Music with Motif: In your dreams

At nineteen, I often think I should be in my mental and physical prime. Yet, increasingly, I have found myself taking naps midday, convincing myself I’m just being productive and that’s totally a normal symptom (right?). This has led me to recall some Lynchian dreams and incidents where I can’t quite remember where I am and what’s just happened.  

 The layered vocals give the immersive impression of being in a hypnagogic state

I think dreams are most thoroughly emulated in music through the genre of hauntology. Popularised by The Boards of Canada and The Caretaker, hauntology combines ambient and drone music, but with the addition of grainy, highly distorted vocals or samples. If I had to pick one project to share, it would be Inca Ore’s intimate album Birthday of Bless You. The track list’s mysterious and lo-fi compositions invite the listener to explore the ambiguous meaning of each track. Apart from a familiar face on the album cover and topical titles for each of the tracks (such as ‘Wedding Day’), everything else is entirely open for examination, like a dream’s meaning. Furthermore, exploring experimental music, Coil’s Musick to Play in the Dark is deeply unsettling and eerie, with their range of boundary-pushing soundscapes and cryptic lyrics. The highlight of the album, ‘The Dreamer Is Still Asleep’, is incredibly simple musically, but the void that the hypnotic persistence of the music fills, consumes the listener whole into a nightmare.  The layered vocals give the immersive impression of being in a hypnagogic state. 

Depending on how dreams are interpreted, they can be read as the subconscious trying to say something. On Joanna Newsom’s ‘Emily’, a biographical track about her sister, whom she sees in her dreams, they are used as a source of inspiration in her exploration of the world and space through Romanticist imagery. ‘Emily’ is a cinematic album opener to her 2006 album Ys, detailing how Joanna sees her relationship with her sister as a guiding light, akin to “meteorites” or a “beam of your sun that banishes winter” that she engages with even in her dreams. There’s a clear juxtaposition between the sisters’ outlook, too, as Joanna interprets the world through the poetic qualities and symbolism they possess, whereas Emily, who is an astrophysicist, sees the world through more scientific means. Nevertheless, Joanna looks back fondly on what her sister taught her, through a beautiful arrangement by Van Dyke Parks, and Joanna’s soothing harp, which makes the incredibly dense and epic scale the track encompasses feel digestible. Lyrically, the track circles back to the sense that there’s a wider purpose to her music, whether her inspiration is from something greater and spiritual or from human connection; the answer lies somewhere in the middle.  

The structured track collapses into isolated vocals and the bare bones of a beat, mixed with fuzzy ambience

One of the most creative implementations of dreams is on the final track (‘Rest Stop’) from Kero Kero Bonito’s 2018 album, Time ‘n’ Place, which throws a complete spanner into their predictably uplifting and jovial personality, because the structured track collapses into isolated vocals and the bare bones of a beat, mixed with fuzzy ambience. In a literal sense, it emulates the body’s collapse from being tired on a long drive, but there’s a wider, nihilistic comment on how long her idealisation of life will continue to kid herself. From their previous album Bonito Generation, which masks the reality of maturing with optimistically warm “bubble-gum bass” sound, to Time ‘n’ Place, there’s a greater depiction of the lengths we go to hide the reality, until the machine eventually falls apart. Although I hope for another album by the trio, I can’t help but think ending their discography on this note is incredibly poetic.