Dream In Dream Saeko Killy

Japanese producer Saeko Killy returns for her second album of psychedelic electronics and drum machine workouts with “Dream In Dream” on Bureau B.

In contrast to her first LP “Morphing Polaroids”, which was a more collaborative project coming out of the pandemic, “Dream In Dream” sees Saeko Killy take the lion's share of the controls herself. This time around she wrote and played mostly everything herself, meaning she could arrange her songs exactly how she liked, to draw out their dream-like elements.

“All the songs were recorded in Berlin in 2024,” Saeko says. “Playing and performing in front of people gave me a lot of inspiration. It made me write songs with simpler structures, because I have only two arms!”

Occasionally Saeko got around the arm issue by teaming up with her good friend and guitarist Alexa D!saster, who features on “Melancholik” and the album-opener “Kaiju”.

Right from the start, Saeko invites us into her hypnotic musical world, with wide-screen pads, guitars that sound like chants, and dubby reverb slaps, forming the foundation for Saeko’s otherworldly vocals. “Melancholik” in contrast, is a moody stomper of uptempo minimal wave, nodding to her ‘80s post punk inspirations. These two tracks capture the different sides of “Dream In Dream”, blissful downtempo dreamscapes next to upbeat excursions for the psychedelic dancefloor.

Saeko mixed the album together with Sebastian Lee Philipp aka Die Wilde Jagd, another long-time friend that Saeko was introduced to when she first moved to Berlin. Together in Sebastian’s studio, they brought out the harmonics of Saeko’s collection of Korgs, Yamahas and other affordable, modern-day versions of classic synths. “Sebastian has delicate ears,” Saeko explains. “He was very much hearing what I wanted to do with the sound, and sometimes his ideas would just fit perfectly to the songs. He made it all happen with his great knowledge, totally magic!”

Music and magic are just some of the languages that appear on “Dream In Dream”, which also switches between Japanese, English and German. For the track “Jede Farbe” for example, Saeko experimented with each language, to find which would fit the groove best. The result is something that could have been heard booming out of speakers in West Berlin in the ‘80s. However the changing languages also place Saeko’s songs somewhere between worlds. They sound new wave, but filtered through Saeko’s lens of J-Pop, NDW, and Industrial music. Saeko navigates these in between sounds using signposts from her dreams, guided through the space-time distortion loops as if by a vision. The true meaning of this vision might not be immediately clear - but who minds, when the search for that meaning sounds this good?