hypnagogue.net/2011/03/17/dan-pound-aurora/

Aurora is, as the title would lead you to suspect, a suite of shimmering drifts full of star-glisten and spacewind. The flows here are filled with sounds that arc toward the skies and ease their way back down. Pound has a fascinating sense of depth and layering that creates complex interplay between his rise-and-fall creations. And with every track there’s a little something more added to the mix. The title track has a short stretch of drumming toward the end, playing to Pound’s shamanic-music side; “True North” goes heavy on the drama–thick chords and hesitant, hanging pauses bringing a sense of expectation; “Wind Calling” features some slow and soulful guitar playing off the underlying bass drifts; “Under Stars” grows upward from sparseness, beginning with twittering night-sounds to encompass a glittering canopy. As with all of Pound’s work, the imagery and emotion in Aurora is strong and certain. The subtle shifts pique the listener’s interest throughout–although you’ll likely be content to just drift through it. More superb stuff from Pound.

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"Aurora" is a cosmic ambient album containing nine atmospheres, which is not as textural as one might expect. Dan’s aural landscape are expansive but also rather active in nature.
This recording dips into the pool of serene, surreal and reflective soundscapes with a meditative touch (e.g. "Northern Lights", "Magnetic Pull", "True North") while, frame drum pulses and ethereal vocal pads comes to the surface in the opening title track.

It’s no pure drift music though, as Dan implements all kind of sound bits and pieces in his tracks to enhance the overall sound spectrum. The latter also could have sounded a bit warmer and more polished to my taste.

"Aurora", recommended by the composer for low volume playback in repeat mode and perfect for the Winter Solstice, blends the mysterious, atmospheric and the chilling side of free form ambient music.

The album is available through the usual digital stores online next to Dan’s own website.

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www.sonicimmersion.org/review.php

This release from 2010 offers 64 minutes of shimmering electronic ambience.

Dedicated to the moods generated by atmospheric manifestations of light, this music communicates an airy flair that frequently shimmers with tenuous electronic embellishment.

The electronics tend to be gentle and flowing, often relying on texturals to achieve harmonic layers of vast expansion. These auralscapes are tempered by additional traceries whose more-prominent-but-still-understated definition serve to maintain the music's overall serenity. Wisps of melody slither through this ambience, teasing the listener's psyche with their glistening activity.

While controlled tonalities dominate this tuneage, keyboard electronics are present, serving as fanciful enhancements which lend rarefied substance to the floating compositions.

The application of deeper-voiced electronics produce a moody density that laces the darkness with elusive illumination.

One track features a lazy guitar whose chords ride breezy currents amid chilly vapors of soft electronic oscillations.

These compositions achieve a delicate beauty in their expert approximation of airborne displays of light. The music perfectly stimulates introspection while promoting a tendency to watch the sky, allowing the listener to color that vista with their own imagination.

www.soniccuriosity.com/sc485.htm
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Aural Innovations review of Aurora
May, 2011
www.aural-innovations.com/issues/issue42/danpound.html
If Wolf Moon echoes the chiaroscuro of nature's inmost resonances, then Aurora telescopes its transitory beauty into a gallery of shifting, impressionistic sonic portraits. The exquisitely crafted title track is like a slowly evolving canvas of shimmering hues and glittering pastels splashed across a star-swept sky. Intertwining lead synth phrases materialize out of a modular drone, sparkle momentarily and then melt imperceptibly into a translucent sheen of icy strings and glassy electronic textures. Tracks like "Northern Lights" and "Polaris" further illustrate Pound's debt, though not necessarily fealty, to some of the past masters of ambient sound construction (Steve Hillage's Rainbow Dome Musick, Steve Roach's Structures from Silence, and Don Robertson's Starmusic all come to mind immediately), and while not always trail-blazing, his contribution to the genre is both earnest and authentic. Honed to a fine crystalline beauty, "Polaris" drifts on wide washes of synthetic strings and a pulsating undertow of low-frequency tones that conveys Pound's vision of harmonic resolution in our increasingly chaotic and dissonant world.

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