Only Good Dreams For Me

On “Love2,” the second track on Zaumne’s ‘Only Good Dreams For Me’, Natalia Panzer’s voice emerges from a hazy smear of a pop-song chorus: “I am touching the cold window,” she intones. “I am touching the spinning walls. It’s a way to remember what’s mine is yours, and back again.” ‘Only Good Dreams For Me’, Zaumne’s first release with Warm Winters Ltd., embraces such direct contact as it cycles through states, from dread to hope. The heavy air that lingered on Zaumne’s previous releases, like humid breath from the ASMR whispers that populate his compositions, has lifted a bit. In its place, crystalline melodies cut across textures culled from field recordings taken in transit: a train between Zürich and Milan, a wooden elevator in Antwerp, birdsong outside a Warsaw window. Voices are still there, some buried and blurred, others, like Panzer’s, rising from the mix in stark moments of clarity. Anchored by a makeshift internal monologue that forms from a patchwork of diaristic vocal snippets and emotive melodic accents, ‘Only Good Dreams For Me’ has the effect of a cityscape viewed in motion from a window at dawn: a clarity that comes less from knowing where you are than a sense of peace with where you’re going.