Dummy offer up a pastel-hued escape fantasy on do you love the color of the sky?

In the prologue to David Toop’s excellent 1995 book Ocean Of Sound; a freewheeling history of ambient music, the author comes up with a doozy of a sentence: “as the world has moved towards becoming an information ocean, so music has become immersive. Listeners float in that ocean; musicians have become virtual travellers.” Toop was attempting to capture the mood of the fluid and globalised postmodern era in which he was writing. It feels apt, however, to use this same sentence with regard to Dummy, a band whose oeuvre so far feels like both an homage to and a subversion of this era of music. Perhaps the best lens through which to view the LA-based band's fourth album do you love the color of the sky? is a ‘what if’-style thought experiment. These ten vibrant, impressionistic tracks imagine an alternative present, using the post-rock of Seefeel, the liquid d&b of LTJ Bukem, and the chillout pop of Morcheeba as the meeting point from which its timeline branches off. The album’s raw materials are strictly of this era: drum machines, swirling synths, ethereal vocals. However, Dummy do a compelling job of bending this mood-scape to suit their own ambitions, crafting a dreamlike midd...