On the first release under her given name, Oakland’s Sally Decker embraces the unknown as an act of radical vulnerability.
Since 2017, the experimental electronic artist and Mills College graduate has released her music on the venerable NNA Tapes label. Her debut album as Multa Nox sought to elicit an emotional response from oozing synths, intimate electroacoustics and largely wordless whispers.
In The Tender Dream steps up the intensity of her mesmerizing concoctions with the piercing strains of feedback – a compositional tool that can only be partially controlled – while also foregrounding Decker’s poetic meditations. With her voice now clearly audible, inviting comparisons to other “emo ambient” artists like Claire Rousay or Lucy Liyou, she reveals the very human longing at the heart of these fragile drones.
Decker describes “In The Tender Dream,” the album’s title track and 10-minute centrepiece, as “a documentation of my evolving understanding of what self-love really is.”
Squeals, chirps and shimmering tones unfold for nearly eight and a half minutes before we hear her admit that “I may have wanted you because you made me feel needed.” Layers of vocals stack up like the muttering evocations of a séance as she obliquely explains how a lack of control can be addictive. In the song’s closing seconds, Decker casts a new spell by becoming her own object of affection: “I want to stare myself down in a tender dream.”
“This song lived for a long time as a performance,” Decker explained in an email statement to Ears to Feed. “The text and tone of the reading went through many variations in the live setting to reflect the current moment for me – in this sense, this was a hard one to be done with in a recorded form.” By fusing multiple vocal recordings with semi-controlled feedback, she was able to create “the contemplative environment in which the voice finds the space to finally emerge.”
“The words speak to multiple experiences in different relationships, the thread being the pain of giving someone else the power of holding this ideal, this dream,” Decker’s statement concludes. “This track is a distillation of multiple years of reflection and work around this, though the process is still unraveling and continuing.”
In The Tender Dream is set for an August 13 release by NNA Tapes.