How important is the theme of a piece of music? To what extent do aesthetic choices (artwork, lyrics, stated concepts) colour the audience’s perception of the sounds? It’s a question that doesn’t frequently get asked in Metal, where the same basic themes are repeated by the majority of bands until they become taken for granted, but Metal-adjacent genres like Dark Ambient can make it seem much more significant.

Aside from her contributions to various collaborative albums, The Edge Of Architecture (Cryo Chamber) was my first exposure to the music that sole-member Sasha creates under the name ProtoU, in part because the spiritual/meditative themes advertised for her other albums held no interest for me. This time the artwork shows an instant change of thematic pace, and when the label blurb talked about “black gigantic buildings”, “the night reek[ing] of dark fluid as flickering neon lights reflect on wet streets” and “a jungle of steel and shadows of automated builders creak[ing] in the distance”, I was on board.

Musically, The Edge Of Architecture is a rich, multi-layered construction of rumbling drones, lyrical synth-work and evocative field recordings, all magnified by the enormous Hollywood-sound you can take for granted on a Cryo Chamber album. Opener ‘Quiet Sky’ sets the mood perfectly, a dense web of radio chatter from air-traffic controllers giving way to almost crystalline drones and the cries of birds, isolated from their context and abstracted into symbols. Elsewhere, human voices slip in and out of dense monoliths of sounds, transient moments lost among something larger and more distant than themselves. It captures its theme of future architecture and the isolation of the built environment perfectly, but how much of this interpretation comes from knowing and buying into the theme is unclear. It’s also, arguably, irrelevant.

The Edge Of Architecture is a masterful demonstration of how music can be fully conceptual, of how theme and sound can cooperate on a level far beyond putting pictures of demons on the cover because that’s what bands like you do. As with many of Sasha’s labelmates, the term “Dark Ambient” doesn’t do justice to the moments of genuine warmth and light that coexist with the grinding drones and darker atmospheres. This is DEEP Ambient, not mere background atmospherics but a rich and fully realised work that forces the listener to engage with questions of meaning, purpose and symbolism far beyond liking a particular sound.

9.0/10

RICHIE HR

Richie HR, Ghost Cult, Ghost Cult Magazine, Dark Ambient, Deep Ambient,