Jam City is a fella who made a record called Classical Curves which is widely heralded as very good and one of the decade's most influential pieces of electronic music. I've always found it pretty boring, and no one seems interested in explaining its importance in even remotely legible terms. A few years later, Jam City made Dream a Garden, a highly-anticipated and quickly forgotten left turn of a follow-up that saw him veer away from club bangers for nerds and plunge headlong into, like, funky guitar-based dream pop shit with vocals best described as ill-advised. It's great. Dream a Garden was the first album out of the Night Slugs/Fade to Mind camp to transcend the extraordinarily embarrassing era of this Chinese-language cover of Prince/Sinaed O'Connor's Nothing Compares 2 U is a (1) meaningful (2) political statement that (3) the artist is qualified to make and (4) the listener is qualified to interpret (with extreme deference) and into actual truths like and not so long ago / I was a child with a computer. It's full of cool, blurry sounds, seemingly unconcerned with appearing ironically immersed or removed from its inspirations. In other words, it sounds like something made without any particular intent, and A Walk Down Chapel remains one of my favorite songs ever.

Anyway, I assume that to dream a garden is to believe the above for years and then find out that actually, the album was accompanied by a weird statement, that there is a review of it containing the clause to bring this back a bit to the critique of capitalist society as a schizo-culture, and that, you know what, that old protest sign about bombing for peace might just apply to writing about music as well.

Highlights: A Walk Down Chapel, Today, Proud