Photo courtesy of Drag City

Originally released in 2000 on Sub Pop, Damon and Naomi With Ghost gets the reissue treatment this month via Drag City and we’re thinking too, that it’s time to revisit the dream pop duo’s collaboration with Japanese experimental rock act Ghost. This one-off “experiment” sounds melodic, dreamy and textural, with Ghost’s contribution mainly lying in the form of adding complex rhythmic patterns and the use of stop-time on songs like “The New World” and “Don’t Forget.”

The set was banged out over the course of a few days in Damon and Naomi’s apartment during the last week of December 1999. “I hear the sound of friends working together,” Damon recalls. “On New Year’s Eve itself, we had a lot of champagne and Ghost all got fantastically, ridiculously drunk. There are photos we’ve sworn never to share.”

For Damon and Naomi, these sessions marked a changing point in their career, one that Damon says characterized a sound they’ve never felt the need to grow out of. “I Dreamed of the Caucasus” is a prime (though restrained) example of what emerged.

The song was inspired by the Werner Herzog movie The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Briefly, the film details a wildchild raised in the woods, who didn’t know language when he first wandered into a German village. “In my mind I associated that initiation with my father’s arrival in the U.S. as a refugee from Poland during World War II,” Damon says. “His confusions must have resembled Kaspar Hauser’s in some ways, I felt. I never mentioned it to anyone, but when my father heard the album he zeroed in on that tune — he said it brought tears to his eyes, though he didn’t know why.”

Damon and Naomi With Ghost arrives January 31 on Drag City.