Pete Feenstra chatted to Esbe for his Feature show on Get Ready to ROCK! Radio. First broadcast 28 August 2022.

New Cat Records [Release date 20.05.22]

Esbe is a British composer, musician, arranger, producer and vocalist with a beautifully expressive Bjork style timbre.

She’s is in her element when hovering over subtly layered electronic arrangements with ambient influences. She’s uses the purity and range of her voice as an additional instrument and part of a contemporary ambient style. As a result, ‘I Might Be Dreaming’ is an evocative album full of the kind of drama, neurosis and search for meaning that populates all our dreams.

The title track is a majestic dip into the subconscious, a place for those relationships that might be unattainable in real life. So she aims for the edge of the world, and flanked by subtly nuanced horns and brush stroked synths, sings: “Don’t try and wake me it’s more than sleep that I’m losing,” and: “Don’t try to wake me I’ve found the peace I’m craving……”

Her subconscious facilitates her quest to connect with her inner self and possibly realise her full potential by juggling love, loss and bigger themes such as the planet’s future.

She lays her psyche bare and explores the full range of her eerie vocals on the suitably titled ‘Cry From The Soul’.

Being the opening track of the album, it sets out the conceptual framework for the album as a whole, while musically its a melange of faux strings, synth sweeps over a moderate pulse.

The album title suggests an ambivalence, which is mirrored by her willingness to move through different states of the mind, at different times.

She unafraid to dig deep for her subconscious explorations and has the lyrical ability to express her finding, while the musical arrangements generally opts for a restrained approach that always leave plenty of room for her exploratory vocal style.

She immerses us into her ethereal subconscious via initial expansive cinematic strings and the opposite introspective sounding ambient electronica and slowly evolving synth sweeps with doomy drones.

It’s a place where she can freely associate ideas, people, situations, and connect with the kind of fleeting, but universal feelings that often remain tantalising out of reach in dream land.

In some way this album feels like an exercise in widening musical genres to fit her ever changing subconscious canvas.

Her sparse musical arrangements are always in the service of the song and voice, while her words cleverly mirror the unfettered subconscious, which surely mirrors her own artistic imagination.

On ‘Don’t Say Maybe’ her voice hovers over an organ, synth and Rhodes piano accompaniment, while her top line perfectly nuances the song’s aspirational nature, marred only by the fact that the electronic percussion sounds dated, circa the 1980’s

They say songwriters are the lucky ones who don’t need to stick to reality to create their art. Such is the case here, on a project that straddles introspection but aims for universal emotions.

And in doing so, she scores a near miss, because after having drawn the listener into the dreamy aesthetic of the title track, the use of tempered electronics, percussive synth sounds sometimes sounds slightly forced, especially when trying to accommodate such a natural voice.

That said, there’s no denying the breath taking beauty of ‘No Desire’, which evokes every heartbeat and breath of the song while exploring a wash of raw emotion,

Then there’s the heartfelt unrequited love ballad ‘I Needed You ’, on which her voice melds into the track like a dream from afar, before imperceptibly moving to the front of the mix for a repetition of the song title. Her now anguished phrasing mirrors her lyrical angst: “How could I fool myself.”

“A Lonely Star’ is more of an ambitious song which doesn’t quite work as well. It opens with the sharply contrasting screeching strings and low-end drones, leaving just enough room for her counter-weighting gently echoed elongated vowels.

The combination nicely evokes space, time and the great beyond, but the overbearing instrumentation and drone arrangement asks much of the listener’s patience.

The lyrically pessimistic ‘Angry Sun’ extends the use of bass drones, while an overly dramatic B-movie string arrangement is offset by her repeated choral style phrasing.

And almost as if she’s realised the need for a resolution to the tension, she alters her vocal attack on the beautifully crafted ‘Whisper In Solitude’, with phrasing and a timbre that evokes The Velvet Underground’s Nico.

Bolstered by a cool horn arrangement and perfect diction, this is an outstanding track which achieves everything that this album sets out to do.

If prosody is understood to be the appropriate relationship between elements, then she’s clearly struck gold with lyrics that fit the music perfectly: “Moulding like clay every plaintive belief”

And if ‘Breathe’ isn’t the most original of tracks, her husky voice, double tracked harmonies and pristine diction again is reminiscent of Nico.

The arrangement leaves enough space to suggest an expiation of air. The combination of voice and music – the gentle pulse and bed of synths – pushes her into another facet of a dream like state.

The flow of the album leads to the need for a resolution, which she provides it by re-stating the album’s mission statement on the closing track ‘Restless’, delivered over an eerie Theremin sounding backing.

“Burning out like a furnace on the inside, chilling out like a freezer on the outside, it’s cool not to care, there’s a world out there. There has to be something for us to believe.”

The question is whether she’s singing about the planet, the collective unconscious as a whole, or is simply searching for meanings in her own dream like state.

Either way, her slowly evolving musical vision poses as many questions as answers, but perhaps she’s encouraging us to simply enjoy the ride and dip under the surface and discover our true selves. ****

Review by Pete Feenstra

Featured Artist: JOSH TAERK

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In 2023 he signed a recording deal with Sony in Canada and released a new single on 15 September.

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UK Blues Broadcaster of the Year (2020 and 2021 Finalist) Pete Feenstra presents his weekly Rock & Blues Show on Tuesday at 19:00 GMT as part of a five hour blues rock marathon “Tuesday is Bluesday at GRTR!”. The show is repeated on Wednesdays at 22:00, Fridays at 20:00). This show was first broadcast 29 October 2024.

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