Dust Devil

Across Dust Devil, a fictional atmospheric electronic double album, Naemi—a Kansan now based in Berlin—crafts songs that gently rise and fall. Each has a strong point, but a fragile feel, as if they started out as pointed statements before the producer whittled them down to nothing. Indeed, like weather.gov he waxes rather poetic about the tornado-like phenomenon that gives the album its name, each song arriving in a haze and when “exhausted or out of balance,” it “will break and dissolve.” It's a soft and magical album, big on ambition and small on scale, which is, in my opinion, just the right amount of each.

Naemi, who previously produced under the name Exael, is part of a loose crew of musicians from Kansas and beyond – notably Ulla and Huerco S., who both appear on the album – working on the more expansive side of electronic music . Expect to hear mesmerizing soundscapes, ping pong cues, slow laser beams melting into muted hi-hats, acoustic guitars armed in fractal dissonance. This attenuated acoustic shares the anti-melody principles of waveless music, but not the abrasion. The album is quirky, but easy to listen to. Flexibility is part of the approach.

Dust Devil is the work of this sound, with Naemi bringing together a series of young experimental killers as selected guests, talented people scattered throughout the bands' Motion Ward the 3XL, whose label head, Shy, appears on this album. They perform an array of musical talents, spoken word poetry, strumming an acoustic guitar or chanting the sweetest nothing over gurgling, humming and pulsating beats.

The album opens with “It Feels So Good” featuring “Erika”—who is also known as the pretty popular R&B musician Erika de Casier. She's so much more well-known than the rest of the artists that it feels like they thought it would be gauche to use her full name – a blurry scan of sound. The song could easily have been an instrumental. on its own it would be a nice piece of atmospheric music, made from the softer version of something between the call of a baby whale and the digitized sound of a trumpet combined with a digital harp-like shimmer. But with de Casier singing, which she does slowly and softly enough to almost whisper, the song goes from soothing to seductive. Brian Eno never could. “It Feels So Good” is probably the closest thing the album has to a “song”. It's a smart choice to open the album, a proper dip into the warmth of the album before traveling into the next 13 songs that dazzle together as they fall in and out of coherence. Ideas are developed, implemented and abandoned. There's not always a ton of growth, but not a lot of value either. curiosity takes over.