Dreamlin’s The Colour of The City is a carefree, lightly acoustic
electronic record that offers a break from the hard rhythm workout of
IDM polyrhythmic chaos. Egor Kunovsky, the main force behind
Dreamlin, hails from Minsk, Belarus, where he is constantly promoting
electronic music in his country and what he offers through his
Dreamlin persona is electronic music that sets heads a-nodding.
“Bit Mountain,” the opener on his new record from SHUM, is an acoustic
affair, all finger-picked guitar and light reverb. “Nostalji”
channels saucy guitar and elongated violin notes against a light
downtempo beatbox rhythm. While Egor prefers to proclaim a state of
genre homeless in his work, there is a persistent downtempo vibe
running through most of his tracks. “Upside Dawn (No Madonna)” or
“Loose Your Soul vs. Blank Grid” wouldn’t be out of place on the Cut
of Tea label while the loose keyboard work and echoing synth reverb
of “InFLUence vs. Dexter Methorphan” chills a room quite nicely. The
guitar in “The Light of Night (insect mix) vs Stevie B” plays against
a backdrop of a nocturnal insect symphony and the dopplering echo of
falling satellites. “Wishlist” thrums with the muted thump of a party
going on downstairs, a seductive lure that intices the listener down
into the basement where the finger-picked guitar can be heard over the
looped bass thump.
Egor is tirelessly seeking new venues and new exposure for electronic
music in his homeland and, even on The Colour of The City, he is
constantly open to collaborators. While he performs much of the
eletronic programming on the record, the live instrumentation is all
sourced from like-minded artists. The vision on The Colour of The
City is an invitation to a restful headspace, a chillout vibe that the
West has put aside recently in our quest for harder, faster, noisy
beats. Dreamlin invites you to relax and open your mind and knows the
easiest way into your synaptic core is through the light brush of a
jazz-inflected downtempo beat.
The Colour of The City is out now on SHUM.
