Conor C. Ellis is an electronic music artist and designer based in New York. His practice focuses on the transformation of everyday sounds, memory, and careful listening. His work is guided by a love of letting sounds simply be—unfolding in their own time, revealing textures, harmonies, and stories beyond conscious control.

Conor's work is as much an act of listening as one of making. Field recordings are central to his work—from the immersive landscapes of Soft Earth (2019) to the layered architectures of Cutting Out My Shadow (2021), and Dreamless (2022). His records explore sound as a container for memory, shaping delicate collisions between the concrete and the illusory.

Commonly, the hazy and indeterminate quality of ambient music makes it easy to associate with mental states in which the unconscious takes over, directing your attention in patterns novel to your understanding. There's something of a contradiction in the clarity of the connection between ambient and dreams or daydreams, of purposefully entering your own mind and emerging on the other side with mere traces of a map impossible to follow. With Dreamless, Conor C. Ellis seems to suggest we can move on from the labyrinth of the layers of attention into something more akin to an organized archive: everything out of view is not symptomatic, but solely out of focus. The cover art evokes this principle, the transparent leaves of a plant not a ghostly or ethereal absence but a detailed map of their beings; the blurred background, full of vaguely white shapes, is not the domain of symbolic infinity but more simply a field of possibility for clarity.

Ellis composed Dreamless as an impressionistic album of personal memories, filling it with field recordings and drifting electronics that point towards the careful observation of certain moments in life. Lest we forget, impressionism was originally drawn to the latest science of the eye, an approach later subverted by its mingling with the sweeping fantasies of various artists, but it is useful here to recall that it was the sensation of the surface what most mattered in many an impressionist work. "The Wishing Well", the opening track, glows with electronic textures that suggest a room full of water, but the sounds are all cut up, preventing immersion, a collage of aquatic sensations that precludes depth, understood as the looming otherworld of unbound imagination. This wishing well is not here to make us metaphorically lose ourselves to our internal labyrinths, but to ground us, to grasp your full attention and throw it to the here and now, to the contact between your senses and your surroundings. Therein lies the beauty of the superficial.

This is an emotional form of ambient that needs no concept of the unconscious, of an unknowable mass of layers. All it needs is the bodily reaction to remembrance, the point at which we stop perceiving a difference between the memory and the senses themselves. "Protector" and "Every Moment is a Celebration" follow through with the promise of the wishing well, texturizing feelings of well-being without recourse to a sudden loss of self through the shifting of attention. Their ethereal qualities (a distorted singing voice, the joyful noises made by children slowly emerging from the background of the mix, into the forefront), like the leaves of the cover art, map the swells and retreats of how remembering feels like – a warm tug in your belly, a slight pull in the hair at the back of your neck… this dreamlessness is driven, after all, by the precise activity of neurotransmitters.

"Dream Dog" is perhaps the most 'dreamful' track in the album, but the echo of the field recording of a dog's bark, aligned with a crystal-clear quiet piano melody, hints at this not being a stand-in for the dream itself, but the after-effects of a dream, the lingering sensations of a restless night. The following track, "A Lucid Understanding", foregrounds the clarity of the piano playing, set against a low drone that turns into a noisy collage reminiscent of the one found in the wishing well. A voice surges from amidst the electronics, sometimes weak, sometimes strong, but never lost: there is no soundscape here, tied by an unconscious vastness that remakes the world in its image, but a sound-skin, the lucid understanding a bodily impression, stark and powerfully present.

The album ends by affirming that presence in a sort of binary emotional register, sadness and happiness. "I Drew the Sun 1000 Times" bears the distinct weight of a difficult memory, a contradiction in passions whose short focus and development nonetheless leaves little room for free-falling into melancholia; "Mother's Beach" sways with the sweetness of time spent with loved ones, and its equally strong and precise focus prevents the music from swelling into more intense positivity. These controlled, contained pieces showcase the dreamlessness of Ellis' approach, which produces an ambient that is clear-cut, impressionistic, and made for the skin: in accessing a transparent internal archive we perceive memories in ways that make the surface of our bodies brim with sensations and emotions. Open the album, focus, and feel your remembrance. (David Murrieta Flores)

Brooklyn-based composer Conor C. Ellis returns with his second album titled 'Dreamless' – "a celebration of life's many colors". Tender and delicate throughout, 'Dreamless' radiates a warmth unlike any of Ellis's previous output.

Consisting of personal recordings and improvisations from his childhood home, these pieces are like glimpses of special memories. "This album is about finding beauty in both joyful and sad moments," shares Ellis. "I wanted to make something full of love, honesty and emotion." On 'Dreamless', Ellis embellished his trademark abstract electronics and ambient sound design with meandering piano melodies, processed voice and intimate field recordings of markers on paper, his two year old nephew, and natural soundscapes. It's a marked progression in the composer's approach. His direct, almost clinical compositional style was evident on his debut 'Soft Earth' but here, the music is looser, gentler and more poignant.

The track titles reflect Ellis's slightly diaristic approach too, directing one's imagination towards concrete moments in their past; drawing the same picture of a sun over and over again on a piece of paper, dogs barking in the distance as the sun shines through the window panes… Pieces like "Every Moment Is A Celebration", "Dream Dog" or the closing "Mother's Beach" are beautiful piano meditations, "The Wishing Well", "I Drew The Sun 1000 Times" bring to the fore more spectral, abstract textures, while "Protector" and "A Lucid Understanding" are notable for their use of voice. Despite the variety of approaches across its seven tracks, the intimacy and honesty shines through on 'Dreamless' – Conor C. Ellis is closer than ever before.

Words by Adam Badí Donoval

What does it mean to stand on solid ground? I was texting a friend the other day; we were talking about wanting and trying to find a stable life when he said, "I so [much] want to be solid [that] I am adroit at convincing myself I am." That is to say, our projection and will to realize stable footing may be enough to convince us that stability is a reality even when it is not. In a slightly different sense, this is the best way to describe the feelings I have toward Conor C. Ellis's debut album Soft Earth—a record that convinces us of its solidity until it begins to gape open. To me this notion is intimated even in the title: Earth/earth definitely always appears to be solid and stable and reliable, but in actuality it is much more malleable and precarious than we can possibly imagine.

How else do we explain tracks like "Iridescent Collapse"—which I can only describe as a rainscape whose bottom falls out from under it. Cinematically it is as if we are viewing a falling drop of water, then many such drops, then several thousand such drops, as they appear to approach a forest below, but (at the 1:30 mark) the ground drops too, and opens up revealing… nothing. Technically speaking, the track is simply crafted, textually straightforward, and tonally minimal. It begins with a sample of rain under a lone, plaintive, vibrating (or is it glitching? Or is it time-stretched beyond recognition? Or is it simply… wavering?) pair of notes, arrhythmic but repeating. Deeper, darker samples enter (another water source? Or a dragged stone? Or a growl?), then a washing synth chord. Each part increases its intensity until 1:30, when the atmospheric samples cut out and the wash synth's filter is suddenly removed. It's as if the landscape we once saw were a mere curtain that has been brushed aside. A skittering, heavy beat betrays the gravity of this change. We are left wondering how we could have believed what came before. In other words, what begins as a track seated in evoking real, concrete images (perhaps this is indeed musical Imagism, if we consider the sparsity and technique), undoes itself into a piece of formality: just several different synths in a room making… something. The what has been lost, but maybe we come closer to knowing the how and why through that loss.

This battle between the concrete, real, oftentimes environmentally charged images evoked by Ellis's luscious synths and textural samples and the indefinite, cacophonous non-images he sometimes decides to conjure—this battle pervades the whole record, if not within every track, then between contiguous tracks. Consider "Stone Water Light," which begins with what one might conjecture to be a delayed-out sample of tread, which then shifts into a soft sweeping drone—a lake in early winter, perhaps—and then (at 1:00) changes again into… delayed-out samples of metal rods? Or something else just utterly industrial in its eschewal of musicality. And then of course this transitions into the bucolic pastoral, "Sun Pull."

But even if we stand, mouth agape, staring at this wondrous conceptual discord, we are driven to ask what we as listeners are supposed to take from this–what do we enjoy about music that plays with us so capriciously? If Ellis is playing an "Old God," creating an Earth only to flood it, is the locus of our musical pleasure in the antediluvian, Edenic melodies or in the aftermathematical wasteland? Or is it in the act of destruction itself, the moment of obliteration? I get the sense that Ellis is more fond of these liquifying interstices than any tangible space or state of being. And frankly I am too.

Then the soft earth is the ground at the moment it gives way. It is the moment in which every pretense of belief and any knowledge of faith collapses into something—perhaps not truer—but something heretofore unperceived. That said, maybe when a "reality" gives way to the formality of uncreation, something greater occurs: with the knowledge of a form, we can, upon reevaluation (or in this case, relistening), perceive what we once saw as reality more holistically, with a wider mind. This insight is to me at the core of Ellis's work. (Isak McCune)