Last month we introduced Dylan Henner‘s new album Star Dream FM, describing how the record is quite unlike any other, blurring the line between memory, fantasy and dreams through a unique concept. “Late one evening, I was listening to the radio alone at home. I couldn’t find the station I wanted, so I shifted the dial around for a while,” Henner explains. “Between frequencies, fading in and out of fidelity, I found a station I’d never heard before. To my amazement, the station was broadcasting my own memories. Memories from when I was seventeen.” The enigmatic producer uses this idea as the basis for a collection, we wrote, “which explores both the tactile experience of adolescence and the nostalgia of times now past,” and single ‘We Walked all the Way to the Lake and The Water Was So Still We Jumped in Naked’ proved how human and intimate an electronic sound can be. “Personal details might be scant for this secretive artist,” we continued, “yet, perhaps counterintuitively, few acts welcome listeners so close within their work.”
With the release of Star Dream FM approaching via Phantom Limb, Dylan Henner has returned with new track, ‘We Ditched School and Climbed Over the Neighbour’s Fence to Swim in their Pool All Day’. Another cut for which the title says it all, embracing not just a sentimental fondness for the specific moment but one wider in scope, longing for the kind of curiosity and carefree spirit which marks youth. Similarly, the result feels personal, though there’s the undercurrent of something different. The sense Henner is not so much tapping into his own memories but a kind of collective yearning. One developed not through individual experience but the culture itself. The cinematic version of youth delivered to us so steadily we come to mourn it as our own.
