Full of spaced-out sound effects, and making no concessions to conventional song structure, Canyon’s debut LP Keep Your Dreams is best described as a trip (light show and chemical refreshment optional).

Over 11 long tracks, the Perth-raised, now Sydney-based Ryan Grieve and Leo Thomson thread together a post-rave library’s worth of slow-rolling chillout-room rhythms, referencing everything from dub to Krautrock along the way. The pair ply their dubby squiggles, electronic bubblebaths and trippy soundbites to drop little shiver-inducing melodic runs like it’s no big deal. The effect is never to surprise or to subdue the listener, but to touch and placate a very deep and primal need that you didn’t know you had.

Keep Your Dreams’s tunes don’t really explode so much as they unfurl. Synthetic washes of sound undulate with electricity as tempos speed up and slow down with calculated precision, creating an atmosphere that relies more on how the synths and drum machines change from one movement to the next rather than on familiar melodies or lyrics.

Because of this, songs are sometimes hard to pick out and identify, and it’s clear Canyons want the listener to treat the work as an album, as opposed to a collection of 11 separate tracks that could be skimmed over or skipped. Getting to a section of “proper” vocals and catchy electro-pop beats requires patience, however, as sometimes the only thing for the listener to take in are electronically programmed drums, alien-like sounds, and spacious guitars that seem to be stretched across an empty night sky.

Canyons - Blue Snakes by modularpeople

The longest track on Keep Your Dreams is ‘Blue Snakes’, arguably the “hardest” song on the album. And yet, strangely, the metallic breakbeat that pulses under the entire song doesn’t really want to make you dance, it wants to hypnotise you. The beat is gorgeously thick and pulsating, but clouds of odd synth noises keep wafting over, obscuring your view.

Records like Keep Your Dreams usually get filed into the wayward category of “intelligent dance music”, but that’s not quite right here. Sure, it’s gorgeous and hypnotic – more about beats than songs – but it’s also immersive in an old-school way; a record for people with enough free time (or a long enough commute) to lose themselves in its 50 minutes. With its dramatically orchestrated peaks and valleys, Keep Your Dreams is an ambitious, acid-tinged, ambient landscape that’s designed to melt your mind till it drips all over the couch you’ve sunk into.

by Jen Peterson-Ward