Courtney Bailey’s debut LP, arrives on Second Circle, and it’s a marked contrast to her recent EP for Animals Dancing. Where that was a banging, dance floor affair, this far more chilled. Often almost beatless, ambient, sometimes abstract, but always atmospheric. 

Songs such as Kodou and Swept Away are ethereal synth-pop, that could be 80s art duo Dip In The Pool but re-imagined in a post-house, post-techno 21st Century soundscape. The lyrics, in Japanese, are sung and spoken, sweet, choral, and the harmonies, in places, hark after 60s girl group bubblegum. The latter track, while laid-back, boasts bells, Roland bass and frantic, spinning sonic fractals. 

Bailey drew some inspiration from the work of fellow Japanese artist Dream Dolphin, and on tunes like In Dream this really shows. With breathless, poetic prose and soft, reed-like keys, suggestive of the score of some scantily clad designer perfume ad, it recalls the 90s “ambient” acts Enigma and Deep Forest. 

Like A Heaven, one of the album’s highlights, too could have been a classic in chillout rooms decades ago. Robotic, chugging electro-erotica, with chiming bleeps, it’s a TB-303 licked, double-dipped, psychedelic search for a new life “swimming in the clouds.” Like The Beat Club’s Security meets the sleazy downtempo acid of Bailey’s Second Circle label mate Khan. 

Words are whispered, or siren-like sighs. The music, sparse, aquatic splashes. Burnt Moon, another standout, has haunting harp-like glissandos, the sound of surf, a light rattle of bongos / congas and Fairlight / Art Of Noise fragments. New Journey, the closing instrumental blends a bottom end throb, trebly East Asian timbres and angelic vocal treatments, like an 80s Synclavier-sporting kankyo ongaku pioneer. 

Courtney Bailey’s In Dream can be ordered directly from Music From Memory spinoff Second Circle.