Summer is a state of mind.
Travel brochures and TV ads may promise cloudless skies, deserted beaches and blissful sunny days but the reality is, more often than not, some way removed from these idyllic visions of tranquil nature.
Music as the soundtrack to dreams, can help us escape into an imaginary zones where life is more like the glossy magazine version. This is where
the transporting qualities of chillwave, dream-pop, glo-fi, call it what you will, come in.
Cuushe's PR team are aware of this and point out how this young Japanese woman's alluring music has been "sonically constructed to illustrate beautiful dreamscapes".
Cuushe uses her voice as an instrument with delicately crafted layers of piano notes, guitar chords and synthesized reverb which have echoes of Grouper (Liz Harris) .
Three years on from her debut album Red Rocket Telepathy, she returns with three new songs and a batch of remixes.
Misleadingly classified as an EP, it actually consists of three CDs, each in 3 inch format, with a combined playing time of 59 minutes.
The titles of the new songs give a fair indication of the hazy, hypnotic atmosphere - Do You Know The Way To Sleep, I Dreamt About Silence and 9125days Of Sleep Waves.
The first of these two are remixed by Geskia! and Teen Daze respectively while there are two further versions of the '9125days' tune by Blackbird Blackbird and Federico Durand.
The remaining four tracks are treatments of songs which appeared on her debut album.
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Of these Julia Holter's sound art makeover of Swimming In The Room is the most radical with vocals drastically re-edited, initially stripped back to the most basic 'la - la - la' sounds.
It is the nature of Cuushe's music that , however much you tamper with it, the fundamental airy qualities are never entirely lost.
That said, some of the remixers take a bull in a china shop approach as if to deliberately undermine the ethereal textures she has so meticulously created.
Botany rebuilds Summer Night Sketch into a smooth piece of synth-pop which is just about acceptable but "Polish beatmaker" Kixnare's synth'n'bass treatment does From A Window On A Plane no favours.
Least successful of all is Teen Daze's bass-heavy transformation of the hazy original of I Dreamt About Silence into something resembling a New Order b-side.
Motion Sickness of Time Travel (aka USA's Rachel Evans), who also produced the album artwork, is more sensitive to the astral mood with a soothing ambient drone version of Dust Of Dreams.
Tracks like this take us where we want to be - soaking up that idealized vision of summer which, in the mind's eye at least, is endless.
Cuushe's website
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