Fantasy Noises & Perfect Delusions is the 2022 debut atmospheric drum & bass album by the niche artist Deathbrain. The record came out on the Polish drum & bass label SVPACYBERIA and was released on Bandcamp, including in hi-res.
The album sounds light on its feet and easy on the ear. Its tempo hovers just above 140 BPM, noticeably below the speed usually associated with the genre. Fifteen tracks over roughly 45 minutes feels surprisingly dense. They play like brief metaphorical dreams or trance states, flowing softly into one another and merging into one continuous drift. The album catches you with carefully placed hooks and pauses, which is why it passes in one breath, never getting the chance to wear thin.
If atmospheric drum & bass isn’t a genre you know especially well, a little context helps. It’s a softer, airier offshoot of drum & bass: speed and breakbeat still preserve an energetic pulse, but the center of gravity shifts away from aggression and toward melody, harmony, and a sense of space. Much of that spaciousness comes from long reverb tails, which make the music feel deep and enveloping. The music is warm and relaxed, and that atmosphere clearly draws from ambient.
Listening to Fantasy Noises & Perfect Delusions, I kept thinking of Aphex Twin – more specifically, Selected Ambient Works 85–92. Both records are free of the pressure we usually associate with club electronics. What connects them is a soft, fluid texture and a distinctive pulse that nudges you into motion without imposing anything. This is home-listening electronic music, the kind that turns a familiar room into a space for “dance-ambient”. And if you like throwing atmospheric gatherings at home, Fantasy Noises & Perfect Delusions slips into that setting particularly well.
All in all, this is remarkably versatile music. It’s soothing and tender. You can put it on alone in a dark room, collapse onto your bed, and stare at the ceiling. That is one of atmospheric DnB’s defining qualities: it doesn’t switch your mind off completely, but it doesn’t overload it either; it leaves you somewhere between stillness and motion.
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At the same time, if you like having music on in the background while you work at a computer, the album fits that role perfectly too. The breakbeat provides a steady micro-rhythm, almost like a metronome, while the soft harmonies never draw too much attention to themselves. Rhythm and tempo lift you onto a wave of sound, like a surfer, and suddenly you’re hammering out sentences while your feet and shoulders are moving in time. In a sense, it’s almost a literal realization of the old DnB idea of “ride the groove”—moving with it instead of fighting it.
I had this album on while writing this review and kept imagining myself gliding along a calm wave. Whenever I got tired, it didn’t throw me off; it simply carried me along. During those short breaks, I would just dance quietly. The album really is so calming, so gently lulling, that you could easily fall asleep to it.
And while I’d describe the release’s mood as nostalgic and mildly lonely, it still suits an evening with close friends remarkably well. As I said above, Deathbrain never pushes the listener toward club-style dancing, and the album doesn’t even really function as background music for conversation or noisy activity either. Instead, the music creates a rare state of shared solitude, where everyone remains a little alone with themselves while still inhabiting the same emotional space.
In all of this, Deathbrain remains a blurred silhouette himself, much like the figure on the cover. We know almost nothing about his face, his biography, or even his voice in any conventional sense. Across these tracks, you hear a high, probably feminine vocal line, one that’s basically impossible to make out clearly (maybe it’s just a bundle of samples). And on the album cover, there’s an anime-like figure whose gender is just as hard to pin down.
In electronic music, that kind of anonymity is a perfectly familiar practice: it shifts the focus away from the artist’s personality and toward the sound, the effects, and the atmosphere. But does Deathbrain really exist outside his own tracks—does he exist as a figure at all? Probably, and apparently, he’s a pretty decent painter too.
P.S. Special thanks to Yas – the SVPACYBERIA founder, for helping me acquire the limited edition of the album.
