REVIEW: SY3 - 梦游 Sleepwalker
Lava lamp music for fish lovers: does it make a splash?
21:14 // March 25th, 2025 // Music From Memory
When SY3 first slipped into my release calendar, I was convinced I was in for a reissue of some apocryphal Sonic Youth spinoff, but no! No no! These folks – all three of them – are a Chinese-American project from LA, and their debut EP 梦游 Sleepwalker will moodlight your dreams and wallpaper any installation you expose to it. Its buoyant downtempo and gauzy stylings are exactly the premium you’d associate with Music From Memory, and running at five tracks at just over 20-minutes, its dimensions are exactly right for a calling card.
Now, as far as the whos/hows/whys are concerned, a little housekeeping is in order: the good people at Music From Memory rep a gold standard in curation and expo, but they may have oversold us here. Read through SY3’s press release and you’ll be expecting a widescreen revival of early ‘00s Cantopop à la Faye Wong and Zhou Xun (both of whose work from that time comes heartily recommended), but the upshot is another story. SY3’s cinematic aspirations coast more on dialled-in cool than melodrama, and vocalist Kelly Guan has far less in common with any Cantopop diva I’ve heard than with the New Age murmurations of MFM shoe-ins Courtney Bailey or Dream Dolphin.
There are commonalities – the group’s downtempo has the same airiness and warmth as anything you’d hear out of turn-of-the-century Hong Kong, and the coy tone Guan takes on “Tell Me” would be likewise at home there – but 梦游 Sleepwalker is far better approached as ‘mood music’ than as pop. (The closest it gets to pop is the lethargic R&B stylings Guan adopts for the dub cruiser “Grace”, which sounds exactly like the Dream Dolphin x Carbon Based Lifeforms collaboration that was never to be, and is by no coincidence my favourite song on the EP.)
If those are the fairest terms to take this release on, if the palette is by and large pristine (anyone partial to aqueous, mid-frequency bliss will have a field day here), then there’s still some accounting to be done for its featherweight impact. Save for “Grace” and the eerie siren-hook that anchors “Tell Me”, these tracks live and fade entirely on how much time you have for the aesthetics at play — and even as someone who identifies as aggressively partial to these, there’s no getting past how perfunctory “PLS” scans in its ‘90s-happy montage of peace signs and incense, or a nagging wish that something more had done with the diffuse narration of the title track.
The reason I’m a little put out by the association with Cantopop is not so much for referential reasons, but because the vast emotional thrust of the Faye Wongs and Zhou Xuns of the world is precisely what’s missing here. This music is hazy, playful, evasively sensuous, and a whole number of qualities that I typically adore in similar projects but amidst all those dreamlike textures and slick production flourishes, it ends up slightly, fatally short of whatever magnetism it takes to come together as a whole package. Put plainly, it sounds shy: shy in a way that makes me very sympathetic to this project’s potential, but not in a way that makes me any more likely to return to most of these tracks.
So them’s the breaks — and you pronounce the band name as sigh. Nice. Cross your paws they give us something a little more memorable to pin it to next time, and don’t set too much store in my reservations. I took a similar standpoint when I covered Courtney Bailey’s debut and that record (which scratches a similar itch to this EP) ended up eschewing my critiques of slightness by filling all my free hours with bliss disproportionate to my early estimations of its substance. Will SY3 do the same? Who knows, but I’ll certainly be watching their page.
6.5/10 Further listening: Yoshinori Sunahara - Take Off and Landing Dream Dolphin - Gaia: Selected Ambient & Downtempo Works (1996-2003) Courtney Bailey - In Dream Zhou Xun - Ou yu Faye Wong - To Love