by David Wilikofsky
Rarely do albums come with titles as apt as In My Dreams I’m There, the debut album from Devin Shaffer. “I have a million fantasies a minute. I’m a chronic daydreamer – I don’t have just one pipe dream sitting there, but possibilities that rotate constantly through my mind as a means of escape” says Shaffer of herself. It’s a habit that heavily informs the music she creates. Utilizing field recordings, gently plucked acoustic guitars, and otherworldly vocals, Shaffer gives listeners the experience of being in her mind; she’s created music that manages to exist both in her dreams and in the real world.
The juxtaposition of the dream and physical realms is obvious from even a cursory glance at the tracklist, where some track names belie a deeply rooted sense of place (“Carina Searches for Hollow Rock, North Carolina”, “Drive Into Woods”) and others suggest existence on a more liminal plane (“In My Dreams I’m Offline”, “Dreaming”). However, the reality suggested in the music is muddier than this seemingly clear division. Take “Drive Into Woods”, the foreboding opener that conjures up the feeling of wandering through a looming forest, only to slowly dissolve that image into hisses of static and the distant sound of wind chimes. Or “How”, whose otherworldly chorus fades into the sound of waves crashing and the conversation of “Carina Searches for Hollow Rock, North Carolina.” This is music that revels in blurring the line between the two worlds, moving freely between them and often allowing them to coexist in a single plane.
Shaffer also cites walking as an important part of her creative practice, and this sense of journey translates into the structural fiber of the album. There’s a clear flow to it, sounds and individual tracks bleeding into one another. Sometimes there’s a specific sound that rattles around in the background of one track only to jump into the foreground in the next; at others new sounds gently and organically emerge out of previous ones. The constant is that there’s always some sonic throughline pulling us from one track to the next, moving us forward. We’ll emerge from a dream into the cold light of day, only to doze off again minutes later into another dreamscape.
Though you can point to some antecedents of Shaffer’s sound (Grouper, Julia Holter, and Astrid Øster Mortensen all came to my mind at various points in the record), this is music so infused with her world view that it feels like it could only be made by her. It’s truly something special, an album that heralds the arrival of a huge new talent.