There Is No One Else When I Lay Down And Dream is the type of understated album that gently ingrains itself into your subconscious in a manner that I thoroughly enjoy. Yes, there’s pop hooks and interesting production, but ultimately its the rhythmic sense that filters into physical consciousness, bypassing the mind to work directly on the nervous system, like good dance music always does.
Ninca Leece is originally French but now resides in Germany via The Netherlands. Her subtly accented vocals and delivery bring to mind obvious forebears such as Björk (her penchant for elaborate costume in performance reinforcing this link), but the music lies elsewhere. Leece utilises the timbres of German minimalist techno and deep house, but with a variety of light and shade creating a more dynamic mood befitting song-based structures. This tends to stray towards the more overground end of the spectrum like Booka Shade or lesser known luminaries like Pupkullies and Rebecca. So expect to hear lots of tiny shards of sound standing in the place of hi-hats and snares, glitched electronic fragments creating syncopation, repetitive, deep basslines and stray synth whines floating overhead. And, above all, a 4/4 kick pulse which is never obnoxious, but constantly moving. Over the course of 50 odd minutes, the effect is to create a gently pulsing ebb to wash around you and carry you along.
Lyrically, Leece doesn’t stray too far from the sensual, befitting the history of this type of music. “When I touch your skin again/I disappear, disappear/When I smell your skin gain/I surrender, surrender”, she coos in ‘Division’. It’s typical of the entire album and, admittedly, sounds trite on paper. But Leece’s delivery never strays into the tacky, so the lyrics become a reinforcement of the brooding of the music, not a distraction. This is merely heightened when she reverts to her native French on tracks like ‘The Beast’ and ‘Aseptique’. Her gently glitched cover of The Cure’s ‘Lovesong’ fits in perfectly and gives an idea of the musical and lyrical obsessions Leece mines in her own songs.
There Is No One Else When I Lay Down And Dream is not going to break wide open the possibilities for the future of music, but it doesn’t aim to do so. But it does aim to use established formats in order to move you, and does so very successfully, with joyful playfulness.
Adrian Elmer
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