Signer: Selected Dreams 2020-2022 CS

When diving into Bevan Smith’s discography, one continuously gets the feeling that the well is bottomless. Whether creating lo-fi soundscapes with Andrew Thomas (Feeling Flying), pastoral IDM in the late 90s style (Aspen), or outsider ambient techno (Signer), he seems to be everywhere at once (we’re not even gonna get into the numerous rock/pop collaborations). But Smith is also an aggressively non-promotional artist, so even though he’s released music on labels like Carpark, Type, and Sub Pop, you’d be forgiven for never having heard of him. Regionally isolated in New Zealand, and largely unconcerned with the self-promotional duties required by the contemporary creative economy, he seems to be operating largely on his own terms.

In the fall of 2020, with Covid lockdown in full swing, Smith began to enact a unique personal ritual. Every night he would listen to a single experimental jazz album from the 70s in its entirety before creating music of his own on a single device (the Synthstrom Deluge). These recordings, which he dubbed ‘Isolated Dreams,’ then began to appear without notification or fanfare on the artist’s Bandcamp page - the first appearing in October of 2020, and the most recent (as of this writing) in February of 2024 (Volume 23). The music here is simple and direct; wavering synth lines draped over a series of repeating rhythms, with occasional micro-changes in texture and timbre, all of it recorded in real time and refreshingly loose in terms of arrangement and production gloss. Like the artist, it seems to exist in a state of self-directed autonomy.

Choosing a cassette’s worth of material from this rich archive was not easy, so we collaborated closely with the artist on track choices and placement, curating a representative selection of pieces from the first 15 volumes. It’s our hope that this physical release will bring some much needed attention to this unique and ongoing electronic project.