We’re sitting around a glass coffee table that’s been smeared with spill stains from cheap beer and expensive lattes. No one is talking. We’re stoned and music is playing that has absorbed the last drops of each our attention spans. And because of it, we’re content living in a world designed by a man who calls himself Tourist and uses nothing but soundwaves with which to create something much more vivid. Each component of his production feels acutely delineated. There’s no room for error, and in his errorless world, there is room for nothing but independent interpretation and the creative workings of the mind to attempt to make sense of it all. 

 

It’s 2013 and Placid Acid is playing at full volume in the dark, dank smoke hole we call the Dojo. The early 2010’s Dreamwave Golden Era is beginning to take proper hold of the world and Tourist – somewhat of a newcomer – is blowing our fucking minds. Those were the days.

 

And yet, here we are six years later. So much has changed. Some of us are well-traveled, some of us are steadily-employed, and none of us have a room dedicated for smoking pot. But today, Tourist is blowing our fucking minds once again. It’s nice to know music is so fluid – that it wasn’t the era, the situation, or the weed that made Placid Acid so great – that it was simply Tourist, and probably the company of friends with good taste. 

 

Everyday is anything but what its title makes it out to be. It’s the kind of album that, like the recent string of projects from a collective of electronic artists who ran the world’s music scene just a half-decade ago, reminds us all why the rose so quickly, and why they might just do it again. The Dreamwave era which found itself carefully balanced between the ambient and the intense ends of the spectrum, elicited emotion and encompassed, well… the everyday.

 

So, maybe Tourist has a point after all. Something in the music is so relatable and so situationally applicable, that it really is the music of every moment. Its broad breadth of interpretation allows each track to change and adjust with its setting. Specificity is limited and the only thing to define it becomes the memories made while listening to it. And that’s the genius of the stylistically middle-grounded, musically genius collection of electronic composers we’ve confined to the Dreamwave box. 

 

While emotion runs deep and its meaning is more or less indefinable, the artistic motifs driving Everyday are easier to discuss. Artistically, it’s broad. A thesis on the eras Tourist has seen come and go and a grand union of everything he as an artist has indulged in, Everyday is a kind and gentle reminder to fans of electronica just how we got to where we are today. 

 

Its opening track, Awake is expectedly ambient and orchestral, rising through its course into a proper lead-in for what’s to come. Someone Else and Affection take on a similar aesthetic, ambient yet strong and focused in their discourse.  

 

There are tracks like Emily and Violet that utilize a vibrant series of synths and samples à la Slow Magic and Passion Pit to bring out the inner positivist child in each of us. 

 

Other tracks – Apollo and Hearts – are clubby house anthems that would make Deadmau5 proud, while Violet feels altogether more trap-nuanced. 

 

But, the meat of Everyday is an ode to Tourist and his Dreamwave compatriots who granted us the most emotive and delectable moment in electronica history. Love Theme, Pieces, and Gin Under The Sink remind us of Placid Acid, of Tourist and Bondax, Disclosure, Darius, and Crayon, and also give a glimpse – just like Bondax’s 2018 Revolve, Disclosure’s collection of recent singles, and Crayon’s 2018 Post Blue– of just where they might all be heading. 

 

Artistically, it’s broad. 

 

But it also coalesces neatly into yet another innovative project from a producer that has quietly been one of the most important, most influential of the last decade. 

 

It’s odd to think that Everyday might somehow fly under the radar of the international music scene. But, music has changed a lot and tastes have too. Yet, there’s a good chance that this album, amongst the wide collection of other recent and transformative projects from the Dreamwave elite, might return tastes to a new era. And if so, we might have to get the gang together again in some dark, dank smoke hole for a new silent discussion on life soundtracked by a new take from an old favorite.