Sanctuary OS

There's a certain tranquil nature to Sanctuary OS. Amidst skittish breaks and floating piano leads, its atmosphere lies like a padded blanket in the background.

I often talk about 'ebb and flow' when I talk about atmospheric albums. The phrase applies itself to this album rather nicely, though - Sanctuary OS does nothing but ebb and flow. Teetering on the brink of breakcore, with its snappy percussion, the album relies on pattering drum beats but constantly retreats back into ambient solitude, often complemented by yearning digitized synths or simple piano melodies. It shies away from the faster, crunchier aesthetic of breakcore; it flinches from even the rhythmic punch of drum n bass, infringing only upon the latter genre's most atmospheric niches. Instead, as the name might imply, Sanctuary OS is much like a machine existing in a dream state, a console booting up in an ethereal environment. Something is vaguely computerized about it - though ambient, it is not organic by any means, but rather digital.

This is perhaps present most in the first movement. It's difficult to tell whether Sanctuary OS is a concept album, since the naming scheme seems to imply so, but the atmospheres themselves serve only to build on each other rather than an overarching narrative - regardless, from the onset, the record introduces its ambience through the gentle eponymous opener. "Sanctuary 1" is equally quiet and atmospherically sensible, treading lightly, hesitant to employ its percussion, but the album begins to get progressively bolder. This is where its 'ebb and flow' comes into play - Dusqk seems to, with the captivating effects of natural progression, capture its production's evolution over the course of the next five tracks, with the breaks growing in confidence and the pacing becoming quicker and lightly-footed. 

Just as it flows, it ebbs. "Sanctuary 6" marks a return to chillout, a retreat back into the 'sanctuary' the album provides, an appeal to comfort and safety that resides in Dusqk's ballooning synth pads. And just as quickly it flows again: "Sanctuary 7" begins firing up leads that continue to engage, as if the executing of commands on the album's console has become faster and more intentional, through the next three tracks, until the eleventh "Sanctuary" (though it's the twelth track) is able to perform a proper shutdown of the operating system, marking a dreamy end to a dreamy project.

The key issue with this 'ebb and flow', though, becomes apparent at the album's conclusion. Once it's done, Sanctuary OS simply washes over you. The lack of memorability becomes clear - something not unusual for an ambient album, but unusual in this magnitude. Likely this is because each track is entirely reliant on the ones around it. Which works fantastically well in the bigger picture, but the seeming lack of standouts means that Sanctuary OS lacks individual moments of brilliance that would typically complement its greater objective. Not only does that punch a dent in its replayability value, but it also lowers the album's experience, since, in an amorphous digital cloud of atmospheric breaks and ambient production, there is very little to latch onto, save for the ghostly breaks whenever they choose to grace the ear.

For being a strong record cohesively, Sanctuary OS gets marked up. But for all its strengths in its ambience, it holds a weakness in being unable to reinforce that ambience with something larger, leaving it stranded in the limbo space between background music and true immersion. Perhaps that's where it wants to be - this is quite a liminal-sounding project, after all - but, at times, it fails to stand up on its own two feet, floating away into a void it created for itself.

Listen on Spotify here.