Dreamland - a new territory to discover on the international map of gloomy electronics. I think the most frequent reason why small labels like Dreamland still pop up these days is their founders' common wish to publish their own music on their own, leaving behind agents and troubles they usually make. And as it is often a case, they meet other music makers willing to cooperate on their ways, thus from small manufactures big and interesting record labels arise. I am of opinion the same happens to New Zealender Dreamland, run by the main man behind dark ambient project Bokor - Zac Keiller. Here's some impression of mine on some of his and other Dreamland groups' releases.

Certainly, I'll start with Bokor, which presents on Dreamland's premiere release one, almost 20-minute track "The Field" divided into three parts. Listening to these gloomy, electronic vibrations, drones, and slowly moving, heavy, sonic clouds I start to think about European 'stars' of dark ambient scene - Dagda Mor, Raison d'Etre, Inade. No matter where you live, the vision and the practice in making deathlike sounds seem to be the same. In 'The Field' Bokor tries to give its music a conceptual form. Three parts of the tracks are named as follow: 'The Signal', ' Battle ' and 'Survivors' and everyone should already know what kind of field it is. Musically, it's noticeable in a waving of emotional amplitude that veers from hush moments to violent breaks. Quite an orchestral arrangement which automatically indicates other Bokor's influence - Australlian neighbors Shinjuku Thief. I think 'The Field' as an introduction to Bokor's sound realm served its turn well. We will wait to see what happens next...

Mitre - a project from Scott Richardson, a guitarist who has been making abstract guitar pieces since 1997. A curious thing about "Sympathy for Agamemnon" is that's only his second release! The guitar is the base of his music, an excitement with sound is the method (down to effects delaying and modulating sound) of reverberation and static drones. In such circumstances, a solo guitar appears to have an after-taste of both an emotional and melancholic exhibition, as well as of a simple rock guitar solo. The three tracks included on the 3" CD-R have been recorded directly onto 4 tracker, and this fact reminded me of a similar release - 'Crystallizing the World of Memory' by Mason Jones, although, to be honest. Mitre's in for lots of work to achieve such possibility of putting visions and ideas into practice as Mason has. Can't tell many good things about 'Sympathy for Agamemnon' indeed. Found no catchy moments here, so I'm skipping to the next item...

fm3 is a collective name for a bunch of Chinese musicians who play music on traditional, local instruments, as well as by use of modern technology i.e. laptops. If we omit the fact of the origin of this group, fm3 will show us their artistic potential in full bloom! The effect of collision of two different music worlds is a weird conglomerate emerging from digital processing of ancient Chinese folk tradition into organic, almost meditative sound streams. The first piece is a dark ambient soundscape with space area rippling threads soundly associating to films fx. The second one builds up a sonic structure with a help of traditional Chinese string instruments whose sounds reverb against the background of digitally generated drones, and sonic hazes. The very last track of "Ambience Sinica" is the most remarkable of all - psychoactive pulsations, suspense, thrilling mood - a true dark ambient crackajack!!! Excellent!

Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words - this Swedish project is not an unknown to me and shouldn't be so to our readers, either as its founder Thomas Ekelund was once interviewed by Jeff Surak for the previous issue of ERP, as well I had a chance to hear one of his previous release. If I remember well it was a very quiet lowercase music. In the contrary to the title, music on "This City Is Dead or Dying" pounds with life, and is relatively loud. Just as the work of Bokor, this record is divided into three parts. The first offers us rough surfaces of sounds, hidden in a fog of white noise with series of distant signals. This is a solid and condensed wall of sound that's quite attractive with its interesting sound texture. What follows after it can be compared to enormous, thundering sonic clouds that embark upon us with superb, shadow music. The thick mood is growing thinner, when the last opus starts to appear - a dark ambience's changing slowly into beautiful, long lasting drone with delicate, sonic ornamentation in the background. Along with fm3 the fairest proposal from Dreamland so far...

Aidan Baker seems to be very active these days. I have an opportunity to listen to his music for the third time over a very short period of time. And you know what? I like his work, be it soft but dark electronica from 'I Fall Into You' (Public Eyesore), or spatial guitar floating 'Eye of Day" (Foreign Lands). I feel he's clever enough at doing good music in various ways. "Cicatrice" is much in the mood of 'Eye of Day', it sounds like a lost (and found) part of this record - 3D sound effect made by floating bands of sounds that could be compared to a sort of el-music on keyboards. An impression of a lack of hurry - each element must reverb out before next will replace it. Freedom in flying. Done by use of guitar and delayed effects. What else can be said? Just get it!

[krzysztof sadza]

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