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 whe...