Drifting in and out: Eivind Aarset's 'Dream Logic'
[Part 3 of a series on sleeplessness in music - see parts 1, 2]
Sometimes sleeplessness need not mean no sleep. Twisting and turning feverishly, you find yourself able to drift away for a few moments. But it only takes the creak of a wall against the wind, or the weight of an image as it falls into your head - often you, falling, feeling the rush of air against your limbs - for you to open your eyes again to the dark. Those possibilities show how sleeplessness can blur the boundary between wakefulness and something else, as you lose a sense of how long you have been staring at the ceiling, if in fact you were dreaming a second ago, whether this place you call your room is exactly as you remembered it.
The guitarist Eivind Aarset revels in this floating uncertain state in his 'Dream Logic' (2012), together with our old friend Jan Bang and Erik Honoré. Like Biosphere's 'Insomnia', Aarset relies on copious fade-outs to silence to indicate the night's expanse; but here there are no sudden interruptions, no jarring loss of our perception as lack of sleep snaps ever-closer at our heels. Rather Aarset portrays a restless night as continuity, as the gentlest of movements. Drifting in and out of sleep does not jerk us from one direction to another because the two states have started to fold over themselves. Any sudden noises or changes in our sonic environment have been eased into view by the silence preceding them; there is no dissonance. We're simply rising and falling in our own dream-world.
(snippets from Aarset's website)
Yet of course, the challenge of drifting in and out is holding on to something that tells you where you are. For Aarset this indeterminacy is staged through the absence of dense melodic and harmonic foundations: sometimes notes are bare with few siblings; other times, we lose ourselves in free improv as on 'Reactive' - but free improv with reverberating strings samples weaving in and out, teasing us with snatches of a chord structure, while plucked metal strings briefly form major harmonies that are destined to disappear, making us unsure we heard them in the first place. Your ear follows these lost notes into the fade of the darkness, wondering where they might lead. Because of the constant presence of the sleek echoing strings behind them, and a silence whose hush over other sounds is experienced as gentle, these Derek Bailey-esque plucking don't rip us out of our reverie but seem to float with us, as if we'd just come across them in a few minutes of snatched sleep that we'll only notice after we've woken up. Dreams often feel like a jumbled collage, and here Aarset and Bang create that effect perfectly with their shifting sonics streaking over a hushed canvas.
So what is the logic of the dream? For Aarset the closest thing to an answer seems to be free-association over a backdrop of quietude. A moment of dreaming can reveal memories long-forgotten, or at least things which afterwards you grasp for their provenance, as in the childhood evocations of music-box samples in 'Jukai (See of Trees)'. The dream is so able to mix up our sense of a stable consciousness because it follows no logic that resembles the waking state. Other time-spaces can overlap ours then drift away again before they are properly grasped, and so we lose track of whether we are now fully awake or rather following the story of a brief new reality, one that feels nothing like our own but which we fully accept is the way things should be when we are there. You wake and you feel silly for having believed you were where the dream took you, for it looks now nothing like the presentness of your room. But that's hardly the point, is it? The dream makes you forget all that, especially if you find yourself sleeping then waking throughout the night.
Silence works so well in 'Dream Logic' to convey the world of the drifting insomniac because it is so often, when unexpected and unannounced, such an isolating experience. We experience silence, once we notice it in our sonic vision, as something that creates its own space, with you as a patch of flittering grass that dares to make a noise in it. Silence makes you aware of yourself and your spatial position, as distanced from all those sounds that have faded away. So when things things emerge from the surface of the silence, jumping into the air before falling away again - tracks like 'Black Silence' come to mind - you feel yourself abandoned, left alone. Silence has a beautifully unheralded quality about it - a silence can never quite be owned or controlled by anyone, it likes to find partners in other spaces and merge with them. So when a sound comes into view from Aarset's guitar or Bang's sampler, you sometimes experience it at first as if you are 'hearing things' that aren't there. You cannot tell if the silence of the music has been ruptured by something outside of it, and therefore if the silence of the song is itself continuing. Then when the sound disappears, is the ensuing silence a property solely of the track? Or are you now hearing the silence outside your headphones? Like interrupted sleep, silence is something difficult to pin down, to know that you are experiencing it in the moment.
The dreams of 'Dream Logic' are those playful inhabitants of silence, those that let this expanding sonic space dance with sounds that normally take precedence, so that each never blots out the other, they become equals.
The guitarist Eivind Aarset revels in this floating uncertain state in his 'Dream Logic' (2012), together with our old friend Jan Bang and Erik Honoré. Like Biosphere's 'Insomnia', Aarset relies on copious fade-outs to silence to indicate the night's expanse; but here there are no sudden interruptions, no jarring loss of our perception as lack of sleep snaps ever-closer at our heels. Rather Aarset portrays a restless night as continuity, as the gentlest of movements. Drifting in and out of sleep does not jerk us from one direction to another because the two states have started to fold over themselves. Any sudden noises or changes in our sonic environment have been eased into view by the silence preceding them; there is no dissonance. We're simply rising and falling in our own dream-world.
(snippets from Aarset's website)
Yet of course, the challenge of drifting in and out is holding on to something that tells you where you are. For Aarset this indeterminacy is staged through the absence of dense melodic and harmonic foundations: sometimes notes are bare with few siblings; other times, we lose ourselves in free improv as on 'Reactive' - but free improv with reverberating strings samples weaving in and out, teasing us with snatches of a chord structure, while plucked metal strings briefly form major harmonies that are destined to disappear, making us unsure we heard them in the first place. Your ear follows these lost notes into the fade of the darkness, wondering where they might lead. Because of the constant presence of the sleek echoing strings behind them, and a silence whose hush over other sounds is experienced as gentle, these Derek Bailey-esque plucking don't rip us out of our reverie but seem to float with us, as if we'd just come across them in a few minutes of snatched sleep that we'll only notice after we've woken up. Dreams often feel like a jumbled collage, and here Aarset and Bang create that effect perfectly with their shifting sonics streaking over a hushed canvas.
So what is the logic of the dream? For Aarset the closest thing to an answer seems to be free-association over a backdrop of quietude. A moment of dreaming can reveal memories long-forgotten, or at least things which afterwards you grasp for their provenance, as in the childhood evocations of music-box samples in 'Jukai (See of Trees)'. The dream is so able to mix up our sense of a stable consciousness because it follows no logic that resembles the waking state. Other time-spaces can overlap ours then drift away again before they are properly grasped, and so we lose track of whether we are now fully awake or rather following the story of a brief new reality, one that feels nothing like our own but which we fully accept is the way things should be when we are there. You wake and you feel silly for having believed you were where the dream took you, for it looks now nothing like the presentness of your room. But that's hardly the point, is it? The dream makes you forget all that, especially if you find yourself sleeping then waking throughout the night.
Silence works so well in 'Dream Logic' to convey the world of the drifting insomniac because it is so often, when unexpected and unannounced, such an isolating experience. We experience silence, once we notice it in our sonic vision, as something that creates its own space, with you as a patch of flittering grass that dares to make a noise in it. Silence makes you aware of yourself and your spatial position, as distanced from all those sounds that have faded away. So when things things emerge from the surface of the silence, jumping into the air before falling away again - tracks like 'Black Silence' come to mind - you feel yourself abandoned, left alone. Silence has a beautifully unheralded quality about it - a silence can never quite be owned or controlled by anyone, it likes to find partners in other spaces and merge with them. So when a sound comes into view from Aarset's guitar or Bang's sampler, you sometimes experience it at first as if you are 'hearing things' that aren't there. You cannot tell if the silence of the music has been ruptured by something outside of it, and therefore if the silence of the song is itself continuing. Then when the sound disappears, is the ensuing silence a property solely of the track? Or are you now hearing the silence outside your headphones? Like interrupted sleep, silence is something difficult to pin down, to know that you are experiencing it in the moment.
The dreams of 'Dream Logic' are those playful inhabitants of silence, those that let this expanding sonic space dance with sounds that normally take precedence, so that each never blots out the other, they become equals.
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