elintseeker - Life Without Dreams.
After seven years of silence, elintseeker returns with a new album titled Life Without Dreams. In this release, he ventures into the many faces of pop music, looking inwards for musical highlights he is fond of from eras past that shaped both his life and musical journey in the period between childhood and adolescence.
Originally an album of slow, beatless ambient pieces composed from moments of hypnagogia during sleepless and dreamless nights, the atmospheric and melancholic aspects were retained but the songs were given a structural makeover with an eye to the guidelines of pop music: a comfortable groove, predictable structures and progression, melody and accessibility.
The album features some guest appearances. Most notably, the Greek flautist Stelios Romaliadis (of Lüüp) returns for another performance and the Japanese singer and musician Piana lends her voice to most of the songs, fulfilling elintseeker’s longtime wish to work with her. Some of the songs in the album like East Side Life and City Horizons were written during the mid-to-late 2000s specifically with Piana’s voice in mind and with her participation in the album, the songs could finally be realised the way he envisioned it many years ago.
Journeying in between the fringes of jazzy ambient prog rock, hazy AOR and balearic, reverb-heavy new romantic, new wave and art pop, Life Without Dreams is an album that celebrates the power of pop music at its most dreamy, romantic and evocative, as well as creating a sense of music born from, or made for, the city after dark. It’s also a documentation of the musical reaction that started from the forced stillness and uncertainty in his life and around the world during the initial months of Covid lockdown. A desire to suggest ‘motion’ and ‘urgency’ in the musical sense was the preferred and appropriate response, instead of the usual calm and stillness of the ambient route. It also served as an opportunity for him to fully revisit the art of song crafting and execute much loved musical clichés that have been replaying in his head for a long time, of styles and sounds that are fading into oblivion as the years go by.
Artwork by Kohta Tomita
