[Reviewed by: Iaha Crax]
It’s been quite a pleasure every time hearing “The Edge of Architecture”, it concocts a feeling of loss and numbness before stepping down from the top of a skyscraper, a prolonged scene from a movie where a character is about to jump (release himself from the gravity) from a high structure.
The musician is from Kiev, lives inside a modern, concrete city, tries to find a point of harmony there, a cloister of emotions hammered, uniformed into a mirror of the escape that remains only a possibility. Tracks are different in their reflection, although textures have the same knitting; what changes is the nuance of the gloom around, from “Quiet Sky” to “Falling Home” and “Glass Fractals”, the reality remains grey but irradiates a probability to change the past and alternate this future.
Childhood memories haunt, resurface and restructure the face of this newly born existence; “The Edge of Architecture” imprints digitally this already dystopian reality and makes it bearable. A new fiction demands new music, allegedly voiced by ProtoU, soft, droning, sometime lifeless and always evasive, frivolous. Music for fractured souls, organless bodies, lucky heirs of the new network; the artist behind the project extracts some gems of speechless enchanting drones exactly out of the heartless beats of the virtual drama. Fracture, obituary of a neuronal love-construction, “Hidden City”, a sibylline poem on dead memories, “Phantom Tones”, resurgence of hybrid virtual life.
Whether explicit or not, like this review, ProtoU’s “The Edge of Architecture” is a subtle work of drone ambient, fragile and feminine. In fact, ProtoU is the work of Sasha Puzan, female violinist and choir vocalist, co-teamed by Cryo Chamber to release this album.
ProtoU – The Edge of Architecture
Cryo Chamber, CRYO 088
CD/Digital 2018
Santa Sangre 