Saeko Killy’s debut, ‘Morphing in Polaroids’, was something of a collaborative project which emerged from that wilderness years of the pandemic – a time which seems as surreal now as then, but perhaps for different reasons. While many people sadly lost friends and relatives, people also lost the plot and found new paths. People lost one another and found new connections. People lost and found themselves. ‘Dream in Dream’ marks a new phase for Saeko: having had the opportunity to perform to audiences, new ideas presented themselves, and for this outing, she firmly took the reins for herself, writing, arranging, and playing almost everything herself, the outcome being that she could arrange her songs exactly how
she liked, ‘to draw out their dream-like elements’.
The album is, indeed, dream-like – but not all wispy and swoony, soft-focus and spinny, the quintessence of ‘dream-pop’ and ‘dreamy indie’ which evokes dappled sunlight and wan wistfulness: no, ‘Dream in Dream’ is electronic and poppy, but it’s a bit twisted, a bit weird.
‘Next Time’, propelled by a primitive drum machine is tense and jittery, and reminds me of the kind of dreams I have, where I’m either rushing about, late and lost, while ‘Melancholic’ is a slice of paranoid-sounding, vaguely gothy electronica that’s firmly rooted in the sound of the early 80s, sounding very like an amalgamation of X-Mal Deutschland and DAF. And then there’s some murky sax and things really get weird. Recommendations don’t come much keener than that.
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After the dubby ‘Yokoshima’, ‘Jede Farbe’ brings hints of The Flying Lizards with its stark, upright delivery and sparse instrumentation, but there’s an atmospheric aspect to it, too, with dissonance between the cold synths and chilly piano ripples. The title track, the longest on the album, is an inward-facing slice of busy 80s-influenced electronica, which takes its cues from Jan Hammer and contemporaneous cop shows and the like. That the album seems to drift as it progresses, and fades out into a haze is perfect by design.
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