Ilyas Ahmed
A Dream of Another
Catalog #: GN73
Shattered Lapis Blue Vinyl
- 1. Etched in Smoke
- 2. Nasty Man
- 3. Twice the Memory
- 4. Little Devil
- 5. Waves
- 6. A Dream of Something
- 7. Imagine There
Ilyas Ahmed has spent nearly two decades trudging through the murkiest sonic territories with patient consideration on his own, as a full time member of Grails, and together with the likes of Liz Harris (Grouper), Golden Retriever, and most recently Jefre Cantu-Ledesma on their 2021 collaborative LP You Can See Your Own Way Out. Across a string of exquisite releases on Root Strata, Immune, Digitalis, and Time-Lag, the Pakistan-born, Portland, Oregon-based musician has spread out a tapestry of spectacular solitude, somewhere between off-kilter folk and grimly contemporary ambient music.
Now, Ahmed returns to Geographic North with A Dream of Another, a spiritual successor to the distantly seething Behold Killers and his most hallucinatory and benevolently bereft record to date. Here, Ahmed sets out a new, more oblique path than ever before, eschewing lyrics and vocals, incorporating a solemn drum machine, and charting a series of waking dreams.
The end result is a masterful LP written, recorded, and performed entirely by Ahmed, mastered by Chuck Johnson, and continues the excruciatingly beautiful, pained traditions of somber avant-melodists like Vini Reilly and Loren Connors.