Anxious and disoriented, a pair of ears weave down the sidewalk in rush hour. A fortunate, random turn around the right corner and they slip through a tear in the fabric of geography and enter a cavernous space, clammy and poorly-lit, true, but a place of rest, where panoramic glimpses collapsed from far-flung points on the compass roll by one after the other.
The dreams recalled on the first track of this album unfold faster and change scenery more often than on most of the suites Will Long and Danielle Baquet-Long composed in their short but intensive time together. This is hardly to say that their hazy, looped aesthetic has been abandoned; rather than a collage, it is more like a mood board of aspiration.
“Collection of Fogs and Lading Clarities” is vintage Celer, a lengthy drone which passes by a temple filled with chanting Nepalese, lifts one foot, then the other off the ground and ascends. “Who Feels Like Me, Who Wants Like Me, Who Doubts Any Good Will Come Of This” follows (though concise in sound, Baquet-Long is wildly verbose in naming things), capturing this flight as an effortless cruise upon rising thermals. It is a singular Celer ambient moment.
Which is possibly only trumped by the closing, twenty-minute vision of Utopia, in which a sweet, flute-like melody slowly emerges in quiet relief against an otherwise rain-heavy, cloudy sky.
In all fairness, Jerome Moncada ought to be listed as collaborator for his beautiful arrangement of Dani´s photography, which makes “Panoramic Dreams” an audio-visual experience several notches above the norm.