Cate Kennan - The Arbitrary Dimension Of Dreams (2022)

‘The Arbitrary Dimension of Dreams’ is Cate Kennan’s oblique exploration of memory, nighttime, and narrative. The resulting 12 compositions are brisk, evocative, and lingering. Kennan’s sonic palette is vast yet harmonized, deftly matching spectral synthesizers to hazy lap steel guitars and watery analog effects. Existing in the sparsely occupied world of early melodic electronic music, her songs call to mind the sonic landscape’s of Malcolm Cecil, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, and Deux Filles. Each individual track sculpts a setting, constructing an amorphous landscape of surreal musical vignettes. Picture a boat tied to a dock, bobbing with the waves, wisps of fog refusing the complete vision. This is the nebulous space of ‘The Arbitrary Dimension of Dreams,’ an enveloping, insistent realm that feels both intimately familiar and profoundly otherworldly.

The album sustains the tension between dream, fiction, and reality thanks to Kennan’s investment in the contradictions of these states. She notes that the fundamentally absurd and arbitrary nature of dream does not free us from the dominion that daydreams, fantasies, and wishes have on our lives. Similarly, the understanding that our dreams belong entirely to us, products of our individual mind, cannot undo the suspicion that they somehow come from somewhere else. For ‘The Arbitrary Dimension of Dreams,’ Kennan expresses this tension by pairing the grand gestures of film scores with intensely personal idiosyncrasies: abrupt endings, murky, subharmonic rumbling, and ghostly fragments. Kennan’s sense of timing, her steadfastness, and her daring ensure that even the slightest detail in this narrative is gripping, poignant, and expressive.

Cate Kennan is a Los Angeles native. ‘The Arbitrary Dimension of Dreams’ is her debut LP, following appearances on the compilations ‘Succession Sounds, Vol. I’ (2019, Post Present Medium) and ‘Clay Bodies’ (2021, Objects & Sounds).