Written by: Skarsnik
Artist Links: Aidan Baker Thisquietarmy
Country: 
Label: Lunasylum
Genre: Drone/Ambient
Tracklisting:
01 Agent
02 Mandarin
03 Clockwork
04 Blood
05 Amplifier
06 Crush
07 Glow
08 Milk
Origin, and a way to evolve.. For those of you who are still fanatically following “The Harvest” the predecessor of this album was reviewed by my colleague Vargr Wulff back when the stars where young. Now we face the dark age of reason and so with my own senses ravaged by time I embarked to the landscapes created by two extremely potent musicians, namely Aidan Baker and Eric Quach.
Orange is more then just an ordinary collaboration between two skilled artists, it is a hybrid gently shaped to carry the hopes and dreams of both its loving creators. This remastered version of the old album also includes 4 previously unreleased tracks from the same old session. One thing that instantly struck me when I first roamed through the album is the majestic sensation of the atmosphere. It lingers in the room like a heavy intoxicating scent, subtle yet potent. The blend of vibrating drones and slightly distorted harmonics on layers of more acoustic elements such as hellish guitars wheezing feedback into the void is at times both disturbingly intricate and dreamlike. The whole album reeks with something disturbingly sinister yet serene and angelic, a perfect mixture of sensations that enhances the majesty of it all. Ambient music has always been my release from reality, a shortcut to the inner sanctum of my soul. It is a weird thing to hear the music yet hardly register its full impact on the body and soul. The music behaves like a potent virus lingering in the air ready to bloom out in sudden bursts of impossible imaginations and this is what makes this album so great.
This remastered beauty delivers a few tracks of what I would call near perfect music for the lucid dreamer. However even the sun has its spots and in a few fragile moments the album staggers on tracks such as amplifier who could have been a bit less noisy for a midsection in a dreamers digest. This is of course my own humble opinion and it is really hard to recommend something as complex as an ambient album based on taste alone. However the flaws are heavily outmatched by all the good things I have to say about this album. Flawless execution in both shape and sound makes this my favourite ambient release of this year up to this point. This mighty epos of dreams and drama would have worked perfectly against a video depicting space or some weird micro cosmos yet unseen. In my humble opinion we all need something in life that is greater then ourselves and for those of you with a vivid imagination this album is the spark that could ignite your mental bonfire. Orange is a solid release and if it have not been obvious up until now I can heavily recommend it to anyone into dreaming dark droning ambience with a touch of industrial waste.
Rate: 4/5
