Michigan-based musician Fred Thomas may have reached the most listeners with the melancholic indie pop of his group Saturday Looks Good To Me, but for those that venture deeper into Thomas' body of work than those sunny, lovestruck songs, his ongoing love of electronics will be no surprise. Bred in part by Michigan's noise scene, the experimental undercurrents that have been part of his style since the beginning were bound to find a digital voice at some point, and indeed, his hard-touring duo City Center was defined by their sampler-mangled loops, Hydropark was pure kosmich redux, and Thomas' present role in indie supergroup Winged Wheel (featuring members of Matchess, Spray Paint, Sonic Youth, and more) is that of the band's Eno figure, routing their sounds through live processing and playing damaged sinewave melodies on a barrage of synths.
Buried even further down is Dream Erosion, a sporadic series of Thomas' synthesizer compositions that's so discrete it feels like a secret. Beginning in 2020 as anxiety therapy, Thomas spent more or less every night recording soft and minimal electronic instrumentals. He quietly released an album under his own name entitled Dream Erosion (Synthesizer Songs) in 2020, and followed in 2022 with Those Days Are Dust, Dream Erosion Pt. II. With literally dozens more unreleased songs in this style, Thomas dropped volumes 3 through 6 on cassette in editions of ten copies each, all of the tapes selling out minutes after they were made available.
This brings us to Dream Erosion Pt. VII, a collection of ten more of Thomas' placid, intentionally spare electronic compositions. Opening with an avant-drone of driving synthesizers, we move between Ann Arbor experimental roots and Detroit pop know-how. Thomas proves his knack for subtle hooks and unexpected key changes, shaping each track with just the right reverb and arpeggiated phrasing. It’s minimalist, but never static. The album exits in shimmering bells and analog tape warble, evoking a collective dream we each almost remember, but can never quite place.
