Dreamless Sleep is the latest from Evan Caminiti, whose day job is as one half of twang flecked drone duo Barn Owl, and like his partner in Barn Owl, Jon Porras, Caminiti’s solo records don’t always deviate too much from the Barn Owl M.O., offering up variations of the duo’s distinctive dusky sound, with the various individual solo records often easily mistaken for proper Barn Owl records, which is not a bad thing at all. Caminiti and Porras have undeniable musical chemistry, and both have proven to be perfectly capable on their own, both experimenting more with keyboards and synthesizers lately, which of course ironically seems to have been influencing their work as a duo as well.
All of that said, Dreamless Sleep definitely finds Caminiti pushing his sounds into uncharted territories, ditching much of the twang, and the droned out mesmer for something way more kosmische and downright new age-y at times. In fact, if it weren’t for the fierce guitar tones and muted buzz, the sounds here could easily slip into full on new age bliss out. Thankfully, Caminiti takes that new age drift, and weds it to his dense guitarscapery, letting neither overshadow the other, resulting in tracks that manage to be both dreamy and ethereal, dark and cinematic, wrapping washed out shimmering synths in spidery sinister melodies, and wreathing hushed ethereal ambience in clouds of ominous thrum, the recordings adding even more texture and density, gristly and on the verge of slipping into the red, the sounds blown out and occasionally corrosive, with some of the tracks slipping into near SUNNO)))-like heft, only the shimmery swirl holding it back, and conversely, some of the tracks are so airy and ethereal, it’s often just a single slab of crumbling, rumbling blackened hum, that keeps things safely on the darkside.
It’s like the perfect music for some seriously psychedelic planetarium show, the music evoking massive sprawls of space, and the ever shifting cosmos, dying stars and black holes, planets being born and epic swaths of glimmering starfields.