“It destroys me every day”
Truly a “Treasury of Reveries,” as one song here is aptly titled, Knife Is But A Dream is the latest album by Tony Jay, aka Michael Ramos. Jointly released by Bay Area labels Paisley Shirt and Slumberland as well as Japan’s Galaxy Train, the lo-fi endeavor was entirely composed and recorded at home by Ramos alone. Well, alone with his cat Penny going “through a time of delicate health.” You probably wouldn’t know it, but Penny provides guitar muting, keyboard playing, and backup vocals on a few tracks.
One of those bright lights in the Bay Area indie music constellation, Ramos also performs with Flowertown and Al Harper, and recently collaborated with Chime School on their album The Boy Who Ran the Paisley Hotel. So it may come as no surprise that the sounds here fit neatly into our local fog pop scene—melancholy, sedate, mellow strumming rumination. Amid the sung pieces, instrumentals (“Doubtfully Yours”, “The Softest String”) fade in and out like apparitions, reinforcing the work as some sort of lost film depicting not just people and relationships, but landscapes, lifeless things, the passing weather.
