Today’s immersive sound experience comes courtesy of a Bandcamp Daily feature about Irish musician Maria Somerville and her remarkable debut album “All My People”. It’s hard to pick out one track to introduce Somerville’s sound-world, but here’s “All Too Much”
If this is dream-pop it comes from the deepest dream-state sleep. “All Too Much” sounds like some early ambient work of Eno has been beamed into a cathedral via a shortwave radio drifting on and off station while Somerville sings quietly in the middle of the hall. There are things you imagine you can hear in the mix that may not actually there; audio illusions, like watermarks, or ghostly stains seeping through from a parallel world, smudged hallucinations, warped through time and space.
It’s a magical piece of work and everything on “All My People” possesses a subtle kind of sonic magic. I was reminded at different times of the spirit of Cocteau Twins, Grouper, El Perro Del Mar, and HTRK (sometimes all in the same song). The infinite reverb layers and strange noises washing around in the mix often providing disorienting anomalies, like the kind of things you may imagine half-remembering hearing while drifting off to sleep watching an unsettling a dream-sequence from a David Lynch film. Wonderful.
Pop Lib 
[…] with Aoife Nessa Frances accompanying the review contained references to PopLib favourites Maria Somerville, The Clientele, and Broadcast. So I had to check the album out. And then buy […]
[…] creator Maria Somerville, there’s a similar approach here to the music on Somerville’s “All My People” album through linking the traditional and the modern, transforming memories into a ghostly personal […]