Planningtorock Gay Dreams Do Come True Vinyl 12" EP 2022
1. Gay Dreams Do Come True
2. Gay Dreams Do Come True (Instrumental)
3. Girl You've Got My Heart
4. Her Heart Is Now My Home
Born in Bolton, UK, Planningtorock – aka. singer-songwriter, producer, composer and director Jam Rahuoja Rostron – has been using music as a mirror to learn more about themselves for the last seventeen years.
In the early noughties, the artist debuted with their first full-length record ‘Have It All’ and collaborated with subversive innovators such as The Knife and Peaches. Four acclaimed studio albums later, and Planningtorock is a recognised force in politicised dance music that warps sound into new shapes, and plays with ideas around gender, sexuality, and desire. Also in demand as a remixer, Christine and The Queens, Robyn and Romy of The XX have enlisted Planningtorock as a collaborator in recent months – and last year, the multitalented artist teamed up with Chanel’s sound director Michel Gaubert. Their ‘Planningtochanel’ EP soundtracked the Parisian label’s Autumn/Winter 2020 show, and was the first work created in Jam’s new home city of Tallinn, Estonia. It’s also here that Planningtorock created their transformative new EP, ‘Gay Dreams Do Come True’.
Jam uprooted to the Estonian capital – a gentle-paced, cobblestoned city on the Baltic coast - after spending two decades in Berlin. Already feeling restless and ready for a change, everything fell into place when the musician met their partner through mutual friends in Helsinki; soon, Jam relocated to Riinu’s home city full-time. Last September the couple married. LGBTQ+ marriage isn’t legal in Estonia, so the ceremony took place at the city’s British Embassy – in theory, the country recognises marriages which took place abroad. In reality they have been struggling to get their partnership acknowledged in their home country while under a right-wing coalition government. With the prime minister now ousted over an alleged corruption scandal, Estonia is going through a time of great political upheaval. Distant hope of a more progressive government is on the horizon – and ‘Gay Dreams Do Come True’ represents Planningtorock’s own personal exploration of queer love.
A loud, proud, unabashed celebration, Planningtorock’s new EP ‘Gay Dreams Do Come True’ stands in opposition to the endlessly tragic queer narratives which seem to dominate the mainstream, Jam set out to make a record which basks in the all-consuming joy of queer love instead, and the sense of belonging and safety that comes with it. “I feel there’s something very political about owning queer happiness,” Jam says, “cutting it out and saying: we have a right to be happy. I want to make quite blatantly gay music to take up space. I felt like I was gay-dreaming on the day Riinu and I got married! There were little birds and stars around my head,” they say, laughing, “I was really pinching myself.”