Burn Into Sleep & Dream Skills

here aren’t too many finer esoteric labels in North West of the United Kingdom than Tombed Visions, and they present another fine cut: this time the collaboration between Burn Into Sleep and Dream Skills who lock horns for I Carried You for Years and the Deers Are Still Hungry.

A family affair consisting of brothers David (Aging, Fire Nearby and Tombed Visions founder) and Donald McLean (Action Beat, Final Boss) as well as the former’s partner, Lauren (also of Fire Nearby), during the decade, all three have scoured experimental music’s more obscure corners – David and Lauren’s Fire Nearby’s 2024 debut, Fruits of Patience, illuminating the vital aspects of post-rock, while Donald’s Dream Skills vessel has seen the New York-based experimentalist recently collaborate with former singer of The Ex, G.W. Sok; the pair joining forces for the Steve Albini-recorded 2024 release, As We Speak.

Preceding both releases, and Burn Into Sleep’s 2023 debut, Like A Strange Matador, possessed the kind of nervous energy that kept pulling you back in. At times feeling like the logical step that Bark Psychosis should have taken after Hex instead of mangling our minds with Codename: Dustsucker; at others like abstract punk poetry courtesy of Lauren’s fearless surge across the frontiers of west country blues.

Alongside Dream Skills, I Carried You for Years and the Deers Are Still Hungry is a far different proposition, not only in collaboration but also due to the work of Andrew PM Hunt (Dialect, Ex-Easter Island Head). The Liverpool electro-acoustic practitioner, stitching together this album as expertly as anyone from behind the soundboards. With every single detail amplified to remarkable effect, Hunt’s less-is-more approach makes these recordings bristle and radiate with an energy that stops you in your tracks.

While Hunt’s work is undoubtedly a boon, Lauren’s spoken-word passages are this collaboration’s hallmark card. Her delivery, piercing through the unnerving lull that envelopes much of this release with a precision that freezes all the way to the nerve endings.

With subtle guitar plinks and fragments of David’s saxophone dotted throughout the mix, opener, The Girl on the Dior Counter, is narcotic sound design that is like a collage of broken dreams. The protagonist, yearning for her partner as her soul slowly erodes due to being, indeed, “Dragged in the wheel of consumerism”.

Following is Just Looking to Be Whole Again. It’s here where Donald begins to stamp his mark, with an icy flood of electronica that echoes the likes of Pan Sonic, even flaying the excess Autechre’s earliest late night wanderings. The remnants find their way onto Retaliation – electro-acoustic that smashes through the wall that leads to Cop-era Swans. Hostile post-punk, but here it’s offset by David’s glassy guitar inflections, setting the backdrop for Lauren’s poetry that darkens the door (“Never drink while you’re grieving /Because your body’s precious wings / Centred by the hands of the dead / Who left their bodies to the soil and their souls to the freedom of the sky”).

Then there’s Undefined By Pain. About as literal as this collaboration gets, it’s a no-wave, free-jazz mash-up seemingly inspired by interrogation chambers. However, Lauren’s abstract spoken-word passages ease any suggestion of sonic sadism (“Build solitude into your day… a new chapter undefined by pain“). It’s quite the contrast to Showgirl With Desire. Droning minimalist post-rock designed for cathedrals, the wicked tale is anything but, in what is a close-to-the-bone allegory seemingly inspired by Ryū Murakami.

As Put Your Hand In Mine and Pillow Spray see Burn Into Sleep and Dream Skills trading barbs deep into world of the avant-garde, the defining moment on I Carried You for Years and the Deers Are Still Hungry comes via penultimate pieces, Bronx Zoo. Doom-laden noodlings that cut through the deepest and darkest parts of the night, here Burn Into Sleep and Dream Skills unveil something that encapsulates the project. Abstract minimalism that fizzes along the fault lines, and through Hunt’s ability to capture such an unsettling vigour between the studio walls, I Carried You for Years and the Deers Are Still Hungry is an absolute one of a kind.

I Carried You for Years and the Deers Are Still Hungry is out now via Tombed Visions. Purchase from Bandcamp.