Stella Z – Thunder In The Sky Dreaming
Stella Z announces Thunder Is the Sky Dreaming, her new eight-track mini-album exploring the intensely vivid world of lucid dreaming. Stella is a composer, producer and DJ currently based in London, but originally from the Chinese province of Fujian – where she grew up on Mandarin and Cantonese pop and post-punk. Stella’s music often draws on her Chinese roots not just for inspiration, but as source material: a key part of her process is collecting field recordings when she returns home, then building releases around her finds.
On Thunder Is the Sky Dreaming, Stella also leans heavily on her experiences of lucid dreaming, weaving it into her practice. As Stella explains, “I dream almost every single night. With lucid dreaming, sometimes it becomes a dream within a dream, a trap I can’t quite wake from. I can even smell things in certain dreams. These intensely sensory dreams seriously disrupt my sleep. I tried to cure it. Chinese medicine, brain training, all sorts of things. Nothing really worked. So this project is about finally accepting it as part of my body.”
“Every night is an adventure”, she continues. “Time travel, the joy of reunion, heartbreak, regrets, little hints for real life. I can direct my dreams in the way I want. I now have a whole box of made-up stories in my brain, with people, places, sounds and plots that never happened, but somehow feel familiar and remembered. Now I’ve started looking forward to every night’s dream.”
Other inspirations for the project came from experimental film and performance. Composer and vocalist Meredith Monk was a key reference point, particularly her pioneering use of the voice across film, theatre and dance, while Stella also cites 1940s avant-garde cinema and the work of female surrealist painters and writers: “think Remedios Varo wanders into Maya Deren’s ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’, somewhere in the dreaming forests of Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Word for World Is Forest’.”
Listen to Thunder Is the Sky Dreaming and these references make perfect sense. A melancholy, longing record made for lonely late nights, it feels above all like getting lost. It’s also immediately replayable, revealing new details and layers with multiple listens.
The release closes with a rare remix by one of the world’s most celebrated drummers, Valentina Magaletti. A core member of Holy Tongue and Moin and a collaborator with everybody from Thurston Moore to upsammy, Valentina has been an inspiration for Stella for several years now.
“Every year for the past few years”, Stella explains, “I’ve gone to Valentina’s residency at Cafe OTO, which has happened to fall on my birthday. It started as a coincidence, became a little birthday ritual, and is now one of the most inspiring days of the year for me. Having Valentina remix one of my tracks feels like a very special full-circle moment!”
Stella has released two albums to date: 2023’s In the Woods, Will Be Late and Fig, last year’s contribution to the celebrated Music to Watch Seeds Grow By series. She has performed live at festivals such as Watching Trees and Abrupt, while also DJing for tastemakers like Fold, Chunyou Festival and Field Maneuvers.
Thunder Is the Sky Dreaming marks the third and final release from the CDR Pathways 2026 cohort, now in its second year.
Thunder Is the Sky Dreaming lands 19 November 2026 via CDR.
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