Dronny Darko and Ajna Immerse Us In A Radioactive Sound Design

Few artists know how to begin an album like Dronny Darko. The newest release from Cryo Chamber offers we listeners a collaborative effort between artists Dronny Darko and the mysterious newcomer, Ajna, with whose work I am unfamiliar, however, after listening to this pensive and immersive work, I will be searching for more information on them.

Radioactive Immersion  sets an aural stage of exploration into an abandoned nuclear reactor - or some biological science laboratory, as also mentioned in the album’s precis - a facility whose core and subsidiary operations remain active, yet is abandoned and given unto the slow assimilation of nature. Flora has become altered from its natural state, verderies growing in strange geometric patterns, fed by the irradiated waters of the cooling chambers.

This is an immersive sound escape, a soft, introspective mental caress of spatial sound design. There is no sense of urgency in this collection, and I never felt any unease, or tension, as is often slightly indicated in these releases, typifying a horror element in the stories; this is simply an exploration into an environment abandoned by any human purpose, and consigned to the inexorable crawl and consummation of nature, resigned to how the whims of consequence carry one’s actions.

Slow pads weave between field recordings, with random moments of synthetic stabs and sequences that help carry us along these dark corridors, the sonance fixed just beyond our mental “headlamps” as we traverse further into the dark corridors.

Radioactive Immersion is exactly what we want from artists such as Dronny Darko, and this collaboration is binaural and sound design excellence. I want to hear more from Ajna, and I would hope that this debut foray into the Cryo Chamber label is the beginning of a catalog of works. Radioactive Immersion is available in digital and reverse board matte digipak on March 9, 2021 on the Cryo Chamber Bandcamp page.

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