Naomi Oliver - Dream Transcriptions (Woven Eye Propaganda)
The cover tells you most of what you need to know: a real CD dragged through a scanner, its surface stretched into streaks of colour and smeared into something else. It's a fitting image for Naomi Oliver's fourth release, and her first on Woven Eye Propaganda - an ambient album about media decaying, and about what's left when the signal breaks down. The error in the cover image is made by hand rather than a digital effect, a small statement of method from a self-described "lo-fi enthusiast and error artist."
Oliver’s practice spans video, glitch and sound, often mixing visuals live and singing through synths, using cassette tape, static, feedback, original sound, found audio, and corrupted imagery. Influenced by 70s and 80s New Age, psychedelia, glitch, code art, digital signal artifacting, and 60s to 80s b-movies, the digital glitches here are bathed in analogue tape processing so errors feel warm rather than clinical. The surface noise has the comfort of vinyl crackle or a low fire burning in the next room, with wordless, half-formed vocals surfacing like distant outer-space transmissions.
Oliver is a Blue Mountains artist, and the place runs through the record. The label's notes describe the landscape's "intimate hostility," matching my own childhood memories of wandering the scrub in the ravine behind my grandmother's house: awed by its scale, yet aware of its danger as a place where you can lose your bearings and the bush doesn't care if you find your way back. Dream Transcriptions carries that same tension in its sound - teetering between serene and menacing, as if an error is never far from the surface. The mountains are also Darug and Gundungurra Country, a place with a history far older than any record made there.
The opening track, Woodgrain, brings the mountains closest, built from cicada samples, fridge hum, looped soft vocals, and cigar box guitar. The guitar strums coherently but out of time, while the domestic fridge hum sits under the insects like a second kind of nature. Geokinesis is smaller and stranger, with tiny tectonic plates flickering in cellular patterns like glass marbles across a floor.
From there, the album becomes more immersive: Ascent travels weightlessly between speakers, while its dark mirror The Fall is half-submerged in flowing water with voices drifting up like a call from a drowned radio. Bestiary settles into soft, warm meditation drones with a hypnotic top layer that leaves you asking whether it's a vocal or a machine oscillating. That ambiguity is the heart of the record, complete with low growls evoking local bush legends like the Blue Mountains Yowie or Lithgow Panther.
Synthetic wind drifts in and out of Long Gone like weather in a digital space alongside metallic gusts and distant space communication. Towards the end, Slow Vortex applies a dragging pull that never quickens nor lets go. Twelve, Midnight closes the record as the mood lifts into more hopeful chords and drones. Here, the narration is inaudible, tape slips, and high frequencies cut off and drift back like a lost signal until the hypnagogic drift stops you from trying to name anything at all. The inaudible narration on Twelve, Midnight is part of the point, but it may frustrate listeners who want something to hold onto.
Nothing sits still in this record. Textures surface, circle, and fade with depth and distance, while tape processing blurs the edges between digital and analogue layers, making headphones the ideal way in. The mix is the mechanism: it makes sounds behave the way memories do. Cicadas, a guitar from the next valley, or a voice under water surface from the static and dissolve before they can be named, much like my memory of the ravine, wonder and fear knotted together and never quite in focus. Oliver builds with that haze rather than polishing it away.
The album's title does a lot of work: a transcription copies something from one medium to another, always losing something in the move. Dreams resist capture, so each track feels like an abstraction of a dream, an attempt to write down or recall what can't be held. The errors aren't failures of the process but evidence of it. Oliver never tries to fix the loss, making decay feel tender without removing its danger. Its stillness can occasionally blur one piece into the next, but that haze is the point. Warm, strange, and deeply absorbing, Dream Transcriptions is a liminal album for very late nights, long train rides, and the slow drift into sleep. It rewards repeat listens. Highly recommended.
Mastered by Kieran at Sound Kontrol, Dream Transcriptions was released on September 28, 2026, on Woven Eye Propaganda.
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