Tom Beedham

Chuck Blazevic and Alice Hansen’s sample-based dream pop project You’ll Never Get To Heaven performing at The Silver Dollar for Wavelength Music Festival on Feb. 13, 2014. Photo by Tom Beedham

One might not expect to find purveyors of a particularly narcoleptic dream pop—a label once typified by guitar music and its effect pedal-oriented (and derisively labeled) “shoegazing” forebears—to make a point of deploying sampled material in it’s enchantments, but partners Alice Hansen and Chuck Blazevic have figured out a way to make a gig of relying on that technology almost exclusively.

Across the partners’ material, the chilly downtempo beats and tone washes that Blazevic spends the sets eliciting from his sampling machines are enough to carry you off to another plane of awareness. Less consistently present (though always welcome), Hansen’s atmospheric vocals aren’t held back and “buried” by any genre tendencies, but instead emerge from Blazevic’s impressionistic sound paintings, bringing listeners back down to earth. And considering the pair were tasked with opening the first night of a four-night festival (and effectually WL14 as a whole), it was easy to appreciate an act that sedated its listeners without charging them to reach for their pillows.

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Originally published by Aesthetic Magazine.