Bill Wells – Dreams ’24 / ’25

Bill Wells, a Scottish solitary, apparently develops as lively an imagination in sleep as he does across his broad musical practice. A playful skewedness connects his band projects, such as the National Jazz Trio of Scotland, with shorter-term collaborations, including with musicians such as Stefan Schneider, Aidan Moffat and Isobel Campbell. Now he lets fans of his idiosyncratic yet accessible work share in dreams he captured after waking. It is hardly surprising that many of these fragments sound fleeting, not quite of this world.

In just 25 minutes, Wells fits in 21 tracks. On the A-side, »Dreams 2024«, Norman Blake – of Teenage Fanclub fame – lends his voice to the surreal miniatures; on the B-side, it is the northern English musician Aby Vulliamy who gives the dreams from 2025 an even more suspended, intimate quality. Many of the miniatures are shorter than a minute; only »Anybody There_What Am I Afraid Of« breaks the two-minute mark: a track that does not merely sketch an idea, but tells a small story through sound. At the start, unsettling ambient sounds conjure a nightmarish atmosphere, which soon dissolves into swaying comfort. Despite the spirit of experimentation contained in the pieces, some – hardly surprising, given their context of origin – recall wonderfully lulling lullabies, such as the melodically clattering »Beautiful Dreams«.