Jamie Lidell and Luke Schneider.

If you only know Jamie Lidell as the singer and producer popular from the British soul revival two decades ago, it may seem confusing to find him paired with Luke Schneider, a Nashville pedal steel ace who uses his intricate instrument to shape ambient wonderlands. But before Lidell had hits with Multiply and Jim, he was a founder of exploratory electronics duo Super_Collider and the knob-twiddling, sample-splicing mad scientist who made 2000’s explosive Muddlin Gear. “I’m really glad I didn’t lock myself into being this crazy electronic dude, who can only do this and my brand is that,” he once told The Guardian. “It would have messed with me.”

Lidell moved to Nashville a dozen years ago. After a decade of relative musical inactivity while raising a family and reckoning with neurodivergence, he seems to be rushing back into it now. His 2025 LP, Places of Unknowing, was a slowly unfolding cinematic wonder, Lidell navigating the perils of his mind over orchestral arrangements that suggest Scott Walker’s final triumphs. But it’s his splendid five-track collaboration with Big Ears favorite Schneider, A Companion for the Spaces Between Dreams, that finally brings him to Knoxville. On “New Land,” Lidell wields his facility sculpting chaos as sequencers and beat machines spill out over Schneider’s long tones across 12 unpredictable minutes. And during “The Story of Your Life,” he and Schneider move up and down in tandem, as if riding a slow roller-coaster through retrospective glimpses of regret and joy, longing and acceptance. An exquisite and transportive listen, A Companion for the Spaces Between Dreams is the rendezvous of unexpectedly kindred explorers.

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