Some anonymous electronic musicians, like Burial or the dub-techno artists on Chain Reaction, took a step back from the spotlight in service of letting their work stand on its own. But this is an album that’s apparently about the artist’s double life, and the questions that are bound to be at the forefront of any curious listener’s mind go unaddressed.
The closest thing we get to an answer to how the artist feels about her double life can be found in the music itself, whose Disneyfied, occasionally GAS-like grandeur is streaked with ambivalence. Like Klein’s last album, the fantastic sleep with a cane, much of the album is taken up by string samples that hover in the stereo field like a low-hanging fog. The most impressive example is “siren reloaded,” a collaboration with arranger Sasha Scott and the London Sinfonietta. The rich sound of the orchestra makes for a great contrast with the intractable and drifting way Klein composes; listening without any further information, you might think you were listening to a time-stretched sample.
Yet other tracks are so crudely rendered it’s hard to imagine a reason anyone would want to listen to them without some deeper background. The four and a half minutes of opener “Forever Yours,” in which Klein seems to be rummaging through a box of cheapo instruments and blowing willy-nilly on whistles and toy harmonicas, might represent the same kind of comforting regression towards childhood required to still believe in Disney-princess fantasies as an adult. But that doesn’t make it any easier to sit through, and you might feel a little ridiculous willing your brain to reach for a context the artist is too slippery to provide.
The embrace of Bandcamp during the pandemic led to a proliferation of albums, EPs, and tapes whose intention was less to be great than to prop up an artist’s livelihood while also providing a snapshot of how they were feeling at that moment in time. These releases were often filled with field recordings and improvisations, prioritizing the glimpse into the artist’s mind over the rigors of craft. my own fairytale falls in this emo-ambient tradition, but the stakes seem much bigger than the ambivalent sketches that take up most of this album’s runtime. Listening to these dense, reticent tracks, I’m left with a feeling of being shut out—like talking to someone who obviously has something on their mind, but who would rather wait for you to guess that something’s wrong than burden you with their problems.
