Wistful chords shrouded in cosy electronic shoegaze polish the pearlescent shine of times past

It’s easy to be caught up in the motions if you discover monotonous days are sailing by in a melancholy haze. Contemplating your journey in a moment of remembrance can help to bring you into the present moment – a revelling in a still moment of reminiscence. ▲STR▲L TRI▲NGLEISM’s gentle dreamy electronic fiddling mired in swirling unkempt acoustics captures just this, paying tribute to the heady feeling when one uses remembrance as a balm for the soul.

A Blue Sky Memorial is a soothing stroll conjuring “what once was and never will be again”, as the artist puts it. It flourishes with antique tape hiss and mellow dream-pop chords cradling precious singular memories. The artist keeps things brief at 20 minutes – the landscape of reminiscence can be alluring and unending. ▲STR▲L TRI▲NGLEISM’s auditory pendulum oscillates from Geotic’s bedroom guitar noodling to Sweet Trip’s lustrous ambient pop and even to Slowdive’s spacious, scintillating soundscapes. These musical fingerprints blend into a novel form of electronic shoegaze, one that is softly beat-driven and manifests pining nostalgia.

Faint whispers emerge during the opening licks of A Headful Of Clouds, the words hard to decipher as if processed as a scratchy voice memo in the mind. The soft-spoken voice that appears is angelic, its mannerly, intimate cadence conveys a moment of rumination.

Numbgaze is the initial engulfing of this meditative state, where the mind – riddled with worries – is allowed to decompress. The uniquely dreamy shoegazing sound first faintly emerges through chipper synthesisers. Elongated waves wash over the ears not in an ordinarily staggering manner, but as a divine embrace underscoring cheery reminiscences.

Vibrating with monolithic, sweeping guitar feedback, Floating is well-named, roaring with the incessant electric swirls like cycling through each memory coming back. The abstract, bodiless voice from earlier A Blue Sky Memorial’s opening track comes into view amid the misty noise, as the words “my dream” airily drift through the ether.

The preceding guitar-driven styles coalesce into the upbeat Blue Sky Sprites, adopting swirling electric riffage that uniquely sits beneath tinny electronics. An explicit display of this dreamy electro-shoegaze, its thick, clattering percussion paves the way to the phantasmal repetition of the word “dream”, once again. In any other project, this would be tantamount to mindless repetition. But the atmosphere here is too strong, too soupy and ephemeral to feel cliche. Swaying, groovy kickdrums signal nothing but kicking back and cooling off to the thought of the more enjoyable, ebullient past. Memory as a dream.

This simmering down lends itself to a sober, sombre coda that drifts into Longing, a contemplative bookend circling back to A Blue Sky Memorial’s introductory chalky-sounding acoustics. The distant, melancholic harmonies are evocative of any cut from Slowdive’s sparse, near post-rock of their final ‘90s record Pygmalion. “This is the most beautiful dream I’ve ever had” can be parsed – the only sentence wholly legible during the entire album. Then, its cushioning musical layering peters out to a fuzzy haze.

Woken up once more, the patient, swirling reminiscence slows to a halt – it’s time to go back to reality. The avenues ▲STR▲L TRI▲NGLEISM has taken to soothe – simple ambient noodling melded with delicate electronica sweeps – go some way to reifying electronic shoegaze’s beauty. In turn, the body has been eased, now no longer as perturbed as it once was thanks to the genre’s gorgeous lulling. Still, if dreaming of fond memories could relieve pain and bring your soul home like this EP does, wouldn’t you love to be there forever?