Nadine Byrne

Ectoplasm Girl Nadine Byrne returns with her first solo album in 4 years, a woozy, unnerving and dreamlike soundworld somewhere betweenLaurie Anderson, James Ferraro and Ryan Trecartin. Huge recommendation... Ectoplasm Girls’ Nadine Byrne lures listeners into woozy mental states on Dreaming Remembering, her soundtrack to a short film of the same name, providing a solo follow-up to A Different Gesture: Collected Soundtracks 2011-2012, and her first outing since Ectoplasm Girls’ New Feeling Come [2016], which were both issued by Joachim Nordwall’s ever-incredible iDEAL Recordings. One of three Stockholm-based Byrne sisters along with Tanya, her partner in Ectoplasm Girls, and Ambra, who has recently provided EG’s live visuals, Nadine operates at the intersection of intuitive sonic and visual arts. Where Ectoplasm Girls tend to a bewitched sort of industrial experimentation, Nadine’s personal work is defined in terms of its relative, mutable electronic sleight of hand, with vocals handled by the mysterious Sarah Kim.

As the title connotes, Dreaming Remembering is about intimate reflection and the space between awareness and uncertainty of recollection. In that noumenal gooch, Nadine works an incredible freeform, uncluttered sound best resembling the illusive nature of dreams and their elusive memory. In her mind and out of her machines, they feel out a spectrum ranging from mirage-like vignettes like Atlas thru to curdled proto-techno buzzes and grubby drone intonations with wickedly possessed vocals.

Extracted from the visuals the material here has a cumulative effect that mesmerises and unsettles throughout the album, bringing us out at the other end in a way that feels like we’ve just walked out of a darkened cinema into dusk, with the strange effect of the preceding visuals and a story you can’t untangle still lingering like a pleasurably strange mental fug that’s hard to shake or decipher.