- There is a photograph being used to promote Sleepstep, presumably an outtake from the booklet that comes with the CD, that shows Dasha Rush running through a forest. She has antlers on her head and is looking back, if not in fear then apprehensively. It's a mysterious image, open to numerous interpretations, and one that visually represents her new music with a rare accuracy.
These 16 pieces are transmissions from that state between sleep and wakefulness, when your dreams take on a particularly vivid and outrageous quality. Sometimes they bolt you awake in a feverish panic, sometimes you drift on in delicious languor. More often, those dreams simply tantalise you. They are elusive, indecipherable, and all the more compelling for their ambiguity. This is the tone of Sleepstep.
"Sleep Ballade," "Micro Universe" and the astonishing "Lumiere Avant Midi" are cosmic adventures in synth loops that fuse elements of Pole, classic Raster-Noton and, fittingly, Tangerine Dream. Slow, elegant and radiantly melodic, these tracks are shot through with a deep sadness.
Followed by the fraught choral drama of "Sail Away From Her," "Lumiere Avant Midi" forms a high-watermark of emotion, which Sleepstep builds to and recedes away from, holding your attention through stylistic ebb and flow. There's a stark, awesome beauty to the glitchy nuclear winter of "Time Whispers And Albert" and the beatless dub techno of "Fog, Dogma And Bread." "100 Hearts" and "Abandoned Beauties And Beasts" hint at grotty dance floor techno without committing. Elsewhere, Rush dips into leftfield electronic pop—the vocal tracks "Dance With Edgar Poe" and "Scratching Your Surface" are reminiscent of Emika's conservatoire club ballads—and, on "Antares," techno-mutated dub reggae. Amorphous as it is, Sleepstate is a very solid body of work.
Tracklist01. Into Space Privet For Cosmonauts
02. Dance With Edgar Poe
03. Time Whispers & Alber
04. Scratching Your Surface
05. Sleep Ballade
06. Antares
07. Abandoned Beauties & Beasts
08. Lumiere Avant Midi
09. Sail Away To Her
10. Lucy In The Sky, Lost Diamonds
11. Fog, Dogma & Bread
12. A Minute After The War
13. Life Time Poem
14. 100 Hearts
15. Micro Universe
16. "Outer Space"