protoU is drone/dark ambient project from Sasha Puzan, who resides in Kyiv, Ukraine. Founded back around 2015, Sasha debuted protoU alongside Dronny Darko (Oleg Puzan) on the Cryo Chamber label with Earth Songs—a dense, immersive journey that begins with the birth of the universe and ends with humans leaving Earth in 2135. Eight months later, she released her solo debut, Lost Here. It is now just beyond the two-year anniversary of Lost Here and during those revolutions about the sun, Sasha released two full-length solo records and also converged with a bevy of Cryo Chamber artists to forge many collaborative albums. Her output, to say the least, teeters on prolific. And this doesn’t even account for her other project, Hivetribe,—a duo between herself and Oleg—that placed a delicate ambient release titled Foreign Winds into the ether in September 2017.

It is fitting that nearly two years since Sasha founded protoU, she released a sequel to Earth Songs, titled The Edge of Architecture, which simultaneously serves as a companion-piece to her ambient trilogy, the first chapter of which is named Khmaoch. Where Earth Songs explored the beginning of time and the evolution of Earth and Khmaoch delved into humanity’s primordial past, The Edge of Architecture observes humankind in the current concrete jungles they have constructed for themselves.

In this conversation, Sasha takes us back to some of her earliest musical beginnings with violin and choir. From there, she details her aspirations to become a DJ and how, after trying this for a time, fell in love with ambient music. She describes a handful of her releases, focusing some specific attention toward The Edge of Architecture, and she takes us deeper into her sound, exploring the lush, vibrant, and organic boughs that form her unique style. Thank you so much for listening.