Composed and improvised at the boundaries of vocal jazz, there are moments of calm, tranquility and spaciness throughout Dune. The music plays hide and seek, often becoming disassociative, disassembled and generally atonal, finding momentary alignments amid a minimum of instrumental voicings. The pieces are often preoccupied with timbral qualities – people will and should hail Hopper's unique tone – and restraint. To this elegance is added Yumi's vocals, which tend to remain soto voce throughout. She mostly relies on wordless melisma that has a fleshy, impulsive character, drawing from her broad experience and work with experimental lights like David Toop. Here, the wordless vocal intonation in particular feels retro and positions the work in an awkward, earlier frame that feels immediately dated. As much as the instrumental work strives to be amorphous and non-specific, the voice tends to make the pieces concrete and overly specific, stretching across some lovely twitter and decay with a demure hippie wail. The contrast is clearly deliberate but to this listener the voice impels a sort of overall squishiness (apologies for the poor adjective) denoting an emotionally damp, seemingly indulgent and gratefully bygone period.
Track Listing:
1) Long Dune
2) Shiranui
3) Seki no Gohonmatsu
4) Circular Dune
5) Scattered Forest
6) Hopeful Impressions of Happiness
7) Awayuki I
8) Awayuki II
9) Distant Dune
10) Futa
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