Kevin Bronson on February 13th, 2018

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Dream System 8, the new collaboration between David Klotz and Erica Elektra, owe their sound to an eBay shopping spree. Klotz, formerly one-half of the indie-pop bands Fonda and People and Stars, went on a vintage keyboard buying binge a couple of years ago. He’s the Emmy Award-winning music editor for television shows such as “Stranger Things,” “Game of Thrones” and “American Horror Story” and got the bug in 2015 when he started working on “Stranger Things’” score. “I loved the sounds that the show’s composers created with synths,” he says. “It was unlike anything I’d heard before in the world of film scoring.”

So besides singer-songwriter Elektra, whose previous solo release came in 2012, his “mates” in Dream System 8 are (gear heads take note) a large assortment of Rolands, Korgs and Yamahas, along with the Crumar Performer, LinnDrum LM-2 and Omnichord System 100. Not surprisingly, the songs on the duo’s album “We Sleep Again” (out Feb. 23 via Minty Fresh) recall many of the artists who crafted their sound with such gear back in the day: Vangelis, the Human League, Tangerine Dream and Duran Duran.

Like much of the pop Klotz co-wrote in his previous projects, DS8’s latest single “Color the Stars” has a wistful but buoyant quality — yes, it is unabashedly starry-eyed. “David wrote it, seemingly overnight, showed it to me, and we recorded it right away,” Elektra says. “I remember asking him what the lyrics were about and he had this whole fantastical and fictional story.” Says Klotz: “I thought the melody was hopeful-sounding, and that I would try and write something lyrically appropriate. The song is about someone who can always see the brighter side of life even though they’ve been painted in a dark, colorless place by someone they love.”

||| Stream: “Color the Stars”

||| Also: Stream “Shine a Little Light” and “It’s All Happening”