Staying awake in Dasha Rush's sonic poems

[The first of a series of posts on sleeplessness in music - see part 2]

With its crisp, piercing cover imagery of a Rorschach drawing, Dasha Rush's Sleepstep sets itself up as an album about dreaming. The picture suggests a record which probes unconscious desires, or perhaps a record which itself allows for desire (of course, as you read into the drawing you project whatever you see on to the album), which opens you up into a dream-world where those hidden thoughts will be made manifest in musical patterns. But the subtitle of the album suggests something less clear than the way many reviewers read into the record. 'Sonar poems for my sleepless friends' leaves you with questions: is Dasha bringing back messages from her own subconscious, to soothe her friends' pain? Is she trying to induce a hypnotic sleeping state in them – that is, is this a cure? To me, the record feels most like a set of consolations for the wakeful, but more than that, an ode to the period when others are asleep and you alone – for this is how it always feels, a solitary passage – are witness to the darkness, and to what that darkness can reveal to you.

Insomnia is the inability to fall asleep at night. The insomniac can also suffer disturbed sleep, where you keep fitfully waking up, and awakenings in the middle of the night or early in the morning, after which you lie awake until the day. In all of these, your relationship to time is altered, as if you've entered another world. Insomnia is a state where you cannot stop yourself following the passage of time, checking the clock every few minutes to see whether you have fulfilled your penance, if enough time has passed to justify your looking up in the first place (and so the task of looking is inherently futile). Time seems to have stopped for you, but it is also relentless, a slow whirlpool current you cannot see the end of.

How do you deal with the gaping hole of insomniac time? Dasha begins the album with a short droney intro, a transition like a drop down a well into this unwholesome wakefulness. Rush then hits us immediately with the tick tock carousel of 'Dance with Edgar Poe'. The rudimentary piano and bass synth plod on endlessly, while Dasha's voice flutters in and out of view, doubling up, anticipating itself with uncanny echoes, reciting a poem which is experienced as all cut up by the way it drifts around the stereo field, so that it is hard to tell how much of the poem has passed as we listen to it, whether it is leading to a conclusion. Then we come to 'Time Whispers and Albert'. This track certainly has a rhythm, but this time it's not mechanical or ponderous at all. In fact we cannot hold on to it, its flutters of micro-beats (which seem to have been reversed to produce this effect) not falling on any obvious rhythmical metre. Flits move in and out, sometimes in little patterns, but then they recede into a small reverberating cacophony of flappings, or of runs of water droplets resounding in a rusted pipe. All we have to fall back on is the burst of echoed white noise which announces the movement of the musical passage, and the knowledge that the synth pad will forever loop up and down on a chord progression from one minor third to one a tone below.

The fluttery wings of the beat do feel like they have a regularity: as you listen, you start to make out repeated pitches and volumes, as some flutters hit harder than others; but there's no cemented rhythm to hold them all down, these regularities seem to come and go as they please, and certainly not with any care for the timing of the main synth pad. Dasha has created a feeling of regularity, but it's one that we as listeners cannot grasp. Like the insomniac, we float in the uncontrollable eddy of a time that does not reveal its underlying mystery to us, where all we can do is go along with the forever tantalising hints of rhythm of sense. It's that or glance over to the clock again, to watch one plodding second follow the next. Dasha's Time Whispers are more appealing precisely because this way, we give ourselves up to the night, or at least face it in its unfathomableness.

Time is again being played around with on the beatless pieces of the record, 'Sleep Ballade' and 'Lumiere Avant Midi'. These tracks go on and they go nowhere. The arpeggios of 'Lumiere...' fall in and out of a foreground crispness but never do they miss a beat, and after a while you become resigned to their doing nothing other than carry on like this. The night persists and it will do its own thing, it has its own will which none can challenge, and so you have to let it run its course – this is especially so for those who cannot sleep through it. So what is the consolation here? Dasha's music is saying it is better to let the night envelop you. The insomniac knows the feeling when you give up trying to sleep, when you lift yourself up and stare at the wall, or the curtained window, and you let your senses adjust to the low light and the silence, which you now try to focus on as a respite from the thoughts that inevitably trickle in as the minutes tick on and accumulate around your bed. You consider how different everything which you normally feel comfortable with looks in the middle of the night, and how it sounds. The notes of 'Lumiere...' sound both as pitch and as jolts of sharp clicks that have their own reverb and dynamism, fireflies jotting this now-unfamiliar landscape. Songs like this one are part of an environment where after a while melody is unimportant (as with the barely-melodic hum of 'Time Whispers...'). The buzzing crackles that accompany these notes become the thing you follow with weary attention, as the arpeggios double up in different registers and drift past, like lonely midnight cars outside.

The best tracks on Sleepstep are hidden away among the sixteen poems of sleeplessness – the experience of insomnia is always one where time stretches out and seems to take in more than you either expect or can handle, and so this album fittingly refuses to reveal a dramatic centre. That said, certain of the poems stand out: 'Abandoned Beasts and Beauties', with its menacing low hum and firelighter beat, slowly augmented by dubby pulses and hi-hats, which gradually allow you to latch on a rhythm, some of whose parts are echoing out in the distance, others like the hi-hats press up against you and emphasise the relative space and silence of the piece. The drums are themselves a melody, giving satisfaction in their repetition of a drawn-out figure, another way of cutting up time in this expanse. But just as you feel you've gotten a grip on the song, these long off-key single-note synth cries are projected from one end of the landscape to the other; you're left unsure what might be coming next. Ominous crashes of boulders on the left and right suggest more raging outside than you'd like to admit, further highlighting the stark candle of the rhythm in the middle focus.

Tracks like 'Abandoned Beasts...', and 'Antares' and 'Time Whispers...' before it, stake out different musical territory from those strands of electronic music which have been eking out sonic material from the remains of past club culture, from those artists who have been mediating dance music through sludge, as I discussed many moons ago. Instead of dipping dance in a sticky goo which slows its materials down and decays them, Dasha Rush's record feels like rhythmic elements are tentatively re-building themselves, like attempts to form new beats with now-unfamiliar materials, electric pulses left out on their own in great echoey spaces (or in fact, listening to the short reverbs on much of the percussion, small confined spaces, like bedrooms). The building blocks of the rhythms in Sleepstep are always sparse, as if only certain sonic creatures can come out and make noise in this strange night.

Those rhythms that do appear under the moonlight make solitary signals, like the beep that bounces around '100 Hearts'. Tracks like this one have migrated from the club, but nor do they sound like the apocalyptic post-hedonism of the luminaries of decayed dance music. These are instead fever dreams of new rhythms forming out of the sparking wires and abandoned cables (rather than old rhythms pulled through the sludge). They float around you and, as with the insomniac's night, at first seem lonesome, unwelcoming. But they slowly reveal more of themselves, like the light filtering in after your eyes adjust to the dark. That's why it's ok that '100 Hearts' goes on in the same way minute after minute; your attitude to it changes over time. All these tracks seem to encourage a sleep-deprived hazy attention, so that repetitions become strange, then quietly remarkable in their intricacies. And that DJ slip of the high frequency scratch a third of the way through '100 Hearts' is so joyous, because it sounds like the wires and cables are trying to form a dance in keeping with their insomniac nocturnal surroundings, and utter an uncontrollable gasp or yelp as they accomplish it. All these tracks in fact hum with energy that is slowly building up and re-forming, a tapping of normally-hidden sources in these lonely hours.

But like the night of the insomniac, this energy never quite erupts. What is most unnerving about the insomniac's night at first is its restfulness, its quietude, which you don't know what to do with when you're confronted with the possibility of experiencing it for hours on end with no reprieve. And so you start to brood over the things you would rather not confront during the day. And then you start to project, to see and hear things in the dark (listen to the voices that appear out of the ether at the end of 'Scratching Your Surface', or throughout 'Lucy in the Sky, Lost Diamonds'). After a while, sleeplessness becomes as strange as your dream-worlds. But Sleepstep is trying to accept that silence that your mind wants to fill in, to make you grow accustomed to the night's own atmosphere, and to reveal just how much there is hidden away in that unmanageable nothingness.