Toronto composer/cellist Nick Storring’s My Magic Dreams Have Lost Their Spell is his sixth solo release. Solo, but containing multitudes of instruments—all of which he performs himself–and, consequently, of sonorities. The inspiration for the album is the music of Roberta Flack, but any relation between the music on this album and Flack’s music is obliquely allusive and filtered through Storring’s own sensibilities, which here show themselves to be romantic, inward-gazing, and lushly cinematic. Listening to the album is like listening to the soundtrack to a film set in an imaginary landscape: vivid, slightly hallucinatory, and receding to a point just at the edge of perception. Although Storring’s cello is most often the central voice here, the sheer variety of other instruments carefully layered into the mix and the rich range of sound colors they bring are integral to the effective realization of the music’s emotional spectrum and strange lability. Unsettingly beautiful.
Daniel Barbiero
Avant Music News 