A Crown of Light is a collaborative project between Brandon Elkins from A Crown of Amaranth and Robert Hunter Osgood from Conversations About the Light. If you’re at all familiar with these artists (and you should be at least a little bit since both of them have appeared on the past LH mp3 compilations) then you know they specialize in ambient, noise, power electronic, experimental music that’s never too easy to express in words, but I certainly try.
Unlike these guys main solo endeavors, ‘The Clearing’ is a much more laid back dark ambient record with some experimentation, yes, but the harsh noisy electronics are not as obvious this time around. In fact these harsher sounds really only show up on ‘Nails, Trimmed and Clean,’ the rather extraordinary sounding ‘Swallow Thoughts Whole,’ and ‘Crystal Sparrow.’ The rest of the album unfolds in a calm, but quite ominous psychedelic manner with various organic samples and a few weird bits and pieces here and there. Vocals are limited to just one song (Swallow Thoughts Whole), but the booklet has a short little story or poem to go with each song to perhaps give the listeners a better idea as to what was going through their heads when these dark sounds were created. The album nears it’s closing with ‘Crystal Sparrow,’ which happens to be a twenty minute piece that starts out rather calm with melodic synths and light noises in the background, but slowly gains in momentum and reaches some intense dark proportions as it progresses. Also there is one final Epilogue track, but it’s just twenty three seconds long.
With all things considered I’m very impressed with Brandon and Robert’s diverse gripping work on this recording, and really hope this is more than a one time partnership, because I just know after I give the album a few more spins I’m going to be eager to hear some new stuff.
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