Review: Adrian Anioł - Arrhythmia OST

My listening experiences of Arrhythmia have been in absolute isolation from its context within the film it is intended to soundtrack; I have no visual reference point to which I can attribute the sounds, and thus the album’s atmosphere emerges gradually out of the dark, devoid of any preconceptions and free to mutate as either the composer or I see fit. The sense of narrative running through this soundtrack is strong enough, even without a visual accompaniment to prop it up. Anioł steers the listener between agonisingly expectant stretches of empty space and horrific, punctuative clangs that shatter the quiet like glass, tugging the listener between an eclectic spectrum of mood and embarking on a pendulumic swing between ease and unrest.

It’s incredibly glacial at points, with crisp echoes of synthesizer drifting to the far reaches of dark ice caverns (reminiscent of a frostbitten Lustmord), before emerging into the metallic impacts and scrapes of industry; post-apocalyptic mental images of self-cycling machines, devoid of human operators. Anioł teases with this sense of desolation, veering between the vacuosity of being utterly alone and the terrifying sense of being in elusive and hostile company. There’s nothing evoked here that doesn’t slot comfortably into the environmental/emotional stereotypes of dark ambient, but Anioł handles the genre’s use of drama, melancholy and paranoia with a greater care and patience than most.