Kin Leonn — Mirror in the Gleam
[Kitchen — 2023]★★★★★
Reviewed 14 November 2023by Colin Lang
Mirror in the Gleam is a grab bag of ambient tricks spread across 11 tracks, each of a perfectly digestible length (2-4 minutes). Kin Leonn is an adept songwriter, and the completeness of each of the cuts is a testament to his ability to craft something quite listenable and enjoyable in the space normally occupied by others’ preludes. Mostly, the album is soundscape-y, free from beats or rhythm, save for “your spectrum” and “dawn memo”, both of which manage to keep things airy and bright. The album as a whole tends toward the cheerier side of the timbral spectrum, with nods to the muted piano work of Nils Frahm and the utter vastness of Stephan Mathieu (Mathieu, it should be noted, mastered Mirror in the Gleam).
To take Kin Leonn’s work on its own terms here would mean essentially giving in to the tracks’ almost pop flare, their ease, intentional eschewal of unnecessary complication. The feeling of listening to Mirror in the Gleam is perfectly consistent with this kind of ambient accessibility, which is often difficult to recover in other, more overworked compositions. That this temperament is achieved in the space of just a few minutes is testament to Kin Leonn’s ability to squeeze a great deal from his source material – synths, field recordings, sequencers – while never making it sound overwrought and overdone. Nearly every composer in this camp battles with the dialectic of too much/not enough, trying to keep the larger whole in sight. Kin Leonn achieves a rare balance between the divergent poles of ambience.
For fans of the aforementioned Frahm and Mathieu, as well as those who like their soundscapes to bubble like a good teenage bath. For more information about this, and Mr Leonn's other work drop by here
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