murmurations

[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, ...

One of the mini-essays in Mark Fisher's fractured but brilliant book Ghosts of My Life (Zero Books, 2013) discusses Grant Gee's 2011 film Patience (After Sebald) , where the film-maker 'replays' W.G. Sebald's walk along the Suffolk coast in his prose-work The Rings of Saturn . Fisher's interest in the film is reflected in the more general themes of the book: on forms of 'formal nostalgia' in today's popular culture, not so much feeling nostalgic for the past as endlessly recycling past cultural forms; and the traces of a 'popular modernism' in forms of pop and electronic music that push beyond this redundancy and lack of innovation. Gee's film, like Sebald's work, plays with the idea of memory being embedded in a landscape, and therefore with the question of how one confronts that past-in-the-present, what an ethical or political stance towards it would look like. Fisher was largely unimpressed with Sebald's writing and ambivalen...

[ 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...