A collection of dreamtone vignettes, the strangely peaceful sound of a distant alien planet

Looking at the origin of dreamtone, much of its silky textures are derived from smoothing and polishing the submergent, rough swirls heard in slushwave. Where the latter washes over listeners with a hallucinogenic sonic malaise, dreamtone glimmers with the pearlescent power that one can often only access through sleep. The elongated synth tones become mystical and pacifying, indebted to new-age music and undiscovered ambient techno from eclectic ‘90s imprints such as Warp and Darla.

Light Blending In’s Moontide is a dreamtone excursion with an uncommon characteristic: brevity. The droning ambient excursions usually found in the genre can sustain long, unfolding durations, ponderously fluctuating for up to nearly an hour. Moontide breaks this convention without losing any of the genre’s depth. At a modest 26-minute length, this is a digestible collection of emerging vignettes, portraying a cautious encounter with an otherworldly dream space, rather than an intimidatingly wondrous ambient voyage.

Therefore, Moontide’s functional strength lies in its transience – the brief repetitions elicit visions dependent on a track’s mood. Many are beatless, oneiric ambience, each unfurling with a beauty similar to the low-poly euphoria of BAKGROUND’s legendary Memory Card.

Some tracks emit a gentle, calm lightness that justly reiterates their title. Blue Chakra is a toasty awakening, spacey bells ring to affirm a pastoral purity felt upon remaining still, inviting reminiscence and even subconscious wandering. Gravity furthers these notions, as its lustrous, sweeping synth pads dispersed throughout kindle gratitude for the scarce surrounding warmth.

However, a shift into a more inquisitive state soon occurs, with the wistful hums on Otherworldly and the resonant synth bed on Temple. The latter’s pensive undertone is especially haunting, a realisation that this alien place is dour and bleak. The faint naturalistic samples of meandering grass steps and bird chirps help anchor this alternate space in the real, but there’s a resigned drifting through this unknown.

Expedition, Dark Waters, and Bottom of the Ocean are a compelling string of liminal, funereal ambience that draw out the thorough exertion which comes with intense meditation. A degrading, analogue quality marks each entry, tainted by emotional blemishes and feeling lost. Dark Waters’ warbling, oceanic synths almost rise up to convulse with the detached solitude of slushwave, but still, things are opalescent. It’s like stumbling through a landscape under a different gravity.

Then, the eerie Bottom of the Ocean is entirely devastating, discoloured ambience. It blends the mystifying spacey interludes of Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children with the unsettling haze of their follow-up Geogaddi in a miraculous three minutes. It may seem here that any earlier perception of light is shrinking as we sink lower, having dived too deep into these strange waters. Yet the humane closer Surrealism, cocreated with ethereal sound collagist Plains Apparition, is a respite – its gleaming, aureate synth stabs indicate a newfound confidence in an alien place.

Moontide carries a spiritual, reinventive aura during its short meditations – some clearly more afflictive than others. The light appears most vividly when viewing these deliberations as if reliving little diary entries, ultimately forming a deep-seated bridge to the past. Beyond its quiet consoling, Moontide guides you to a subsequent good that you may’ve been blind to during that profound but ephemeral pain: vital acceptance and moving on.