evan caminiti - dreamless sleep (album preview)

*Excerpts from the album. Now available at Experimedia.net.* ANOTHER drop from the Barn Owl camp, courtesy of the ever-trustworthy Thrill Jockey. While my initial concern was that "Dreamless Sleep" would come across as superfluous in the wake of the simply fantastic "Night Dust" LP, which only came out just a couple months ago via TJ sister label Immune, I'm pleased to report that such is not at all the case. In fact, for my money, "Dreamless Sleep" marks Caminiti's best and most realized work to date (something I very well may have said about "Night Dust" in my review of said!). Utilizing a palette that makes use of both the amorphous Andrew Chalk-lineage cloud drones found on the aforementioned longplayer and some of the more melodic, avant-doom-blues tropes that show up in the Barn Owl catalog, Caminiti has sculpted a refined and quite beautiful record. "Bright Midnight" is a perfect burner for California evenings, with seething guitar drones set amidst a miasma of howling feedback. "Absteigend" builds to a mass of shimmering beauty with coiling synthesizer figures and hissing layers of static. It should be said that this may be Caminiti's most varied work to date, though certainly not at the expense of coherence. Simply put, this is some of the best guitar-oriented longform music I've heard in a while. Highly recommended. - Alex Cobb, Experimedia
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On Dreamless Sleep, Evan Caminiti (also known as one half of
guitar duo Barn Owl) creates a lush and misty atmosphere with this
collection of hazy, half-remembered sound portraits heard through
a veil of static and hiss. The dense tracks are an evolution in terms
of Caminiti's compositions, musically referencing devotional hymns,
Berlin-school epics, and cinematic westerns. The pieces began as guitar
and synthesizer recorded to cassette 4-track and were deconstructed
and rebuilt over a year after being recorded, resulting in rich orchestral
swells and disorienting manipulation of the source material.