Willow Skye-Biggs - Dreams In Suspension (2024)

"'Dreams In Suspension' was developed slowly over the past 3 or so years. It began as the audio aspect of a video art collaboration that never quite materialized. Like that project I found other aspects of my life struggling to move forward in the ways I had envisioned. I have, since 2020, developed a number of chronic conditions from several Covid infections, causing me to lose my main sources of income and my ability to hyper fixate or exert myself for the extended periods of time my music work has generally required. After years of slow recovery, I am realizing I have no choice but to adapt. I realized one day that these tracks could stand alone without the video components. The title reflects a theme of dreams, ideas, fantasies, goals, and potential paths that exist somewhere but have not, for whatever reasons, materialized into this reality. They instead are contained, swirling and simmering. They must exist, if not tangibly here, then elsewhere. I picture them like glass orbs filled with gaseous starry substances that are sitting high up on some wizard goddess’s shelf in one of the worlds that overlays ours.

My interest, structurally, at the moment is in work that doesn't have a beginning, middle, or ending. I am exhausted and don’t care about a cohesive narrative right now. These pieces, for me, are attempts to freeze time, to hold a specific moment, a feeling, in stasis so it can be explored from various angles, and felt continuously.

These tracks are just small glimpses into something.

I have been primarily focused on developing projects in film over the past 4 years. This work, manifested in 4 short films and a medium length film, has forced me to confront time and structure in a way I hadn't with music in a while. There is something special you can do with music that is difficult to do in other mediums. This study in composition involves attempts at a "non-time", even in-so-much as the work is necessarily time-based. Slowing time, exploring time, feeling time, these are things that I am curious about.

So much of ambient music can be about a passive listening experience, which is intriguing, but I have always been interested in engaging the genre as a very deliberate and active experience. It is, to me, an exercise in focusing on a particular moment and tracing that moment consciously, which creates temporal contrasts, shadows and reflections – in that way seeing the world in a new way, being more aware of the present and more aware of what does and does not exist here. I wonder about emotions, how they intersect our reality and affect the way we experience it. These are things I think about." -WSB

"Dreams In Suspension" is a work of subtle depth and beauty. It can continue to reveal itself over repeat listens, in accordance with the listener's desire to dive deeper. This is Willow's eighth release on Inner Islands and the first physical release under her own name, following releases as Sabriel's Orb and Stag Hare