Deep space ambient atmospheres and sinister drone combine for an immersive expedition to abandoned alien assembly lines on this album by Dronny Darko & RNGMNN

The on-board computer had become increasingly erratic as I approached the energy emission on the unexplored side of the planet. Eventually the AI overheated, stranding me on the lifeless, desolate lump of rock. I rode manually to investigate the energy source, and brought the AI core with me - charred cables emitting a putrid stench inside the research probe.

The alien structure towered like a black monolith under dual moons. I spent days there, roaming through deserted production halls, trying to scavenge anything I could find that was not beyond my understanding. Deeper in and further down the massive assembly lines seemed gone, in favor of smaller, separate enclosements, bathed in uniform light. Here I started to find organic remains, as well as things whose ancestors may indeed have been machines or animals.

On the third day, I found a discarded pack, stamped with the sigil of the guild. The dust that covered almost everything else seemed absent here, and instilled in me both a fervent hope and a creeping fear. It is obvious that this site has had other visitors. A thoroughly exhausting search, on foot, of the surrounding terrain revealed several crashed pods. If one of them has a functioning relay, it can be repurposed.

It will have to be done fast. Something has awakened inside, by my doing or some other force I do not know. I must be utterly certain that nothing else returns with me. But how?

Recommended for Dark Space Horror fans

Dead Melodies presents us a dark cinematic space album with Primal Destination.

The dying star shone weak in the ancient system. Desperate bursts of green-tinged solar flares scattered towards the nearest planet; a terrestrial world circled by a ring of moons. The crew’s search for habitable lands seemed to be reaching an end.

Upon descent, as far as the eye could see, jagged lapis-blue karsts peaked the horizon, almost reaching up to meet the flares above as they breached the atmosphere. Dazzling pearlescent skies laced with layers of swirling clouds gave the impression this was a land harmonious with nature, but as the exploration pod set down in the clearing of a misty swamp, this seemed far from true.

Remnants of civilizations tore through the land from what appeared to be a long forgotten race. The karsts were hollowed-out with metal shards spiking out the sides, entangled in flora and corroding at the roots. Strange bird calls carried on the wind, underpinned by bloodthirsty growls that echoed from the tangled foliage. In the distance, beyond the low lying mists, sentry beacons lit up the overlooking foot hills followed by search lights that scoured the glade highlighting the endless sea of ruins before focusing right on the pod, and then the chase began…

Deep drones, sweeping atmospheres and a mysterious setting creates an immersive setting for this sci-fi journey.

Moscow based quartet Lesa Listvy debuts on Cryo Chamber with Way Home. On this highly atmospheric release you get a mix of deep analogue drone, dark beats, ethereal walls of sound and subtle field recordings.

Years ago the beat of the shaman’s drum pulled your tribe out of the motherland. Now as you make your way home everything has changed. The smell of burnt wood linger in the canopy of the forests, clicking machinery reverberate deep within. Trees malformed, technology fused with nature, the prophecy of the shaman was wrong. The ancient land now lies perverted by the swarm, but the tribe is coming home.

Highly recommended for fans of warm analogue ambient

Locus Arcadia is a collaborative album by 4 artists: - Randal Collier-Ford - Flowers for Bodysnatchers - Council of Nine - God Body Disconnect

This album takes us on a voyage across the stars to the Locus Arcadia Space Station as it follows a lone protagonists questions into what happened after loss of contact.

“I can barely hear them now, their thin reverberating voices quickly fizz in and out. The crackling sounds of half garbled transmissions dance erratically in my ears, desperately trying to break through a crunching wall of distortion. My last connection to home is quickly disintegrating. The only thing I could muster from the broken transmissions was that there used to be a prison on this station and also some kind of archaic cyborg research facility. As I struggle to hold back the closing walls of helmet induced claustrophobia, I soon fear everything will be buried underneath a smothering film of my own sticky breath. I hate the feeling of being trapped in this glass prison. My attention shifts, and I begin to notice just how cold it’s become. It’s dropped 30 degrees since my initial inspection; the meter now reads -87 Fahrenheit. Ahead of me awaits a mammoth of a station. A rust colored metallic structure with hundreds of slits like eyes peering out into open space. I slowly slide a vigilant gaze along its seemingly endless perimeter, and in complete awe of its massiveness the reality of what awaits me firmly sets hold. A fine pointed sting of uneasiness slowly climbs through my sternum and into my throat. Now just twelve meters from the entrance, my steps turn deliberately cautious. I hesitantly raise and press my boots into the ground, compressing the tiny granules beneath me. The closer I get, the quieter it all becomes, and the more alone I begin to feel. As the distance between us diminishes, the anticipation grows feverishly tall like the dozens of rectangular glass lookouts adorning the otherwise dilapidated station. The main entry hatch now within arms reach, I punch in the code: 7-5-1-3. The door opens…”

The fourth album from the Sabled Suns 21xx series, about a man in Hibernation waking up to a world in ruins, takes us through the fourth year 2148.

The album starts with our Protagonist finding The Ark. It takes us through robot filled chasms, overgrown laboratories, uplink stations and deteriorated civilization.

Field Recordings combine with distant Piano and dusty Strings. Cavernous Drone with throbbing bass. Our robotic children’s voices pleads to not leave them behind.

Sabled Sun - Signals, is a series of space ambient works that portrays transmissions that the protagonist, from the 21xx series albums, find on his journey to uncovering what happened to humanity. The protagonist wakes up from hibernation deep sleep to an empty world void of human life in the 21xx album series. As such this is a look into what happens in the periphery of the main project.

Recommended for Space Ambient lovers

Sabled Sun - Signals, is a series of space ambient works that portrays transmissions that the protagonist, from the 21xx series albums, find on his journey to uncovering what happened to humanity. The protagonist wakes up from hibernation deep sleep to an empty world void of human life in the 21xx album series. As such this is a look into what happens in the periphery of the main project.

Recommended for Space Ambient lovers

Simon Heath returns from the void with another detailed and complex dark ambient album. This time under his alias Sabled Sun, a project close to Atrium Carceri but with a more prominent story woven element of the post apocalyptic.

The album 2145 will take you to the desolate landscapes of a fallen future, where a mans voyage after being released from deep freeze hibernation turns into a realization of his own shattered mentality.

The follow up to the album 2145 takes us to the second year after our protagonist awakens from deep hibernation sleep to a world in ruins. Seeking signs of life he encounters the illuminated cities still powered by automated energy and its robotic inhabitants moving with pointless tasks void of meaning. Simon Heath takes us to a cold place of nuclear winters and lost hope in this genre bending release.

The third album from the Sabled Suns 21xx series about a man awoken from hibernation to a world in ruins, takes us through the third year 2147. A shattered man self taught to survive in the harsh world left empty by it’s predecessors, only it’s mechanical children left behind. The protagonist journeys through a burned out world towards the Outer Zones and the rumored space center there, in search for answers.

This Cyberpunk Ambient album from In Quantum takes you to the mega cities of the future.

“Early Spring 2074 Some say the old days were different. Before cybernetics and the transhumanist revolution. Before the megacorps bought us and our nations, our hopes and our dreams. People back then did not live, work, eat and sleep their lives away within the towering megacorp arcologies. These days only the lucky do so.

Before the megacorps developed the semantic networks, there were us - soulless prototypes with imprinted memories and so cybernetically enhanced that we verge ever on cyber-psychosis. Due to our post-human DNA, programmed for resilience, we work and live in areas where Humans cannot - like Sector 417. A quarantined and irradiated zone where we protect and maintain the filtration, power and sewage systems of the Mega-City. The nuclear fallout from the conflicts of the 50’s is mostly cleaned up thanks to us, though you would never know it.

Water is scarce, and the first war over it is already brewing. We see, but lack the capacity to care. The word Humanity now feels on the tongue like some long-lost dream. A vision of freedom and serenity, turned to coarse sand on our pallets.

We see the riots from up here, red smoke and gunfire as anti-transhumanist chants peal through the city. Humans that are disenfranchised, without value in a new world where semantic networks connect the soulless, making them smarter and more effective. What is a single brain compared to thousands? Sometime recently we diverged from the evolutionary path of the many, and now seem land-locked into evolving into a single mind. A single mind at war with itself and all of creation. A single mind ready to disembowel itself to cut the cancer out.

To cut us out.”

Warm analogue bass, textural soundspaces and cinematic build ups combine for a unique look into the future of mankind.

Ruptured World is back with a new album, Archeoplanetary, expanding on the storyline of previous album, Exoplanetary, and presenting an intriguing prequel to its atmosphere of cosmic horror and its prevailing themes of supraliminal close encounters and unknown worlds.

Scotland, 1936. Dr Archibald Macrae of the Transatlantic Institute of Archaeological Investigations has made a critical discovery. He recovers an array of materials compiled by his colleague and mentor, Dr Marian Tarknassus, who has disappeared five years earlier while working on the mysterious ancient scripts of the Pictish Ogham. As Macrae begins to apply the cipher of Tarknassus and unlock the secrets of the recovered transcripts, he is led on a journey over the North Sea coasts in search of enigmatic clues and relics that reveal the possible whereabouts of his missing academic cohort and friend. At the same time, he reveals startling evidence of the prospect of an extra-terrestrial presence on Earth that precedes the limits of recorded history. A prescient knowledge is uncovered that envisages future scenes of intergalactic voyages and the far-flung habitats of strange beings from distant worlds. Archeoplanetary combines cavernous space drones with ethereal soundscapes and the evocations of haunted pianos that remind us of the fragile proximity of human life to the hostile conditions of unexplored cave systems and the vast proportions of the void.

Recommended for fans of cinematic dark ambient and spoken word.

Ava is the second album from Slovakian artist Keosz on Cryo Chamber.

Massive sweeps of sub bass underlines this brilliant album. Serene winds of emotional texture mix with bowed strings. Guitars crackle with slight distortion as they hover over fields of tape noise.

This album probes the depth of the future, where memory transfers into binary form. Digital consciousness in a perpetual loop reliving the past in fractal labyrinths.

Aegri somnia returns with his long awaited second album on Cryo Chamber.

The hum of the Endtime Psalms echo through burnt out buildings. Awaiting impending death as the sky grows dark. Black smoke wheezing from charred windows. We we’re born from stardust, but are but puppets in a mindless game of DNA manipulation, life.

Deep analogue drones rumble under the heavy boots of the human machine. Aegri Somnia plays the role of field recorder and audio manipulator with surgical precision.