AJNA: Inevitable Mortality

Release year: 2016/2023
Label: Reverse Alignment/Zoharum

Listening to US based act Ajna’s Inevitable Mortality, I find myself musing over what a funny genre of music dark ambient is. It’s entirely non-musical, usually extremely minimalist, with drawn-out pieces that can last for dozens of minutes. Essentially, it’s a bit like listening to wind through a metallic drainage pipe.

I mean, with other non-musical genres such as noise and power electronics, at least you get the aggression, the harshness and the abrasion. Something active and confrontational, something to engage the listener. With dark ambient, it’s often just a layer of somber – well, ambience.

Who on earth likes that kind of stuff?

Listening to US based act Ajna’s Inevitable Mortality, I find myself being that someone. It’s certainly an acquired taste in the true meaning of the expression; something you have to learn to listen to. I doubt anyone has genuinely liked dark ambient from the first listen. Intrigue I can believe; fascination I can accept; but not falling head first in love.

And indeed, Inevitable Mortality – first released in 2016 as a CDr, and now re-released by Polish Zoharum as an expanded double CD – belongs to the more minimalist fringe of the dark ambient scene. This truly is like listening to the wind through a metallic drain pipe. Distant, minimalistic, subtly rumbling drones washing over the listener; occasionally complemented or contrasted by layers of higher frequencies or the odd speech sample; but always, it remains vague, abstract, distant and minimalist.

There’s something very soothing and beautiful in the sparse, understated music on Inevitable Mortality. This is not dark ambient in the sense of some overshadowing doom, or some disturbing undercurrent, or haunted desolation; there’s a peacefulness to the music, given a hint of darkness by the abstract sense of melancholy, solitude and distance of the album. This is the music of being utterly alone by choice, far away from the world and its rhythm. The music of gentle rain and an an autumnal wind over a barren landscape. The subtle music of things passing.

I suppose you could call Inevitable Mortality pretty typical dark ambient. It’s got all the outer trappings of yer average dark ambient album. And in many ways, that’s exactly what it is. If someone were to ask me what dark ambient sounds like, I could see myself telling them to listen to this. But at the same time, Inevitable Mortality is far from any kind of dime-a-dozen dark ambient in terms of the efficacy of its atmospheres and the formless beauty of its expression.

Visit Ajna on Bandcamp