REVIEW: Courtney Bailey - In Dream

Ambient's latest club-accredited, dolphin-dreaming scion makes her mark

32:15 // October 30th, 2025 // Music From Memory

Hailing from Tokyo and operating from Berlin, Courtney Bailey channels years of experience as a DJ and event coordinator into her debut LP In Dream, an album that diffuses its rave affinities across a highly enticing New Age reverie. These tracks are openly inspired by the Japanese New Ager Dream Dolphin, whose prolific late ‘90s output runs the gamut of breakbeat, trance and acid techno stylings in both ambient and rave contexts, and whose reappraisal as a cult classic status was cemented with the release of Music From Memory’s excellent compilation of her atmospheric work in 2023. Much like Dream Dolphin, Bailey serves up a communion with nature so earnest it borders on New Age rapture, drawing on wispy ambient synthscapes and heavily reverberated Japanese-language narrations. For both artists, these narrations serve a vital grounding role, their personal touch elevating diffuse reveries with the intimate dimensions of an individual voice and, thereby, an invitation to a wider communion.

If In Dream‘s mission statement is simply to preserve the spirit and aesthetics that Dream Dolphin channelled so distinctively, then the album’s first half upholds it so dutifully that you’d be forgiven for taking it as a full tribute. That’s not to be dismissive – the title-track and “Kokoro No Koe” are particularly gorgeous outings by anyone’s standards – but it isn’t until the midway highlight “Under the Water” that Bailey proves her engagement with the form can be original as well as authentic. At once the most atmospheric and most dynamic track, Bailey thoroughly embraces its aqueous brief in a set of disorienting and ultimately immersive steps, flirting with tribal beats to provide a tangible foundation where needed and panning her vocals for maximum haptic impact ーand minimum intelligibility (as if this music demands a Japanophone audience to begin with (lyrics below in case this is presumptuous)).

Under the Water

水の輝き
光の反射が
水の中に写して
不思議な世界見つかれてる
綺麗な光の反射
屈折して光が
私の中に入ってくる
私は浮かんでる
綺麗な屈折の水の中の世界で
光の反射。。。

Under the-
Under the water
Under the water
Under the water

水の輝き （どんな輝き？）
光の反射が　（光の反射）
不思議な世界は見つかれてる（どんな世界？）
屈折した世界

Under the water
Under the water
Under the water

Translation:

The glimmering of water.
As reflections of light
suffuse the water,
you can come upon a new world of wonders.
Those beautiful reflections…
That refracted light
passes inside of me.
I am floating
in an underwater world of beautiful refractions.
Reflections of light…

Under the-
Under the water
Under the water
Under the water

The glimmering of water (what glimmering?)
Reflections of light (reflections of light)
You can come upon a new world of wonders (what sort of world?)
A refracted world.

Under the water
Under the water
Under the water

“Under the Water” lands as one the album’s most creative offerings and its best production showcase, but the following tracks are almost as adventurous, clashing Bailey’s trancelike murmurings with squelching acid in an even balance of New Age and rave nostalgias. These tones are complementary, as they were on so many Dream Dolphin classics, but they also sustain such a dynamic convection that they (and the album as a whole, really) find themselves dragged from ambient’s perennial ‘background’ realm into territory where you’ll need an insistent volume and keenly-trained ears to get the best out of them.

This has an ambivalent upshot. Although Bailey’s engaging production choices are clearly a net strength and her oneiric aesthetics are beautifully realised, the album’s resistance to passive listening inadvertently imposes a tangible ceiling: its tracks are too brisk and self-contained for their own good, and for what they gain in spotlighting numerous inspired contours, they sacrifice in foregoing a more expansive scope.

For want of more elegant critique, what’s the good of ambient music if you can’t get lost in it? Where is the transgalactic bliss-out that, say, the sub-three minutes of “Swept Away” set themselves up for so enticingly? The moment-to-moment interplay on “Like a Heaven” and “Under the Water”’s may reward anyone’s attention, but there’s something bitesized about the whole package that puts a dampener on the wider reverie it teases so often, so excellently. To draw on the most universally applicable of all ambient litmus tests, on attempting to nap this album, I was distressed to find that it had ended before I fell asleep; In Dream, I was not. Even the title-track (to my ears, the number most amenable to drift away with itself) plays within the dimensions of a radio edit where its palette and pacing suggest a wider odyssey.

But what an odyssey it would be! Not to put disproportionate stress on the reasons I all but love this record — it’s a highly welcome palimpsest of the ambient, New Age and dance Dream Dolphin once merged so distinctively, and it many of her most precious qualities even if it doesn’t quite contend with her at her most transcendent. If nothing else, In Dream is a gloriously portable experience that provokes an undeniable yearning for a more expansive sit-down meditation. More of everything, please!

7/10

Further listening:

Dream Dolphin - Atmospheric Healing
Various Artists - Virtual Dreams II: Ambient Explorations In The House & Techno Age, Japan 1993-1999
Tujiko Noriko - Crépuscule I & II
dolphin hospital - 鬱