Dark Music Review – Echoes from Outer Silence
Review Written By Casey Douglass
Cryo Chamber welcomes Iranian Mehdi Saleh from Alphaxone back with his 4th album on the label. A space voyage ambient album of drone mixed with electronic overtones and a healthy dose of field recordings.Echoes from Outer Silence take us through space and to the archaic signals of civilizations beyond the stars, Mehdi this time packing some serious analogue warmth to his droney dreamscapes.He once again polishes up his already splendid sound quality and excellent production to reach new heights. This is an album best enjoyed when relaxing with a cup of freeze dried coffee in zero G.
Listeners to
Alphaxone’s Echoes from Outer Silence can expect a dark
ambient album that is, for the most part, a gentle and smooth listen
with sounds that ebb and flow in a relaxing way but interspersed with
harsher electronic and metallic noises. As the album description
above also states, there is a good amount of field recorded sounds
too, from birdsong to the more static-based noise of wind and rain.
It is with this latter point in mind that I found myself gravitating
more towards those tracks that make more use of these sounds.
“Outfield” is the
first track of the album and begins with the rumblings of a distorted
storm, the sounds of sliding movements and fabric-like undulations
seeming to rotate from ear to ear. It conjured to mind an image of
some abandoned space dock, the denizens in the nearest bar or strip
joint waiting out the rain. The fabric sound also had an ASMR like
quality so may trigger this response in some listeners, although it
didn’t do much for me sadly.
A track that takes a
different tack is “Sphere of Change”. This track begins with high
hanging notes, a gentle buzzing sound and a light drone, the buzzing
distortion becoming longer lasting as the drone builds. Delicate
ticking noises bounce and echo from ear to ear before a range of
field recordings come and go: bird song, whispers, water and other
sounds like brushing noises. The variety is interesting and the way
they all seem to dove-tail and not be jarring is a pleasing thing to
reflect on. This track put me in mind of an artificial intelligence,
possibly medical or therapeutic, sorting through its memory banks.
Another track that I
particularly liked was “Altered Xone”, a track that begins with
the whining sound of a radio scanning between stations, the female
sigh and snatches of voices found soon fading into warbling notes
that echo out into the darkness. I particularly liked that some of
the more electrical sounds seemed to take on the aspect of an old
dial-up modem handshaking, a sound that I’d not heard for a long
long time.
Echoes from Outer
Silence is a fine, space-infused dark ambient album that seems to
take the listener to the moments between events in the cosmos: the
space-port before the activity begins, the contemplative field
recordings in a medical AI program arranging them for its next patient. It
is the calm before the storm, the big breath before the plunge, the
gathering of strength before the final push. Sometimes, that’s what
we want from our music, the space to reflect and to take stock. I
give Echoes from Outer Silence 4/5, an album that sits
nicely between more brash and more minimal dark ambient creations.
Check out Echoes
from Outer Silence on bandcamp at this link.
You can listen to
“Altered Xone” below:
I was given a free
copy of this album to review.
Album Title: Echoes
from Outer Silence
Artist: Alphaxone
Label : Cryo Chamber