Alphaxone Explores Digital Afterlife, or at Least the Machines that Perpetuate It
Imagine the bliss of the endless sleep, the peace of permanence, and of the ability to upload your consciousness into networks and data frames for eternal storage - the repose of immortality; this is the stuff of fanciful futurism at one time hypothesized by authors such as H.G. Wells and Philip K. Dick; popularised in pastiche by shows like Max Headroom and Black Mirror… but imagine what that storage facility would look like - would sound like. Alphaxone gives us such a limned offering with the new album, Ghost Machine. As you bask in the low thrum of the servers and the effluvial drips and pumps from the feeding tube matrices built into the walls, imagine rows of cylinders and containment spheres, wires running to and fro, a spiderweb of unseen power deliverance from a source plumbed miles further into the ground below, traced by intermittent blinking lights, and heralded by the infrequent oscillations of esoteric machineries beyond the thick pall of mist and steam. The chorus of the souls contained within these machines are left to their own grand concerts in their minds, while the reality of their choir is the soft clicking of regulator switches and capacitors. Imagine a civilization of people who learned this technology - uploading their consciousness to computers - and now Alphaxone will let your mind fill in the rest of the pieces of this tale - be they peaceful or horrific.
Alphaxone returns with a new full-length sound exploration, after the brilliant split album, Back to Beyond (a collaborative effort with ProtoU). The artist’s unique approach to layering and textures returns with Ghost Machine, another futuristic tale of ambiguity - the story’s timbre and mood are largely left to the interpretation of the listener (a quality I personally love about this artist and others). From the description of the album, we are given oblique cues of a world whose population lay in eternal slumber beneath the surface, their undying minds connected to some form of machinery. The brilliance of this album is that we are not given the stories and dreams of those who lie in the machine, rather, we are given the atmosphere of the machines themselves. Spatial reverberations and ghostly knocks abound, the textures reverberating from concrete and metallic walls give us the sense of both claustrophobia and awe at such massive subterranean grandeur.
The beauty of Alphaxone is that on the surface, the music is not presented with any form of dread or macabre, however, the listener could easily interpret a horror timbre the longer you listen. It is the ambiguity of the sounds and soundscapes that make Alphaxone a true sonic mastermind. Fans of sci fi and even industrial soundscapes will certainly want to give this a listen.
You can purchase Ghost Machine in CD Digipak and digital formats on the Cryo Chamber Bandcamp page.
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