As one half of Barn Owl, Bay Area experimental guitarist Evan Caminiti works in brooding and gloomy tones, creating doom metal out of equal parts spectral exploration and end-times anxiety. With his solo work, however, Caminiti has extracted much of the dread that goes into Barn Owl's paranoid metallic drones, opting instead for a more soundtracky breed of guitar sprawl. While early solo albums existed in a turbulent twilight somewhere between Brian Eno's moodiest and My Bloody Valentine's gothiest moments, the guitarist has taken a turn for the nocturnal beginning with Night Dust (also released in 2012), with his songs reaching not for the blackness-of-the-soul doom that informs Barn Owl's wailing walls of sound, but for the aural embodiment of dreams, sleep, and all things hidden deep in the night. The seven darkly glowing instrumental tracks that make up Dreamless Sleep were the result of experiments with cassette four-track and endless processing of those tapes. The layers of guitar tones on "Symmetry" range from otherworldly synth-like waves to brittle high-pitched fuzz, and the added components of tape hiss and warble give the song a detached, mystical feel. This distant, drowning sound brings to mind the best moments of Flying Saucer Attack and David Pearce's feedback-laden nighttime atmospheres, while Caminiti's more traditional distorted leads on "Bright Midnight" recall both Robert Fripp and Neu!/Harmonia guitarist Michael Rother's meticulously thoughtful soloing and direct-input tones. While Dreamless Sleep can sometimes hint at ominous undercurrents (as on the scratchy "Veiled Prayers"), Caminiti's foreboding visions never grow into full-on nightmares. Instead, the album has perfectly captured the atmosphere of an uneasy lucid dream, a feeling both disconnected and urgent at once. The mood is thick and cloaking, and the album represents a continuing development toward the best and most captivating material of Caminiti's expansive body of work. ~ Fred Thomas
