Aura Merlin
Illuminations
Dungeon synth is a funny old beast at times. Despite its package of alleged influences in ambient to neoclassical, that tend to favour longform compositions, dungeon synth typically seeks to miniaturise this content into brief, digestible chunks of rudimentary sonic information. Even those releases that take more explicit cues from the futurist ambient tracts of the mid-1970s tend to favour smaller compositions no longer than your average pop song, such as this latest release from Aura Merlin. But creativity-by-vignette is far from a damning indictment. As evinced by the elegant integration of disparate elements on display across ‘Illuminations’.
Imagine the swirling, easy listening spiritualism of an instrumental Enya, combined with the minimalist melodicism of the sentimentalist arm of modern dungeon synth, along with a smattering of the darker, mournful aspects of faux medievalism typical of the style. But Aura Merlin, despite the name and illuminated manuscript aesthetic of the band, tend toward a modernist take on dungeon synth when compared to many of their peers. Hints at organic music are scattered across this album, a flute here, a horn there. But the texture is predominantly synthetic in that it does not even attempt to imitate real instrumentation.
Paradoxically, the result is far more musical and lifelike than the vast majority of stiff, wooden renditions of proto-white-folk that dungeon synth tends to emulate. Aura Merlin essentially craft pop songs with the tools of ambient music. Each track boasts an engaging hook, the development of a simple theme, a lyrical thread that provides emotive character to the pleasing swirl of background textures, and even some percussion pivoting on a groove like shuffle. The rich tones of skeletal synthwave are perfectly integrated into the more explicitly fantasy orientated elements, resulting in music as subtly diverse as it is finely crafted.
‘Illuminations’ evinces an understated yet impressive breadth of influences, all of which are fully integrated into a unified package of micro ambient. In fact, we could go as far as to say that this bleeds into neofolk at times, such is the musicality and ease at which Aura Merlin weave in subtle refrains and elegant layering of complementary textures. Although we could hardly call this an experimental work, it displays a remarkable degree of self assurance in its willingness to weave together elements from contrasting eras and styles, giving rise to an immersive work that stands apart from the majority of the dungeon synth canon in its ability to justify itself on its own terms. No contrived crutch of accompanying lore, hidden depths of irony, or overly worked thematic material. This is simply a finely crafted collection of pop ambient worthy of the name.
Hate Meditations 
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