Bleep

Driving through the intersections of idyllic ambience and new age, plunderphonic sound collage and melodic retro synthwave, Dylan Henner returns to the label where his career began with Star Dream FM. This is his first full length for Phantom Limb, where he began releasing EPs in 2019; as such, it seems like memories are in order, as Henner has chanced upon the Akashic records in a secret radio station, broadcasting his seventeen year old self’s life in between gently roboticised voices and flashy 80s-esque radio bumpers proudly proclaiming “102.7 Star Dream FM!”

Even without the poetic titles conjuring up images of adolescent melodrama and simpler times, each track goes out of its way to capture these moments. Saccharine and incomprehensible vocals quickly overtake the more definable yet fleeting interview broadcasts, evolving from tinny crackles to glassy ambience as Henner signifies the malleability of memories, and our tendency to focus on the feelings they bring us rather than the accuracy of long past events. The classically romantic sounds of harp sweeps and beds of mellotron rippling strings speak not only of young love, but digitally rendered medieval musical influences travelling through all directions in time.

Contemplating on these themes, Henner brings us sound pieces that are reverent and naïve, angsty yet adventurous, sparse and starry until the dam bursts and fluid harmony flows in with floes of virtual choirs. Movements arrives with arpeggiated marimba notes and poppy, rhythmic plucky keys, plunging deep amid the frothy vocal spray and stuttering synth bass bobbing and buoying across ‘We Walked all the Way to the Lake...’, while volutes of manipulated sound waft in the meditative negative space of ‘Her Parents Were Out...’ until the album’s grandest choir sings us to the end.

Often examining the place of humans in the world, Dylan Henner’s ambient sonics turn ever more personal as he finds his own story while scrubbing through the radio dials.