Wired: 8 best albums of 2021

Vocal Ambient

Fatigue

Take Two

Easy On Me

Rembihnútur (Liminal re-work by Paul Corley)

Cry Your Heart Out

Oh My God

Strangers By Nature

My Little Love

Drift Below

Nepenthe

Labyrinthine

All songs written, performed, recorded, mixed, and mastered by Mike Schmidt. Not like anyone would try to take credit for this anyway.

Blue Dome Glowing

Dreamcycles - Future Lights and Archetypes

sitequeeste.bandcamp.com/album/future…d-archetypes
Available 1 May 2020 exclusively on Bandcamp. Available 29 May 2020 on all digital platforms.

Dreamcycles, the moniker of Irish-Canadian artist Jennifer Moore, emerges from the ashen present to deliver her conceptual debut mini-album Future Lights and Archetypes. Operating at the node between technological reality and speculative fiction, Moore transforms ethereal bedroom pop and monolithic electronics into uncanny soundscapes to explore what she describes as the “landscape of a future global economy.”

Moore’s imagination conjures a new order of global governance which uses data to assess the competencies, characteristics, and productivity capacity of its citizens. Predictive analytics are used to shuttle humans around the globe in a tightly choreographed dance of space, labour and capital. Spanning a perspective both personal and systemic, the Dublin-based producer guides the listener through her sober invention, anchoring its alienating events around simple longings for home.

Across six tracks, present-day sonics are repurposed to create warped atmospherics. “If I wanted to see the world, I’d have to imagine it,” says a disembodied voice on opening track ‘Memory (Temporary Access)’. Pitter-patter footsteps, playing children, and whirring device noises swirl around the words: harsh, familiar, and ultimately unsettling. ‘Fonn Abhaile’ follows—its vaporous synths matched by breathy vocals—but ‘Abrasive Routes’ reveals the haunting potential of Moore’s psychoacoustic constructions. News report snippets detailing the Dublin financial district jostle with screeching high-definition cars. “It’s become the most extraordinary contrast to everything else here,” recites a roving correspondent, cataloguing inequalities suffused into the electronic artist’s home.

As the mini-album progresses, the emotional intensity rises. ‘Memory Laneways’ pairs an elegiac refrain with industrial kicks before ‘Playing with the Concrete’ offers a moment of brightness. “You look good when you’re smiling,” sings Moore over a distant sinogrime melody, followed by her closing, and most affecting track, ‘Final Goodbye.’ Meditations on belonging are swept along by circular, trance-like synths whose closing destination is bittersweet: euphoria tempered by the artist’s sombre backdrop.

Moore describes Future Lights and Archetypes as a “post-extraction artefact.” Through its diary entries, radio clippings, and fragmented songs, the mini-album resembles an object hewn from a fully-realised world, like an Ursula K. Le Guin novel refracted through machine learning. Keen listeners might also detect a flicker of Grouper’s place-based musings or even the crumbling electronics of Actress. But this release melds intimacy with pulsating stimuli, Moore’s gaze oriented firmly towards the human cost of an omniscient technological future.

Future Lights & Archetypes

Dreamcycles - Final Goodbye

Take Two

L'Rain