Birds Sing to Me in My Dreams – all the stores are closed (2026) – Album Review

Album: Birds Sing to Me in My Dreams

Artist: all the stores are closed

Release Date: March 6, 2026

One of my biggest fears in running this website is accidentally promoting someone who turns out to be problematic. Seriously, it weighs heavily on my mind when I write something about a label or a musician, and then later find out that they’re problematic/racist/conservative. The thought of amplifying their energy makes my stomach turn. However, with an all the stores are closed release, I can breathe a lot easier. I can put my head on my pillow at night knowing he is ready to go to the mattresses and help destroy fascism, which, frankly, is the minimum I’m looking for in the musicians or labels I write about. It also helps that his music is fucking awesome.

This album is hard to classify, which of course, makes me like it even more. There are definitely strobes of dark ambient wafting through its DNA. That sentence was a deliberate attempt to describe how this album is coming across. Does that need to be said? Also, he does field recordings right. The sampled material is not just scenery taped onto the wall. He samples something and actually does something with it as opposed to adding it as another single layer to his music. The record literally begins with a murder of crows echoing in the distance, their calls slowly bit-crushed into some deep, liquid melody.

I’ve seen Jason Morales, aka all the stores are closed, play a number of times live – and almost all iterations of his live performances have been percussive in nature. Like, he’s a drummer. I’ve known a lot of drummers in my life that, when it comes to making music, were drummers first and everything else was a distant second. Jason has a wider ear. You can hear the drummer in him, absolutely, but the rhythm serves the environment rather than dominating it. His percussive instinct becomes a way a herding method of organizing the atmosphere in a way that it gives the fog a skeleton.

It’s a brief album, but it has just about everything you could want from local, experimental music. Ambience, thrashing dub beats, industrial didgeridoo (that’s what I’m hearing), hearty lofi beats and then these crushed melodies start panning through the mix, warped and radiant, like little scraps of beauty trying to emerge in tact from the machine that made them. Just a radiant euphony from someone I know is ready for the revolution.

Birds Sing to Me in My Dreams is exactly the kind of release that reminds me why knowing the mind behind the madness personally, is so much more fulfilling in the end. Great record.