[Reviewed by: Iaha Crax]
Alphaxone has released about 10 albums up till now, this is the fifth for Cryo Chamber, the label founded back in 2012 by Simon Heath from Atrium Carceri. Renewed for promoting cinematic dark ambient music, Cryo Chamber (now located in Oregon) has been putting out only qualitative, elaborate and distinctive music. Alphaxone has a strong particular nature as a project, it is being dressing rich-decorated yet minimal music that stands out by a sense of refinement and melancholia.
Alphaxone is the project of Mehdi Saleh from Iran and by checking (and listening to) the other titles of his albums (“Forsaken”, “Echoes from Outer Silence”, “Absence of Motion” or “Altered Dimension”) one can make an image of his evasionist intimate nature.
His penchant for sad and troubled images makes “Edge of Solitude” a pictorial album where he seeks only those territories that are blessed by the absence of man. It is where there’s plenty of sorrow, it receives an abundance of static melancholy which is being spilled over these vast spiritual places. “Road to Nowhere”, “Beyond the Edge”, “Broken Worlds” are like many small poems on pure sensations, it’s like fixation of sounds into a vacuous space so as to make something present by the power of musicality. Or to uncover this ever-present desolation. “Solar Halos”, “Echosphere”, “Lost Horizon”, “Overland”, paradoxically cherish this apparent discomfort, which in fact is a celebration of the absence of life, a soothing grief rendered blissfully by the disappearing of the desired object.
The process of composing seems to be completely submitted to an attempt of dematerialising light and matter. By these drones and ambient brushes Alphaxone is searching a sense of fusion between atmosphere and light. His tones clearly reminds of Debussy’s “La Mer” or “La Cathédrale Engloutie”.
Try to listen the last piece, “Ocean Grooves”, while looking at Monet’s Rouen Cathedral paintings and feel how form is disintegrating. Impressive. Alphaxone has found an “instrumental colour” that ravishes ears and sight.
Alphaxone – Edge of Solitude
Cryo Chamber
CD/Digital 2018
Santa Sangre 