Band: A Crown of Light

Album: The Clearing

Album Year: 2006

Label: Eibon Records

Genre(s): Ambient, Drone

Band Website: www.catlprod.com // acoa.tempoblaster.com

Rating: 8/10

A Crown of Light is the collaborative project between projects Conversations About the Light and A Crown of Amaranth. I am somewhat familiar with the former and never heard the latter. Thus, I was completely unaware of what this album was to offer me as a listener. The CD ended up being quite enticing and worthwhile, and I ultimately found it to be a very well crafted meditative album.

The album has very professional packaging. I found that the artwork accurately matched the music on this disc. The insert is filled with a story, which is broken up into something like chapters and each of these chapters is a song. The story itself is very well written; it is full of movement, philosophy and great imagery. Unfortunately, I don’t see the correlation between the story and the music; the music sounds nothing like the atmosphere I imagine when reading the story and the imagery and locations in the story line seems to have little to no bearing on the sounds used in the tracks themselves.

For the most part, the music is very dark and minimalist. It achieves a dark and lonely atmosphere quickly on through its use of thick drones and desolate pads. Unfortunately the first couple of tracks all blur together, as they all sound like basically the same thing with the exception of pads at increased or decreased volume. There are some sound effects thrown in which give the music a dynamic quality and a bit of variety. Eventually, at the end of track 4, ‘The Machine Shop’, the listener is treated to a brief bit of melody before going back into even more minimalist sound on ‘Nails, Trimmed and Clean’. From there the album picks up and gets very noisey and reverb-y, as if the listener warped into the innards of gigantic tunnel. After this, the album beings to evolve and display its true potential. From about the middle of the disc and carrying onward, the album finds itself and becomes very epic and powerful  After track 4, the album really begins to take on a life of its own and flesh out its reason for existence. The album becomes (or the listener becomes aware that the album is) a meditation on the human condition and the emptiness surrounding being.

Overall I think the music is well crafted for ambient drone. I personally find ambient drone to be pretty boring except in very particular circumstances, but if you are looking for that style then you will definitely be able to enjoy this album. A Crown of Light really know how to create the huge brooding atmosphere of emptiness inside of a forgotten human soul. The Clearing is a huge conflagration stemming from a single emotion drawn out through numerous places and times, but always retaining the initial feeling and raison d’etre. There is a lot of diversity amongst the tracks and a lot of variety within each track. A lot of samples are thrown in which really add to the atmosphere and epic-ness of the atmosphere. The first bit of the album is unmemorable, though the album definitely comes into its own and becomes the catalyst for a potentially very powerful and epic journey.

While I do think that this album successfully achieves the sonification of an empty and desolate Earth, a part of me would rather quietly meditate on the subject or go outside and experience firsthand the desolate Earth rather that sit inside and listen to an album about it.  I do think that this album could aide in similar meditative activities, and if that premise interests you, then I encourage you to give the album a listen.

-[.d4n b4rr3tt.]

january 2007