Archangel One exists in the musical space as a phantom—a figure devoid of biography, media presence, public face. Anonymity works in two ways here: on one hand, it’s an act of refusal to engage with the marketing machinery of the modern music industry; on the other—a forced acknowledgment that music speaks for itself when the author’s personality ceases to be the currency of attention. The Beginning of Eternity—thirteen tracks united by one paradoxical idea: wholeness emerges from fragmentation, unity from eclecticism.

Perhaps I’ll start with the most important thing: The Beginning of Eternity is an album that refuses to play by the music industry’s rules. Archangel One creates a structure where chaos becomes form, where the absence of connection between tracks is the connection. It sounds strange, but that’s only because the record demands active participation from the listener, a willingness to abandon familiar categories and allow the album to work on its own terms.

The album’s strongest aspect is its radical eclecticism. Who is the target audience? Hip-hop lovers will encounter orchestral interludes, electronic music fans will face acoustic country, connoisseurs of experimentation will meet straightforward disco beats. Archangel One deliberately abandons the idea of a target audience, creating music for a hypothetical listener equally interested in all manifestations of sound. Tracks sit next to each other without obvious connections, but the subconscious picks up a thread that rational analysis misses. This works on the level of texture, intonation, energetic flow, while genre becomes merely a temporary tool that the author picks up and sets aside with a craftsman’s indifference.

“Can You Feel It Coming?” is a track of insistence, almost monotonous, the vocals work as percussion, rhythm becomes thesis. The production is minimalist to the point of asceticism: simple chords, repeating patterns, absence of embellishments. No aggression that one might expect from a protest message. Just forward movement, unstoppable, mechanical. The track’s urban pulsation is devoid of big city glamour. This is rain on glass, the minor melancholy of office windows, gray sidewalks. A strange choice for an opening track, but that’s exactly where the strangeness lies: the album begins with a deferred promise.

By the fourth track, “Miracles Every Day,” a sharp genre shift occurs. Soft guitar, retro aesthetic with a touch of country—a sound that could be called homey, if that term described acoustic intimacy. The instrumentation is deliberately simple, arrangement practically nonexistent, and this makes the track vulnerable, exposed. The voice here is the center of the composition, the guitar merely accompaniment. The contrast with the urban minimalism of “Can You Feel It Coming?” is obvious to the point of absurdity. Where the first track was about distance, about urban alienation, “Miracles Every Day” speaks of closeness, of a serenade beneath a window.

“Citizen of Heaven” goes even further toward conceptual provocation. The track begins with dialogue—spoken word without musical accompaniment, a cappella that stretches for minutes. This is already an experiment with form: where does music end and sound begin? Where is the boundary between song and sound performance? Archangel One poses these questions, forcing the listener to tune into the natural melodiousness of the human voice, into the rhythms of ordinary speech.

“The Final Fall of Lucifer”—pure orchestral instrumental work, and here the album makes another sharp turn. Luxurious arrangement, warm sound of strings, classical form—the track could be a soundtrack to a 1950s film where good triumphs over evil by the simple fact of its existence. The track’s title promises drama, tragedy, cosmic conflict. The music, however, offers spring idyll, an almost pastoral picture. This dissonance between title and content is typical for the album: Archangel One constantly plays with expectations, deceives them, flips them over.

“No Such Thing as Random” bursts in with cosmic synthesizers and futuristic special effects. This is the most electronically saturated moment of the album, where production comes to the foreground.

“Soulmates” brings unexpected lightness. A disco motif from the 1990s, but with the album’s characteristic twist—a “chewed tape” effect that distorts the sound, introduces an element of randomness. The track plays with nostalgia but refuses to be retro-stylization. Sound distortions, sudden drops in tonality, moments of destruction—all this transforms a simple disco hit into something more complex.

The final “Alpha & Omega” returns to rap, closing the circle. But this is a different rap now—ragged, fragmented, with vocal choruses that break out of genre frameworks. Elements of the “chewed tape” from “Soulmates” are present here too, but to a lesser degree. The title—”Alpha and Omega,” beginning and end—is programmatic. The track should draw conclusions, and it does so by bringing together all the disparate elements of the album: the rap foundation, sound distortions, unexpected vocal moments, genre blurriness. Closer to the finale, a sound uncharacteristic for hip-hop appears—an exclamation, a cry, a moment of emotional breakthrough. This is the culmination the album avoided for all thirteen tracks, and when it finally arrives, it sounds almost relieving.

Verdict

This album is a test of tolerance for genre indeterminacy. Either you accept this game, or you give up by the third or fourth track when it becomes obvious that the author follows their own logic, which lies beyond commercial rationality.

Technically, the album is uneven. Some tracks sound like fully realized ideas, others like sketches, concepts that could have developed into something greater. Production varies from minimalist to overloaded, and this too is part of the design.

Comparing Archangel One with other indie artists is simply meaningless, because they create their own narratives that collapse under their own weight, they build musical structures that hold on the fragile balance between chaos and order. The Beginning of Eternity is aware of its own absurdity, plays with it, makes it part of the artistic statement. The album laughs at itself, at its ambitions, at the idea of uniting the incompatible, and it’s precisely this self-awareness that saves it from falling into self-indulgence.

The final question: does this work? The answer depends on what you expect from music. If you need consistency, integrity, unity of sound—The Beginning of Eternity might disappoint you. If you’re interested in the process of destroying boundaries, experimentation for experimentation’s sake, the author’s willingness to take risks—the album will offer enough material for reflection. Archangel One gives us an artifact that’s difficult to evaluate by traditional criteria, and perhaps this is its main achievement.

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