but every 2 weeks me and my deranged, deadbeat and beautiful housemates would storm over with empty hiking rucksacks, load up on tins of tomatoes, beans, dried pasta and stagger back with whatever would keep our belly’s full (if not epicurean tastes titillated) while leaving maximum booze resources. Hey, what's youth for anyway? Ok, so I was knocking on 30, but it's just a number, or so I'm reliably [[informed.]]
<<cacheaudio "intro" "./audio/Welcome.mp3" "./audio/Welcome.ogg">>
<h2>Welcome to hell, please mind the gap</h2>
In 1994 I was living in Sheffield, city of hills, steel and [[ancient stones...->Introduction]] <h3><a href="../casefiles.html">Case Files</a>
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<a href="http://www.reddit.com">Reddit</a>Something else you may or may not know about dear old Sheffield is that it's the home to two major universities and a huge, expansive teaching hospital. There's an area off the side of the main city centre that is a sprawling square mile mix of departments, labs, offices, theatres and steaming industrial support buildings where the study of medicine, technology, the future and the past all meet and mingle, where you can walk from a drama theatre in a Church sited on pre-Christian foundations, to a stainless steel robotic operating theatre in one minute. The traditional tin hunter-gatherer trail went right past the western edge of this sprawl, and in one November, on a less usual solo trip for supplies, I spied the battered yellow beacon of a skip down a quiet, leaf-strewn street under the shadow of the towering Hallamshire [[hospital.]]
An old friend once told me "The difference between the North and the South is that an empty skip will be full in 24 hours in London, up here a full one will be empty." How true, and another summed it up in more succinct Northern style: "Owt for nowt!"
Within femtoseconds, I was feet in the air, head in the paydirt, the ubiquitous plasterboard chalking me white and drywall screws slashing me red like a true recycling warrior and United fan by heritage, if not practice. I forget exactly what was there that fateful day, but I know what my arms carried back down the hill, through the herculean portico of the general cemetery, up through the leaning stones, blackened statues and student-eating collapsed catacombs to my little room on the seventh hill of seven [[hills.]]
A box of 3.5" floppy discs and dozens of audio cassettes, not exactly gold, but items that I used a lot of and would save me buying new.
I wish I'd just wiped the discs and recorded over the tapes, but I didn't. I loaded, read and listened. At first, I thought I’d found a collection of the first wave of Sheffield electronic bands and the experimental noodlings of some LSD soaked musos with a penchant for horror, but as I went on, a deeply unsettling //truth// laid heavily upon me, and my nights began to be haunted with the exact visions and vistas described in the text and painted by the sounds. Look, I grew up with Black Sabbath and all the lesser Metal Gods, but never once did listening to them cause an actual ‘big black shape with eyes of fire’ appear before me, leaving me screaming, frantic and [[soiled.]]
The best I can say is that my life attained a focus I had been lacking for some years. The worst....is worse than I, and with a confidence bordering on physical law, anyone else could imagine outside of the hell of some poor, diseased and tortured soul strapped to a bed in the most secure of psychiatric wings, devoid of the language to describe the writhing, utterly alien //things// whose image no human mind could hold and survive intact.
That the contents of that box contained somewhat sanitised (how apt a term) written accounts, and by some method as yet unknown to me, allegedly //sterilised// sound recordings perhaps spared me the loving embrace of a straight jacket, or even of something that viewed me merely as dinner...but those innocent-looking, numbered cassettes; they were possessed of an awful, squirming //vitality// enough to scar and warp my mind with an obscene transcendence. As a musician myself, I had always held the artform in a high place and the act of musical creation something of a dark art, but those weird tapes transformed a colorful phrase into a terrifying [[reality.]]
We live in a golden age for self-medication, and along with a pliant GP, the gift of Prozac, balm of Valium, oceans of booze (and not a little Northern, Nazi death cult defeating humour) I kept it mostly together and passed myself off as a first-class space cadet when I didn't. "Fuck Nyarlathotep! Come on, les al doo the Dagon dance....*lurch*"
It's taken me years to work through the accounts contained on the discs (with some files of a format I’ve never been able to read), and at times the tapes were so profoundly disturbing that I could not listen for months at a time. But eventually, some fevered withdrawal would eventually take over and once more I would intently scrutinise the sounds, trying to glean understanding from them. Fuck knows I drew no comfort. Maybe it's the fact there can //be// no understanding of such things that drew me back again and again like some insect drawn to the killing flame, equally as insentient compared to the minds behind that dread [[light.]]
The origin of the collection seems to be a department with the anacronym 'THARL', as all the discs and tapes are marked as such with cross-referencing codes. My best guess is 'Trans Human Audio Research Lab', but it is just a guess and sounds a bit Dr Who to be honest. Which is no bad thing among so many //actual bad things//.
As I progressed through the tapes, bearing in mind that some left me barely functional for months before my shaking finger could press ‘play’ or click the corresponding filename once more, I found a musicologists variety of recordings from around the world and throughout the age of recording mediums, and I started to understand that many people had simply stumbled into or across the doorways opened by sounds of a certain degenerate nature, and that the remit of THARL was to collect and study these cases, as well as advise more anthropoid powers in some official [[capacity.]]
I did lurk around the general area where I found the box, trying to find some clue as to the physical location of the lab, and as the tapes often contained music (in intent if not always tonality), synthesised electronic sounds and radio intercepts, I schmoozed my way among the students of the music department, shadowed and got chatting with electronic engineers, eavesdropped on psychology tutors getting pissed up and loud and accosted dozens of support staff with "Oh, just looking for the THARL department, have you....?"
But I found nothing, other than unwanted attention from campus security. After I discovered that some of the accounts were concerned with the Ministry of Defence I curtailed any further investigation just in case I asked the wrong person and ended up sealed in a concrete biohazard bunker in Porton [[Down.]]
Why have I started to make these accounts and some of the less...toxic recordings public now, after so long? Maybe it's for my own protection, I mean, stable door (crypts of the elder horrors), horse (with tentacles for a head) etc. Maybe it's a sense of public duty. Maybe I’m looking for people who deal with this stuff to contact me, it’s been a bit of a lonely burden.
Whatever it is, before you go any further, please be aware: You shouldn't. Not unless you have any regard for having a sound nights sleep ever, ever again. Possibly for all eternity if the Big Fella ever gets loose in the all-U-can-eat chicken coop we call Earth.