Recorded on the low slopes of Geboor / Mt. Macedon in the winter of 2019, Time for Dreams, composed of the duo Tom Carlyon (the Devastations, Standish/Carlyon) and Amanda Roff (Harmony), have become more sonically ambitious with their sophisticated sophomore effort Life of the Inhabitant. Following their superb 2017 debut In Time, the new album is a sweet and shimmering body of work with its apocalyptic yet romantically heavenly synth tones and otherworldly sounds -‌ a feeling the duo set out to capture. 

“The musical scenes in my mind unfolded across the rooftops of a metropolis, a desert and another planet with half-buried electric cables glitching in the breeze and zombie fires smouldering in the peatlands,” Carlyon said in a press release. “I pictured Amanda and I wrapped up in a secure bunker looking over all this in wonder and resignation.” 

Throughout the eight-track album, Roff’s spellbinding vocals are threaded in a tapestry of reverb that delicately washes over listeners. Along with the cinematic narratives, Roff pens characters into scenes - describing “suburbs drenched in secrets, violence and occult practices (‘New Conflict Dream’), apocalyptic coliseums (‘Designing the New World’), frozen lakes (‘A World of your Own’), isolated colonies (‘A Million Miles’) and feudal fortresses (‘Death To All Actors’)”. The two instrumentals on the album (the title track and ‘Sento’) are set in an underground space-bunker and a bathhouse respectively. The eerily prophetic and pandemic themed “Death to All Actors” refers to the murder of travelling theatre troupes who were suspected of spreading the plague from town-to-town. 

The duo beautifully encapsulates a feeling of transcendence with its misty trip-hop and hypnotic electro-pop textures that melt away within the confines of their deeply sensual wall of sound. And while you can hear moments of Portishead, HTRK, and Carlyon’s past musical ventures in Standish/Carlyon, Time for Dreams mesmerises listeners with their own minimal beats and keyboard-drenched slow burners that’s distinct to their own soaring atmospherics with plenty of space for experimentation. 

Life of the Inhabitant is filled with the duo’s most ambitious compositions yet and we had the pleasure of having them pull back the curtains, walking us through their new album track by track. 

New Conflict Dream

Suburbaphobia. The powerlessness you feel as a young person, when you see terrible and amazing things all the time and no one believes you. I visited friends who lived in the suburbs when I was young and felt a choking claustrophobia in the rows and rows of houses where depravity was rife! While I was writing about this I was also reading about Jack Parsons and Margorie Cameron making sex magic and having occult seances and designing atomic bombs in their suburban home. Something about the repetitious veneer of respectability makes the suburbs really fucking wild.

Designing the New World

This is about imagining the danger and horror of societal collapse, but then having a lie down and a think and realising it is upon us and has been for some time. The Romans watching slaves murder each other in the colosseum were cute and charming compared to the current masters of capitalism and power distribution globally. Or even just compared to people who make reality TV. I spent a lot of time watching the youtube footage of the last Tasmanian Tiger in captivity. They called him Benjamin, and he did not die of old age but of exposure. The last animal of his kind known to exist on the planet died of neglect. An emblematic, sickening death.

Life of the Inhabitant

This is post-apocalypse, hanging out in the cave, the dome, bomb-shelter, or what-have-you, maybe burning some books to keep warm, drinking some tea flavoured with burnt twigs and urine.

A World of Your Own

This is a song that Tom imagines magically coming out of an old radio in a dream, an attic or archeological dig, something not of this time. To me it's an ice world, everything frozen, everyone gone, maybe a frozen lake with a single ice skater, humming to herself. A tribute to the voices and people you invent as companions to comfort you when you are alone at the end of things.

A Million Miles

Complete isolation, existential crisis, grief and loss, the futility of so-called "life goals", the crippling disillusion, the self-doubt, burning everything you own, living in the moment when the moment sucks, feeling disgusted with "civilization"... but continuing to exist. Yay.

Death to All Actors

Following the existential crisis, starting to get really into the most visceral and yet spiritual and elemental parts of existence. Maybe sickness, hunger, lust, ritual, carnality, nature, entertainment and sensuality are actually the most potentially spiritually important and meaningful activities of living. The title refers to the practice of murdering actors who were suspected of spreading the plague, and the chorus refers to 1 Corinthians 15:55 "o death where is thy sting?". Maybe the sting is all we have, maybe the sting is all, if there is nothing after. Also I'm scared of actors.

Sento

A wonky pleasure garden, floating just above the ground through the steaming ruins of reality.

Outside the Citadel

A party at the end of the world! In the context of the album, this is the way out of one adventure and the way into another. It's hard to think about the insane amount of effort I have put into parties in this sad time of non-party. This is a dance track but when the beat drops and you get up and out on the floor you realise its really fucking slow. Tom is deeply suspicious of any song with a BPM over 104. Sexy dancing only.