Stella Stella attempt to preserve something inherently unstable on Kelpie, a distorted dreampop miniature first heard in a dream and then painstakingly reconstructed over the following month. Rather than polishing away its uncertainty, the track embraces the strange gaps and mutations that appear whenever a memory is brought back into the waking world.
Extensive analogue reamping gives the song a blurred, tactile quality, as though its sounds have passed through several layers of recollection before reaching their final form. Distortion gathers around whispered vocals, transforming a brief composition into an absorbing space filled with mood and feeling.
The song's atmosphere takes hold almost immediately. Intimate, hazy and slightly unreal, the track feels less like a conventional recording than the surviving fragment of something encountered elsewhere, like a dream remembered imperfectly.
ZR