The art I'm most entranced by is the art that feels like it was stolen from my dreams.
There's no ostensible pattern to this. Mulholland Drive, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Max Ernst, early Cocteau Twins, the first Devo album, Tubeway Army's Replicas, certain Industrial music videos, Jacob's Ladder, The Royal Tannebaums, My Bloody Valentine, Brian Eno's 70's work, The Go Team, and Cliff Martinez' Solaris soundtrack all strike very deep chords in me that I can't quantify, nor am I entirely sure I want to.
As tempting as it is to puzzle out exactly why this material triggers something so profound within me, I'm afraid over-analysis will break the spell.
But I do wonder why people will feel the same subconscious tug from certain songs or films. Why do people use the term "dream pop" to refer to bands like Lush or the Cocteau Twins? We surely don't all have the same dreams, and not all dream pop bands use a lot of echo or reverb to achieve their effects. And I don't know about you but I don't remember a lot of reverb in my dreams. My dreams always seem like reality. If they didn't, they wouldn't have any power at all.
One band that has really dug deep into my Dreaming Mind was the Anglo-French outfit Stereolab. They've been almost too prolific, but three albums in particular, Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements, Emperor Tomato Ketchup and Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night have burrowed themselves deeply into my brain. All three records are completely different in style, approach and execution but all three sounded like I'd heard them forever the minute I first gave them a spin.
That's a strange aspect of these dream dispatches for me: anamnesis. They not only sound like my dreams but they sound like dreams I had a thousand years before I was born.
The above video for 'Jenny Ondioline' isn't much, a pretty standard, low-budget indie rock job, but the song is like music I heard a million years ago. Stereolab's use of repetition and drone is usually cited as the source for their magic, but they can pull off the same effect without it.
I'm not sure the band themselves could explain what they are doing, and it must be said their magic is pretty hit or miss. They most certainly have an idea of where they want to take their music, but the magic is something that visits upon them when the conditions are right. It's this way with all art, to be sure.
This video, however, is something special indeed. Taken from their masterpiece, Emperor Tomato Ketchup (my pick for best album of the 90s), the clip here for ' The Noise of Carpet' is something Man Ray or Luis Bunuel or David Lynch themselves would be proud of.
There's a greater lesson here, too. The fact is that all alternative or underground art can be traced directly back to the Dada and Surrealism movements of the 1920, where the formal restrictions on art were obliterated forever. The most interesting aspects of the Punk movement- the graphics, the clothing, the confrontationalism- are ripped straight out of the Dada movement. Most of the pivotal figures in Punk and its offshoots came from an art school background, especially from a time when art schools used to actually teach something to their students.
But the overriding concern of Dada and its evolution into Surrealism was dream reality. Andre Breton saw schizophrenics as visionaries, because they lived on the borderlands between dream reality and ordinary reality.
Surrealism informed Psychedelia, which informed so much of Sixties pop. Stereolab were also deeply influenced by French Sixties pop, as well as post-psych Krautrock. In many ways it was all part of the same continuum, since both were themselves influenced by the studio techniques and early electronic effects that made Psych possible.
Psychedelia led into proto-New Age spirituality, and proto-New Age music as well. The Moody Blues embraced both. No one yet realized it would eventually lead to Yanni and John Tesh. Those horrors were still a ways down the road.
Mainstream pop bands like The Association embraced psychedelic ideas, showing that the human voice, when arranged properly, can summon dream reality as well as any mellotron. The Association would in turn be a major influence on Yes, and you can hear echoes of Chris Squire's style in this and other songs by the Sixties hitmakers. Yes would also become a major influence on the New Age, and Jon Anderson would become a luminary within the movement.
The playful, experimental nature of Psychedelia would linger and gestate out into other subgenres, and would be embraced by a lot of Dadaist bands like Shockabilly and a number of other underground artists during the wide-awake cokehead Eighties.
For my money, these divergent strands would all connect and reach their zenith with My Bloody Valentine's seminal early 90s work. This song lapses me into ancient dreams and dream reality like few others on Earth. Particularly that coda, which sounds like a call coming to you over the horizon from thousands of years ago.
Tell me your dreams in the comments...
