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, ...

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...

I'm always interested in how artists portray their performance space, as it were, in their tracks. People often think this becomes irrelevant when you're writing electronic music – it's all inside the laptop, right? – but if anything the opposite is true. Experimental electronic artists often, intentionally or not, create imaginary performance spaces when they write a track, irrespective or whether they think their track doesn't really have a 'performer', as in a human being playing the instruments. Western listeners hear what sound like instruments and attach a certain agency to those sounds. At that point, the track stops being just a bunch of sounds, and becomes a landscape with some one in it. Once that 'performer' of sound is located, tracks can develop narratives based around the question of the performer's presence in the track. One of the tracks I've noticed this most clearly in is the beautiful 'Stagger' by The Sight Below. The...

In the realm of beat-based electronic music (acknowledging the beat-beatless distinction can be pretty arbitrary these days), one development that's been really exciting is the Los Angeles 'beat scene' , largely comprising young producers, working broadly-speaking from an instrumental/abstract hip-hop aesthetic. The best of these LA artists are genuinely experimenting with timbre and rhythm and their combination. This seems to be one of the main driving ideas for these musicians; as one of these new producers, Baths, puts it, “[t]he crazier it is, the more people are into it”. One of my favourite labels to emerge from this scene is Leaving Records (I was first mesmerised about a year and a half ago by dak's standthis ). The head of the label is Matthewdavid, whose album Outmind just came out on Brainfeeder (have a listen to it here ). I get the impression Matthewdavid is considered one of the more innovative and 'out there' producers to be linked to the L...