Echoes from Outer Silence
Album by Alphaxone
Dark Ambient. I know that Schoenberg predates relativity but there’s still a cultural evolutionary connection between impossible tonality and discoveries that contradict intuition. Several composers who dealt with this duality are named in my all time top 40. That still shapes us but in the post 2000 era acceptance has sunk back in and it’s mostly back to the fragility of life which is also amplified by science. Voyager 1’s Blue Dot picture. Hubble images making us smaller and smaller still. Climate and environmental catastrophe and mass extinctions. But one need not be among an elite chosen few to express what this sounds like. A laptop and an internet connection and there it is for the world. Perhaps lost in the volume but still there to be found. Music like this isn’t singularly triumphant like Stockhausen or Wagner. Instead it’s a healthy part of an ecosystem in a return to anonymity not seen since Gregorian Chant. And the sonic similarities are there too.