National Music Reviews
AUN
Alpha/Heaven
Denovali Records
Street: 06.21
AUN = Stars of the Lid + Anduin + Pausal
There are depths in Alpha/Heaven that go beyond your garden-variety ambient drone record. Beneath every beautiful wash of silvery synthesizer or gauzy drone is some new hidden vista reserved for deep audio explorers with expensive headphones and an afternoon to kill staring at the ceiling (welcome to my life). Distressed drum patterns skitter deep below lapping waves of soft noise and synthesizer feedback, choirs both human and machine surface for brief moments before their frequencies are tuned out by an arching, aching drone scraping its decaying fingers across a cloudless sky. The result is an album full of deep, hallucinatory beauty and grandeur. I doubt I will hear a more moving album this year. –Ryan Hall