Saeko Killy: Dream In Dream (Bureau B)

Electronic artist/producer/DJ Saeko Killy hails from Tokyo and now lives and works in Berlin. This makes a lot of sense when you hear her second album Dream in Dream, just out on Bureau B. It's sonic palette appears to take inspiration from both Tokyo's Blade Runner-inspiring hyper-modernism and the Kosmische (nee Krautrock) tradition that still reverberates strongly through the German capital's many-faceted electronic scene.

Much of the album reimagines 80s electro grooves with a cold, industrial edge. Minimal drum machines meet sprechgesang vocals with occasional echoes of Siouxsie Sioux (the gothy theatrics of Melancholic) or Grace Jones (Next Time, the nearest thing this album has to an uptempo banger). At other times, the warm bass or floaty, stacked-up keys (on the title track, for instance) bring a more emotional, human element.

It's a humanised machine music - slow- to mid-paced, almost draggy at times, like a take on the "drug-chug" that the great Andy Weatherall (RIP) pioneered at his A Love From Outer Space night. The vocals - often hesitant, alienated - sound like a human merging with the electronic ether. As we gradually surrender more of our functions and consciousness to the algorithms, what will be left, what will emerge... and how are we supposed to feel about it? "Did you even exist? There is no way to even make sure you were born" ponders the title track.

Killy's vocals switch between Japanese, German and English: Kotoba no Kozui picks up the pace, while the anaesthetised vibe of Slight Fever is a perfect representative of the album's aesthetic. This is music for liminal spaces, outside geography and time. It's a Schroedinger's electro that exists within a series of dualities: the 80s and now; the waking world and the dream; utopia and dystopia.

Are we humanising the machines or are they roboticising us? The answer may be a bleak one, but Killy poses the question intriguingly. 3/5