Naemi (w/Ulla, Huerco S, Erika de Casier++) - Dust Devil

The artist formerly known as exael returns as Naemi with an expansive collection of ASMR-charged dreamstate synthesis that's shaped by a list of features that reads like a who's who of Mod. Ambient. Truly, this is the Ambi-All Star version of Watch the Throne, each of the 14 tracks featuring a different collaborator pulled from the intersecting orbits of 3XL/Motion Ward/West Mineral/Soda Gong/xpq? et al. If you've cupped just half an ear to music of this kind at some point over the past five years or so, you'll be more than familiar with this most soft-focus of rogue's gallery - Ulla, Huerco S, Ben Bondy, Perila, NAP, Pontiac Streator and more all make appearances, the results more like a particularly sprawling scene report than the debut album of a specific artist. We're used to seeing this kind of thing in hip hop, but downtempo electronic music? Much less so. The benefit of such an approach is that is allows the German producer to cast the net a little wider, and unite the various loose ends of ambient, glitch, dreampop, IDM, trip hop, vapourwave and so forth in ways that don't so much suggest coherence as shared understandings and enquiries. And for the most part, those shared understandings seem to occupy some kind of sunken state, a combination of the dream-fogged, the time-dilated and vapourised memory that really doubles down on our understanding of 'hypnagogic' (and after hour drug intake in Berlin). Funny how such an ambitious, labour-intensive project can yield such hazy, stoned results. Who knew you could get so much work done down in those k-holes.