That Wasn't A Dream

The hesitation to call the liminal, jazz-like blobs of sound on *That Wasn’t a Dream* “ambient music” comes down to detail: Anything so precise and obviously intentional requires—or at least rewards—a little more engagement. Palladino is a fretless bass player with a mile-long resume that includes D’Angelo, Adele, and The Who; Mills is a guitarist and producer whose subtle experimentalism has made him in demand across the underground and mainstream both as a session and live player (Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan) and a producer (Perfume Genius, Japanese Breakfast). Together, they bridge the polite weirdness of fusion and smooth jazz with the hybrids of newer labels like International Anthem, conjuring micro-bits of bossa nova (“I Laugh in the Mouth of the Lion”), funk (“Taka”), and pastoral folk (“That Was a Dream”) that unspool like hold music for interdimensional phone calls—the background, made foreground.

On their second record together, Mills and Palladino strip away all excess, building hushed, hypnotic grooves out of bass and fretless baritone guitar, and cushioning it all in copious empty space.