"Black gigantic buildings loom over our hubris as we reach for the unnatural with each new brick in the wall" reads the short promotional blurb for Sasha Cats' newest album as ProtoU (released by dark ambient label Cryo Chamber), an image both disturbing and alarmingly relevant in todays age of excess and indulgence; mankind no longer content to merely emulate the enormity and scale of the natural world, our ambitions continue to grow into something volatile and all consuming, as the landscapes we once worshipped are reduced to mere foundations for the monuments of our own self reverence to stand on.
The album art for The Edge of Architecture seems to depict a glowing futuristic metropolis carved into the face of a mountain, implying a future where the expansion of mankind continues, however unsustainably, towards the very core of the planet we live on. This leads us to an important question; at what point can we expand no further? The album title itself seems to imply some sort of tipping point on our horizon, a place where our ambitions are halted altogether, be it by our own self-destruction, or by the intervention of some ancient elemental force. The Edge of Architecture imagines a world at the cusp of a profound transformation, blasted landscapes echoing with the memories of their pastoral routes, the sounds of a planet fighting to take itself back.
The blurred, sustained drones of distant wind chimes drift sadly along endless stretches of baked asphalt on album opener Quiet Sky, recalling a time where these plaintive tones were accompanied by neighbourhood laughter and birdsong, long ago replaced by the incessant hum of generators and power-lines. Falling Home, acting as a stark reminder of a time prior to mans influence on the earth, churns and boils with the molten rumble of an infinitely powerful force lying dormant just below the earths surface, a slow ritualistic beat invoking elemental spirits, warm drones bleeding out on soft beams of light.
Throughout The Edge of Architecture, sparse yet thoughtful compositions unfold patiently, field recordings implemented as full on compositional tools, sounds placed with the utmost precision and subtlety so as to create long-form ambient pieces that are both tense and dynamic, drifting patiently yet always with a clear purpose in mind. On Fracture, eerie, cavernous notes float around the listener like wind through a tunnel, grounded by an unrecognizable subterranean bubbling and the static buzzing of exposed wires and faulty machinery, a scattering of debris and obstacles that keeps the listener on their toes throughout the entirety of the album.
As Phantom Tones brings the journey to a close, warm billowing drones curl and twist upon themselves like a spectral, living smoke, displacing the air with thick grey tendrils. Sounding like a long final breath outwards, this sense of finality is accompanied by a shifting mass of field recordings; sounds of children, water, stones, and steel mixed into seething layers of images and sounds, the listener made witness to the aural history of an entire planet, unfolding between their very ears. Are these the earth's final moments we are witnessing, or merely the beginning to something new? This is a question that defines the experience of listening to the Edge of Architecture; impending doom, contrasted by the potential for utter transformation and rebirth.