murmurations

[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 expa...

[Part of a series on sleeplessness in music - see part 1 ] If Dasha Rush's 'Sleepstep' revels in the floating temporality of a sleepless night, Geir Jenssen conjures up a more unsettling atmosphere in another insomniac album, made nearly twenty years earlier. Fans of Jenssen's work under the name Biosphere might be less familiar with 'Insomnia', written as the soundtrack for the 1997 Erik Skjoldbjærg film of the same name. It was originally released in Norway and hasn't turned up in Jenssen's ongoing re-issuing of his back catalogue ( although it was re-issued on CD in 2007 ). Yet it came out at a critical moment in Biosphere's career, appearing the same year as his now-celebrated 'Substrata'. And like that album, the soundtrack is awash in heavy reverbs of scrapes and drones, and in punctuations of silence, with sounds allowed to echo and recede into the distance, falling down towards open emptiness. Being a film soundtrack, however, ...

[ 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...