I Dream in Transit - self released

I Dream in Transit sent me their latest self released halfway across the world, from Melbourne, Australia. A very cool chipboard matchbook style screened sleeve, on thick black vinyl, with a red xerox insert and download card.

Both of these tracks are intensely intimate, quiet droning pieces of minimalism. "Explosion" starts with a massive thump of a hollow electronic kick with drawn out, etherial vocals from Louise, as lonely sounding as the harsh electronics. She's buried under a metallic distant echo, like some kind of broken telephone line, and it plays against the full sounding lower register response lyrically from either Stephen or Phillip. This morose hymn-like back and forth has the best lyrics about our anti-relationship with technology. The kind of detachment that happens from being desensitized or too close to a tragedy...this abstract pop-drone goes all the way back to the sparse whispery pop of Young Marble Giants or The Spinannes the same brand of deliberate and minimal. Even slightly combined with the swirly shoegaze warmth of Portishead...well warmth is the wrong word...it's more lonely sounding or apocalyptic.
Thanks in part to the background of slowly bowed strings, it's an unsettling, perfectly clear vision, crisply recorded with huge gongs and live room sound non traditional percussion that deliberately doesn't follow the mechanical rhythm. It's a sort of dystopian future, clouded by who knows what substances and overall dread, all of which is in the tone of Louise's vocal, which says it all.
"A Drop of Blood on The Surface of The Moon" uses a more organic structured instrumentation this time with the gentlemen in the trio layering vocals over an electric. More lonely sounds, with a woodwind instrument of some kind, all spread out with plenty or room to breathe. Louise, barely floating above their combined loud vocal about the most isolated idea...a person, millions of un-rescuable miles away from earth, gets cut. I think that's what got me about the Kubrick/Speilberg AI movie...seeing little helpless robot automaton Haley Joel sitting in that helicopter under the water for all eternity. I lost it.
This trio is capturing that Godspeed You Black... melancholia. There's nothing overtly as ominous, but it works in the same subtle, environmental ways.
I Dream in Transit has an amazing handle on their own creepy, shoegaze, filtered, slowed down MBV, carefully taking important stock of each word as if it's the last thing you'll ever hear.

Import this direct from the band on their bandcamp page. $10 AU is about $10 US. An edition of 250.

The real tragedy is that I probably will never get to see them live and say thanks for this single.