Dæva (pronounced day-va) is the recording project of Gigi Mead, Brooklyn resident who lives with a cat named Aubrey and “casts spells, slings books, and writes songs” in her spare time. Her debut EP, Beta Persei, is an experimental dream pop project which focuses on the only themes relevant to any experimental dream pop act worth their salt – love, loss and The X-Files.
The first single, ‘Dream’, which premiered on The Grey Estates last week, combines two types of synths, the sparkling wonder of those in the foreground forever surrounded by an ominous background drone, suggesting an atmosphere that could go one of two ways – rise into some numinous joy or descend into something deep and dark and strange. Lyrically, ‘Dream’ plays like an oneiric flattening of time, past, present and future collapsed and presented as one.
We’re delighted to share a second track, ‘Ache’, a dream pop number submerged in chillwavey synths and sci-fi/JRPG-sounding electronics which eventually develop into an rhythmic dance beat. Again, the song is immersed in the dreamlike quality of being overly familiar and unnervingly uncanny, where memories and wishes intermingle to form a vivid-yet-spectral landscape perpetually on the verge of evaporating. Indeed, the meaning of the track is similarly ambiguous, emotions pushing in with tangible weight but diminishing upon closer inspection, like bright lights visiting your patch of sky before passing on, zipping up and away to wherever such things go, leaving only the slow creep of melancholy and a latent anxious twitch.
“All alone, all on my own
Can you sleep at night with the weight of all your fears
Will the visions in your eyes ever disappear
Where were you when I needed you, is this how you want it to be
Scully tells me to move on, Mulder wants me to believe”
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Beta Persei is available for pre-order now from Furious Hooves, including a limited edition run of cassettes. Also, if you find yourself in the area, Dæva is having a release show at Catland in Brooklyn, NY on December 2, 2016 (of which you can find detail here).