I admit that this is an album that was released almost four months ago, yet it is still worth reviewing, and this for three reasons: the excellent label involved (I have always appreciated the Cryo Chamber community), both acts involved (no further comment, at least not yet), and the superb sonic pleasure that characterizes this collaboration (see below). Futuristic Dereliction is like a doomed, dystopian soundtrack once more, offering a post-apocalyptic view though sonic excavations. I will keep it concise, yet thorough.
First this. This collaborative effort was written and performed, and produced too, by both artists behind these projects, being Mahdi Saleh (Alphaxone, Iran) and Maurizio Landini (Onasander, Italy). They collaborated before (in very early 2020) under the working title Shadows Of Forgotten Legends, with ProtoU being involved as well, by the way. This new mutual effort, Futuristic Dereliction, was mastered by Simon Heath, whose fine label takes care of the digital and physical release. The latter (the physical release) is a rather limited six-panel digipack compact-disc, which comes with quite cool visual artistry, designed by Mister Heath himself once more. It shows a world after its own suicide through technologic misbehavior, the ruins of desperate and lost metropolitan societies, the failure of mankind and its pathetic will to progress without knowledge, conjunction or vision. Yeah, the visuals do deeply accompany, and intensify, the conceptual and the aural content of this exquisite recording.
So, Futuristic Dereliction is an audio play that clocks fifty-six minutes, divided into eight individual yet cohesive chapters (all of them lasting in between six and eight minutes of length). It is like the aural translation of a suffocative fog, a mist of corrupted air that surrounds the listener through baleful drones as guideline. Severe dronelines manifest themselves in a mostly sinister way. They get injected with sedative synth-lines, futuristic electronica, psychotropic details (mind the subtle yet mostly considerable use of omnifarious field-recorded sound-effects!) and alienated bass-whirrs. Despite the doomed atmosphere, all pieces seem to unfurl and dilate, then again things subside and seem to grow silent, yet that’s just a harbinger for more judgment and decline to come.
Futuristic Dereliction is an opulent and somehow prodigious experience, because it continuously dwells around, within, and beyond minatory spheres, through orbed, radical textures and abrupt, oppressive sound-collages. It has a mysterious, dreary and hideous ambience, with astral noise-sculpting, some energetic electronics (like the cosmic tunes in Time Fracture which arise, seem to extinguish, and recur again and again), and capricious waves of a sagaciously engineered pulsating tendency, then again of a significant chimerical setting.
Bleak and cunning post-apocalyptic Dark Drone Ambient Music as soundtrack for our impending, inescapable Day of Doom…
https://cryochamber.bandcamp.com/album/futuristic-dereliction
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