With what felt, even to the heartiest among us, like a cruel and endless winter now safely tucked away in our collective memory (for a few months anyway), along comes Dream of Heat, a chilly, occasionally chilling musical evocation of the unfairest season. Montréaler Ida Toninato, who plays baritone sax and synthesizers, and Winnipeg-based Jennifer Thiessen, on viola and synths, originally created the precursor to D of H as a concert piece called Winter[City]Speaks. (On the album, producer Jason Sharp also plays synths.) And indeed, speaking voices—as well as some lovely singing by Thiessen and Toninato — are a prominent ingredient of the music. Over a mournfully descending viola figure and the (synthesized) sound of a distant but persistent arctic wind, the album opens with Thiessen, shivery and desperate, pleading, “I need warmth… I need shelter… l need heat.” On the album’s penultimate and most unsettling track, amid a crowded soundscape of growling, slowly pulsing synth, anxious chanting, scraping noises, and animalistic utterances, Toninato insists repeatedly, in a rhythmic near whisper, “I am… suffocating,” both before and after a ghastly series of screams issues forth from somewhere deep in the mix. Overall, though, the prevailing mood is more one of celestial melancholy or gentle foreboding than panic-stricken claustrophobia, with sax, viola, and voices offering intimations of warmth that contrast nicely with the icier, more ethereal synthetic textures. The seasons are, after all, a handy metaphor for the cycle of life and death, and ultimately Dream of Heat seems to affirm the former.
