Berke­ley-based artist Jen­ny Gille­spie Mason, who records under the name Ship Says Om, invites lis­ten­ers into her serene and intro­spec­tive world with her new release, Dream Jour­nal. The six-track col­lec­tion takes the lis­ten­er through ambi­ent folk, shaman­ic rhythms, and Celtic-tinged melodies.

Each piece drifts through an evolv­ing land­scape of tone and emo­tion. The instru­men­ta­tion cre­ate a sound­scape that feels like a qui­et refuge in a world full of noise. Dream Jour­nal is a ten­der, immer­sive expe­ri­ence, best enjoyed in still moments when you can let its calm­ing warmth set­tle over you – and lis­ten­ing through head­phones makes it eas­i­er to pick out intri­cate, frag­ment­ed ele­ments such as found sounds from her home (children’s voic­es, birds, wind, her dog scratch­ing at the door), and sam­ples sourced from the Free Sound library. The first track Just A Lit­tle Walk is a par­tic­u­lar­ly calm­ing and nour­ish­ing track with its mys­ti­cal open­ing, sounds like rain pat­ter­ing and a sooth­ing bass line. 

Jen­ny describes the record as “a mini jour­nal of the dream state I found myself in dur­ing the mak­ing of the songs,” draw­ing on her expe­ri­ences as both a moth­er and a stu­dent of Inte­gral Yoga, which informs her approach to music as an offer­ing rather than an act of ego.

Dream Jour­nal was record­ed and mixed by Bijan Shar­i­fi in Berke­ley. Its sound world recalls artists like Four Tet, Julian­na Bar­wick, and Grouper, while main­tain­ing a dis­tinct sense of per­son­al mythol­o­gy root­ed in Mason’s Celtic her­itage and shaman­ic fascinations. 

EP Dream Jour­nal by Ship Says Om released 31 October