Memory Scale — Chapter Five
[Audiobulb Records — 2025]★★★★★
Reviewed 31 January 2025by Colin Lang
Memory Scale (aka Arnaud Castagné from Bordeaux, FR) has crafted a pretty unique take on the ambient genre in his Chapter Five, a new album composed of twelve tracks that are really, for lack of a better term, songs. This is part of what makes this work unique, for the structure and internal momentum present within each composition certainly moves, in a developmental way, toward a horizon, wherever that is. To be fair, any music does by virtue of its durational character, but the movement I mean here is formal, built into the internal tensions within each song.
Memory Scale's toolkit is a familiar one – synth and the occasional electric instrument – even if the resulting music isn't, elegantly straddling genres from the quiet, atmospheric moments of post-rock to the ephemera of IDM. The electric bass on tracks like "Afternoon's Echoes" is round and full, pressing into the space around it as well as any of the aforementioned genre's might have done pre-Ableton. The opening tracks on Chapter Five, "Causes & Effects" into "Syntropy", meld seamlessly with one another, creating both the album's mood as well as its setting, the latter of which is sorely lacking in current ambient offerings, too often written by impatient, attention-hungry acts in a rush to get somewhere. Well, it is clear that Castagné knows that listeners have to want to enter a setting before moving toward its horizon.
Fans of 90s ambient works, as well as post-rock acts like Labradford and Tortoise, will find much on Chapter Five worth a listen or two. Others, who are curious about the formlessness of ambient electronica becoming something like a song, or dare I say, a concept album, can take Chapter Five for a new (or old) and reliable point of orientation. For more
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