The unfancy package is meant to extend the theme of lo-fi, rawer loop experimentation, to reflect the “share a moment in time” aesthetic of social media and the lo-fi recording technique used to create the album.
A low-tech, limited art edition (a contradiction in terms or distant relation to the fanzine?) with no actual music inside. Instead, tucked into a folded letterpress card, a tiny, unevenly cut slip of office paper contains a code for downloading this new work by Radere, along with a set of five photo prints taken from the artist’s Instagram collection.
The photographs are mostly underwhelming semi-abstracts (although I do like the one with the regally antlered deer resting in the forest) and the outer envelope of flimsy quality. The unfancy package is meant to extend the theme of lo-fi, rawer loop experimentation, to reflect the “share a moment in time” aesthetic of social media and the lo-fi recording technique used to create the album. Dreamless is said to have been recorded hastily onto a tape recorder in just a few sessions last summer, the first time Radere has worked with that outmoded audio storage device.
“Beginnings” is wonderfully discombobulating, putting the listener in precisely the right, disoriented mood to be carried off into dreamlessness, but the immediately following salvo of “Widow Maker” is an awful racket guaranteed to frighten the horses. Fortunately, “I Remember You” is a lovely piece that lowers the drawbridge on a nostalgic dream castle anyone would rush to enter. Sandpaper rough and mind-exfoliating, “Summer Sun” continues the lolloping loop dappled with lone, splashing guitar notes and gathers its momentum into a stream of orchestral strings which sweep right into “Marin” for a magnificent, windblown, seventeen-minute finale.
Dreamless is available on Full Spectrum. [Release page]
