Daisy Ray - Once in a while

Awaited second LP by hypnagogic sound-fidgeter Daisy Ray on Parisian imprint Deardogs, after an acclaimed debut album on Heat Crimes. Bits and pieces channeled into dream-like sequences, fronted by Daisy Ray's poised yet hallucinogenic voice. Finest psychedelic pop excavated from the fuming ruins of the 21st Century, in a very Brusselard manner. Fantastic artwork by Anaïs Fontanges.

It has been established a long-time ago now, that everything is music, more over, that everything can be turned into music: this morning's dream, sign posts read from a car's backseat, sounds of trains leaving and entering the station, destroying half of a venue with an excavator... Daisy Ray sits on that spectrum, far from Hanatarash and other harsh noise acts, though, but rather close to small music and toy improvisators Pascal Comelade, Steve Beresford or Klimperei.

I usually tend to regard with suspicion any geographic explanation to why a record sounds like this or that, but I cannot fight the feeling that only music bred under Belgian skies can exhale such a hovering gloom, and at the same time, conjure it with a wink. Daisy Ray certainly has that BXL tongue-in-cheek attitude and an appeal for the brainy, and the weird, offering a cartoonish rather than serious take on psychedelia, not dissimilar to that offered by Belgian acts like Aksak Maboul or COS half a century ago. 

She scrapbooks tiny, minimal and bare pop songs, with everything that falls within her reach, but in these messy little fantasies of her, Daisy Ray always takes the lead, conducting such Silly Symphonies with a voluptuous yet strict voice, in a way that sometimes recalls Lolina ('once in a while', 'you ran away') or the ice-cold coolness of Annette Peacock. She distillates tunes about about dead-ends and wrong turns ('wrong train') in an almost sadistic manner. Red herrings, obviously.

Notably, song titles mostly refer to a particular state of consciousness ('meditate', 'dream'). Whether these are feverish dreams or the rumbles and static of the Network, Daisy Ray makes herself omnipotent, both a comforting and a slightly menacing figure, like Lain in the eponymous series. These worlds are hers.  (M/M - wholesale: shops, contact us)