Music Review: Hunki Dori - Reverie

​   On Reverie, the new album by Hunki Dori, Dorothea Tachler has woven a kaleidoscopic narrative journey through her family life, along with a puzzled array of subway platform conversations and the precious subtleties of the day to day, all swirled into a dreamy electro sound scape that awash these everyday human voices into a sea of jazzy and poetic field like recordings.

   This is no ordinary instrumental album. Here, voices, which are hard to separate, meld into a seamless flow of one thing, yet the layered sounds which wash through them seem to simultaneously complicate and simplify the conversations we can hear slipping through the cracks, in the wall of sound, like light. We know these as everyday, kitchen table conversations. On the song Seoul, we hear a woman's joyous laughter, perhaps a mother, an aunt, and as the saxophone and synthesizer whip like wind through her laughter one can almost imagine the room she is in, light through a kitchen window as it settles on a bowl of fruit. A generation gathered, for a moment in time, in a single place of everyday beauty. 

   There is an almost timeless feel at work on this beautiful record, reminding one of the power of the communal fire, the collective stories of communities and families and neighbors and friends, passed down from generation to generation in the hallowed space of a circle. And what is our world if not all of these things. Increasingly our age sets itself to cultivating an era of amnesia and ambivalence. But on, and in, Reverie, our minds and our hearts sometimes become one, as we root beneath our forgetting for our remembering. Here, here is where we came from and why it matters to rejoice in all of these voices, all these familial and familiar stories, that are ours.

   That beneath everyday laughter, perhaps, is the thing itself. A great and simple joy. How easy to forget what the important things are. But on Reverie one finds it just as easy to remember what truly matters to us after all; family, good conversation, the wide and beautiful dreaming wonder of the world.

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The name of this project is Hunki Dori and the new album is called Reverie, which means daydreaming/journeying in French. Indeed the music is dreamy, and takes you on a journey, or was it just a dream? 

Reverie is the 2nd self-released album of Hunki Dori after Cloud Anthems. The music is layering different instruments and sounds, telling stories by weaved-in field recordings of travels to Dorothea’s family in Korea, NYC and other places. It is an instrumental album though it uses voice like an instrument and you hear voices talking from the field recordings, like people on the New York subway or Dorothea’s family talking and laughing.

It’s featuring Takuya Nakamura (CocoRosie) on trumpet and synthesizer (Yamaha CS 01) and Jay Rodriguez (Groove Collective, Marc Ribot) on flute, bass clarinet and saxophone. Dorothea played guitar(s), bass, violin, piano, autoharp, percussions, flute(s), kalimba, electric organ, steel drum etc and programmed some beats. The album was recorded, mixed and mastered in Brooklyn, NY. 

Fans of Bitchin’ Bajas and Steve Reich and anyone who likes daydreaming will dig this album.


© Al Covelli

Before/besides Hunki Dori, Dorothea played/plays in many different bands in Germany, the USA and Japan since the late 90ies playing genres from classical, avantgarde over indie/shoegaze/singer-songwriter, electronic, reggae, surf to ambient/experimental and she has another project which is the indie band My Favourite Things. 

Dorothea grew up in Germany, was living in NYC for the last 15 years, and resides currently in Berlin. Hunki Dori performed live all over NYC, often times with other space-loving musicians of the New York scene like Paula Henderson (MoistPaula), Smomid, Ken Butler, Jarvis Earnshaw, Chuck Palmer and more. https://hunkidori.bandcamp.com/album/cloud-anthems 

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