The mysterious duo of Erik K Skodvin and Otto A Totland occupied a peculiar space in the midst of those nights. There was something nostalgic, something phantom, something deeply personal lingering in the periphery of my mind when the music of Pale Ravine rose into the midnight air, like a dense incense in an undisturbed and stale mind. This was a space that I began to describe as noir-fi. A space where a faint memory drifted somewhere between dusk and dawn, where old film reels unspooled across the walls of an abandoned theatre of my soul, and the air hummed with the sound of forgotten dreams. In that liminal space between presence and absence, between the click of the mind’s projector and the slow decay of light, I found comfort, solace, and peace. I found home.
On Pale Ravine, the duo didn’t just compose beautiful music. They excavated old fragments, unearthing from the dust a lonely piano, unscratching from the strings the cello’s sighs. The phrases emerged and floated, suspended in their anti-gravitational force, restrained, elegiac, and cinematic. Even now, two decades later, it remains one of the defining statements of that year. For me, this marks not just an album, but a specific place in time. A hushed and ghostly landscape where my memories still dwell, and which I visit when I’m able, when I am strong enough to travel back in time.
It’s been exactly 20 years since its release today, November 7th 2025, as Erik and Otto exhume this particular space and time from their archives. While going through the source material appearing on Pale Ravine, they found samples and field recordings that had never been used on the original album. Hydrating pieces with a ghostly echo of Pale Ravine, this two-piece EP, titled after the mystical Lucy, is more than a follow-up to its predecessor from another era. It’s a key to a door that opens up the magic that lies just beyond our reach. If only we are brave enough to step right in, if only time were truly separating moments, if only music had the power to transport… of course it does… of course it will… So let us lose ourselves before we can be found.
Maintaining one side in the past and one in the present, with samples originating in one era and production values of another, Lucy’s Dream is a reverie that deserves your full attention for truly active listening when you’re present, and semi-conscious drift between those moments, when memories arise and jerk you wide awake. It’s like a soporific potion that you drink to bridge the decades. It’s like an elegy for moments yet to come, when in another decade we’ll look back, and read these words, and listen to this music, and then recall that certain texture of this time. “Ah,” I will think, “those were the days… those were the treasured moments.”
