Nick Storring: My Magic Dreams Have Lost Their Spell
Orange Milk Records

My Magic Dreams Have Lost Their Spell, the sixth solo full-length and first vinyl release from Toronto-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Nick Storring, is pitched as an homage to the music of Roberta Flack. But while its six track titles do derive from song lyrics in her repertoire—“Tonight There'll Be No Distance Between Us” a memorable line from “Tonight I Celebrate My Love,” for example—the music itself bears scant resemblance to Flack's music or the general stylistic area with which it's associated. Such an oblique yet nonetheless affectionate and sincere gesture on its creator's part is wholly in keeping with the kind of sensibility embodied by the project, which is idiosyncratic in the best sense of the word.

The list of instruments included on the album is staggering, with Storring having incorporated a wealth of strings, keyboards, woodwinds, and percussion into the six productions. It would be wrong, however, to construe My Magic Dreams Have Lost Their Spell as an exercise in grandstanding or virtuosity. Instead, the impression created is of a resourceful creator drawing upon a large pool of sound generators to realize a particular vision and constructing each piece layer by painstaking layer. Consistent with its plenitude of instrument timbres, the material itself spans multiple genres, with references to gamelan, ambient, musique concrète, post-rock, folk-prog, and any number of others emerging. Adding to the recording's appeal, Storring applied very little electronic processing to the productions, a smart move that allows the material's analog essence to shine through.

Emblematic of the album's style, the opening “Tides That Defeat Identity” assembles numerous sonorities, among them simple acoustic guitar strums, melodica, toy piano, and bowed cello, into an opaque, reverberating mass that morphs, swells, and shimmers for ten oceanic minutes. Heartfelt string figures and harp strums rise to the surface of the teeming whole, but the piece is ultimately less about individual sounds than its identity as a conglomeration that advances at a carefully measured pace. A romantic quality infuses the title track and “Pretending You And I” in the lusciousness of their strings-drenched arrangements and the graceful unfolding of their compositional design. Queasier by comparison is “What A Made-Up Mind Can Do,” which also includes one of the recording's rare flirtations with formal rhythm-based material. After an insistent bass guitar motif initiates the episode, drums, electric guitar, and clavinet appear to suggest a jazz-funk outfit loosely working through an improv. Interestingly, moments in “Now Neither One of Us is Breaking” call to mind “Neither One of Us,” the early ‘70s classic by Gladys Knight & the Pips, more than they do Flack.

Recorded between 2014-18 at various makeshift home studios, the material exudes the fogginess of a dream state. The music doesn't lack for definition, yet it feels cloaked in haze as its tracks flow somnambulantly through woozy zones; even the cover is revealing, given its seeming nod to the photo-collage style of ‘70s-era Hipgnosis. My Magic Dreams Have Lost Their Spell is available in digital, CD, and vinyl formats, but if ever a release was meant to be experienced on vinyl it's this one. More than most artists' albums, Storring's seems custom-designed to flood home listening spaces with its dizzying cornucopia of sound.

June 2020