Sonologyst — Electrons
The solo project of Raffaele Pezzella, Sonologyst have released as many as seventeen albums of post-industrial electronic music over the last eleven years or so and for a variety of different labels. Pezzella is the owner of the Unexplained Sounds Group and its network of subsidiary labels, Eighth Tower Records, Zerok and Reverse Alignment. He is also a publisher of books, which often tie in with the musical releases on his labels. He is an incredibly busy man!
Electrons started life as a digital release in 2016, and after listening to it again, Pezzella found the album sounded fresh and as if it were the work of someone else. He decided to reissue it as a CD with an extra bonus track that was recorded specially for this release, LHC.
The album opens with "Anti-Commutators", a darkly, chilled drone piece that slowly builds, adding extra layers of synth. At over eleven minutes long it’s an epic slice of ambient electronic drone that works beautifully at building a vibe that lasts throughout the whole project. The title track, "Electrons" is next and features some squelchy, glitchy electronic sounds layered over an uneasy-sounding drone that keeps the listener slightly on edge throughout. This is followed by "LDirac = ψ(iγμ∂μ −m)ψ" which opens with mottled synth sounds before another uneasy drone takes hold. It’s short at only just over two minutes long but very effective. "Zeeman Effect" is the album’s epic, at over fifteen minutes in length it is an oppressive-sounding slice of cosmic horror that bubbles with fear of the unknown. "H = (p − eA)22m + eφ" sounds like it should be the background music for an original episode of Star Trek, or Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires, it would fit perfectly in either environment. It’s a darkly disturbing science-fiction soundtrack in the making. "Hadronic Telescope" mixes things up a little, it’s a noisy, pulsing slab of harsh electronic drone, that gives the album something a little different, whilst "Internal Spin" takes us back in a cosmic direction with more otherworldly drones and various bleeps, squeaks and squelches to satisfy fans of cosmic ambience. LHC may be a new track, but it fits perfectly with the other tracks on the album, adding to that sense of cosmic dread that emanates from the whole record. Album closer "g' ψR γμBμψR" is a squelchy, glitchy slice of sparsely populated electronica that brings the album to a gentle close.
Overall, Electrons is a splendid album of dark cosmic ambient electronica that does exactly what I want from an album labelled as such. The music is dark, unsettling and gives that expansive cosmic sound that I want from ambient electronica. The CD comes in a rather lovely digipak with liner notes from Pezzella himself, explaining his thought processes on the reissue of the album as well as an excerpt from a lecture by Jonathan Bain and John D Norton on what philosophers can learn from the history of the electron. All in all, this is a rather magnificent release that all fans of cosmic ambient electronica should own.