Album Review: Alphaxone – Final Encouter

Artist: Alphaxone
Title: Final Encounter
Label: Cryo Chamber
Release date: March 11th, 2025
Country: Iran
Format reviewed: High-quality digital recording

Album Review: Alphaxone – Final Encouter via Cryo Chamber by Pegah

“Final Encounter” is Alphaxone’s latest release via “Cryo Chamber”, and the title alone already feels like the end of a long, silent journey, like finally coming face to face with something we’ve spent a lifetime avoiding. The word final carries weight. It suggests resolution, confrontation, maybe even surrender. But it also raises a deeper, more unsettling question: What exactly are we meant to encounter in this ultimate moment? The cover of “Final Encounter” sets the tone before a single sound is heard. It offers a cryptic hint. A lone figure, suspended somewhere in deep space, stares into a circular opening almost like a portal or a dying star with light spilling from its core. There’s an eerie quiet to the image, as if the figure is not only alone but completely untethered, gazing into the unknown. Is this light an escape? A revelation? Or the final threshold of consciousness itself? Maybe this is an encounter not only with the unknown beyond, but with the hidden depths within. This isn’t just a cosmic landscape; it’s a mirror of the subconscious, each distant star reflecting a fragment of memory, fear, or revelation. The vastness of the galaxy becomes a metaphor for the mind itself, where perception is shaped by reality, yet reality is constantly filtered through perception. It’s an image that invites the listener inward, even as it pulls them outward, toward something greater than themselves.

“Hellmetron” opens the journey with an epic, atmospheric drone that feels like the first step into the unknown. Its soundscape is mysterious, evoking a sense of cautious exploration, as if the path is unfolding beneath your feet. “Cyberstate” follows like a metaphor for the pursuit of inner peace. The textures grow more cinematic and adventurous, echoing the restless search for clarity or meaning. With “Exonova,” the mood shifts dramatically into something more ominous an eerie, enveloping presence, as if we are no longer alone, but surrounded by forces beyond comprehension. Yet, even within this darkness, the sound begins to soften, hinting at the same inner light depicted in the cover art, a calm center within the cosmic.

With “Remcycle,” the boundary between reality and dream begins to dissolve. Time bends what feels like an endless experience may be nothing more than a fleeting moment within the rapid eye movement phase. The soundscape becomes increasingly surreal and weightless, immersing the listener in a dream-like state where perception slips and meaning becomes fluid. It suggests that perhaps everything we’ve encountered so far was part of a subconscious narrative, unfolding behind closed eyes.

What if the world we inhabit is merely a “Synthetica” a fabricated echo of a reality we’ve never seen? The soundscape here evokes this unsettling possibility: that the universe we once believed to be real is nothing more than a simulation, a shadow of something higher and purer. As Plato envisioned, reality may be divided between the imperfect, ever-changing sensory world and the perfect, unchanging realm of Forms. If that’s true, then where do we truly belong? Are we dreaming within the illusion, or waking into it? Synthetica raises these questions without offering clear answers, leaving us suspended in a sonic space that feels both artificial and profound, echoing with the tension between the known and the unknowable.

“Underverse” paints the image of an alternate realm hidden beneath the surface of what we call reality. We remain in motion, drifting through the void, still searching, still sensing that something lies just beyond our grasp. Then, “Convergence” shifts the tone sharply. The atmosphere darkens; tension builds. This feels like a collision point where two realities, inner and outer, seen and unseen, begin to merge. It’s the sound of transformation, the moment when boundaries start to dissolve. With “Quiescence,” we enter the stillness before the inevitable. Everything slows motion, thought, maybe even time itself. It’s the breath before impact, the final silence before truth reveals itself. And then comes “Proximity.” Something stirs within us. The distance collapses. This is the union the merging of the inner cosmos and the outer universe. Not a conclusion, but a convergence of self and infinite, where the microcosm meets the macrocosm at last.

Within us lies a cosmos a smaller mirror of the vast universe, shaped like the great order, yet uniquely our own. To journey inward is to traverse a universe no less real than the one above. “Final Encounter” represents this inward voyage a path of exploration into the nature of reality itself. Through richly layered and impressive soundscapes, Alphaxone constructs a sonic universe where the boundaries between mind and cosmos, illusion and truth, begin to dissolve. 9/10

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9/10  Epic Storm
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