Dreamscape Perturbation I

"Dark Twisted Fantasy"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

Sometimes a mix grows out of finding a song or two that just won’t fit anywhere else.  Today’s mix starter is “Heart Paper Lover” by Marissa Nadler.  I can’t remember how I stumbled onto Ms Nadler, but this track—like many of those off her excellent album Little Hells—has an eerie, dreamlike quality that’s hard to pin down.¹  It’s more dreamy than surreal, so doesn’t fit well onto Bleeding Salvador, but it’s also not quite creepy enough for Phantasma Chorale ... but then again, it’s too creepy for Sirenexiv Cola (although many of her tracks could work there).  Not pretty enough for Darkling Embrace; not contemplative enough for Shadowfall Equinox; not goth enough for Penumbral Phosphorescence.²  It comes closest to Smokelit Flashback, and I almost put it there several times ... but still, somehow, it just didn’t fit.  This tune sounds like a dream that you had, which wasn’t really a nightmare per se, but wasn’t particularly pleasant either.  Something that you awoke from with a vague sense of unease, a sense that there were disturbing ripples in the landscape of your dreams ...

Of course, as is often the case, once you find one track that inspires a mix, you soon start stumbling across others.  In the second episode of the comic-based Runaways, one character asks her sister to sing a lullaby that used to help her fall asleep.  The sister, Gert, sings this:

Let’s go to sleep:
There is a dream we can share ...
Just you and me,
In a floating sea in the air ...
What’s left below?
We’ll never know.

You are the moon,
In a quiet night, terrified ...

Now, I don’t know about you, but to me “Gert’s Lullaby” is not in the least comforting.  It’s dark, and vaguely creepy.  It’s beautiful—Siddhartha Khosla’s synthy dreampop is the perfect background for Ariela Barer’s vocals, normally quite punky, but here restrained and almost breathy—but it’s also just a touch ... off.  I was instantly captivated by it, and, once this mix existed, I knew it was a perfect fit here.

Another early choice for this mix was our opener, a remake of Echo & the Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon,” which is already a song with a bit of a creepy vibe.  In the hands of France’s Nouvelle Vague, with their penchant for redoing new wave music with the æsthetic of New Wave cinema in the style of bossa nova (that’s Portuguese for “new wave,” if you didn’t catch the trend), it becomes something exotic and strange and weirdly disconcerting.  From the initial strains of jungle-like sounds to the smokey vocals that turn the underrated synthpop classic into a loungy, slinky, shadowy tune, it’s the perfect opener for the mix.

Several of the dreamier dreampop bands are excellent for this sort of mix.  Trentemøller, who we’ve seen on Paradoxically Sized World IV and Darkling Embrace I, and Widowspeak, who we first encountered on Smokelit Flashback V, and Iron & Wine, who’s been on both Slithy Toves I and II, as well as Porchwell Firetime.  (Of the three, I think “Sycamore Feeling” is the clear standout.)  For bridges, there are some returning favorites as well: Trespassers William (previously seen on Darkling Embrace) provides the “Intro” to our back stretch, and Morphine (from Slithy Toves II) gives us “Miles Davis’ Funeral,” which, along with the inimitable Devics³—who gives us our “Ending”—brackets “On Your Wings,” Iron & Wine’s contribution.  There are also some newcomers here, such as Zambri, Au Revoir Simone, and Warpaint.  These 3 bands have a lot in common: they all produce stylish dreampop, they all tend to explore the darker corners of that space, and they’re all composed, principally or entirely, of women.  The two Zambri sisters are mainly singers and all 3 members of ARS are vocalists and keyboardists, while Warpaint is a more traditional four-piece.  All three groups have a lot to offer, especially on a mix such as this one, but despite the driving urgency of Zambri’s “All You Maybes” and the lost-and-lonely-ness of Warpaint’s “Teese,” I think Au Revoir Simone’s “We Are Here” is the best of the bunch: it’s a lazy, diaphonous tune with just a touch of inscrutability.  At the other end of that spectrum, dark electronica artist I Am Jen gives us the instrumental “Find Me,” which is just barely not too dense and dark for this mix.

One of the most interesting sets of tracks, though, is the pair that kicks off our middle stretch: “Nothing’s Going to Hurt You Baby,” by Cigarettes After Sex, and “Is It All OK?” by Princess Chelsea.  Both were bands introduced to me by workmates from my current job, and both are goth-inflected electropop.  The CAS track is more of a slow, muddy and echoey ballad, while New Zealander Chelsea and her singing partner Jonathan Bree give us an almost child-like duet which is both dark and shimmering, composed of equal parts hope and cynicism.⁴  Coming off the Mazzy-Star-style, somewhere-between-dreampop-and-shoegaze of Widowspeak, they provide the perfect lead-in to the dark and almost oppressive “Find Me,” and thence on to “New Lands.” This latter track can be found on the moderately obscure New Goth Gypsies, which is an interesting little EP in its own right.  RUMTUM is a one-man electronica artist from Denver; Catamaran is a 3-piece modern surf rock outfit from Dallas.  Both fully fit my criteria for the appelation of “obscure bands.”⁵  The EP contains one track from each band, then those same two tracks, but remixed by the other band.  The track we’re hearing on this mix is RUMTUM’s, as remixed by Catamaran in a “vocal edit.” “New Lands” itself is pretty standard electronica fare, which means I find it a bit boring.  But the spin that Catamaran gives it here—that is, providing vocals, technically, but vocals which are so muted and distorted that there’s no hope of making out any actual words—makes it interesting once again.  And just dark enough to fit perfectly in the wheelhouse of this mix.

Dreamscape Perturbation I
[ Dark Twisted Fantasy ]

“The Killing Moon” by Nouvelle Vague, off Bande à part
“Gert's Lullaby” by Siddhartha Khosla & Ariela Barer [Single]
“Heart Paper Lover” by Marissa Nadler, off Little Hells
“Xavier” by Dead Can Dance, off Within the Realm of a Dying Sun
“Eclipse Them All” by Smoke Fairies, off Smoke Fairies
“Bones” by MS MR, off Secondhand Rapture
“All You Maybes” by Zambri, off House of Baasa
“Sycamore Feeling” by Trentemøller, off Into the Great Wide Yonder
“Sore Eyes” by Widowspeak, off Almanac
“Nothing's Gonna Hurt You Baby” by Cigarettes After Sex, off Ⅰ. [EP]
“Is It All OK?” by Princess Chelsea, off The Great Cybernetic Depression
“Find Me” by I Am Jen, off Electronic Collection No. 1
“New Lands [Catamaran's vocal edit]” by Rumtum, off New Goth Gypsies [EP]
“Intro” by Trespassers William, off Different Stars
“Toxic” by Yael Naïm, off Yael Naïm
“Teese” by Warpaint, off Warpaint
“We Are Here” by Au Revoir Simone, off Still Night, Still Light
“Miles Davis' Funeral” by Morphine, off Cure for Pain
“On Your Wings” by Iron & Wine, off Our Endless Numbered Days
“Ending” by Devics, off The Stars at Saint Andrea

Total:  20 tracks,  76:29

That just leaves us with a few tracks.  We first heard Smoke Fairies on Porchwell Firetime, and they could also easily be described as “dream folk,” so they work well here too.  As does MS MR, who are sometimes called dreampop (they’re not), sometimes darkwave (even less so), and occasionally even witchhouse (not really, but perhaps the closest).  We heard their ultra-classic “Salty Sweet” on Slithy Toves II; “Bones” is not quite as good as that, but it’s damned close, with a touch of dark, a dash of poppy, and a soupçon of murky, dreamy vocals, plus it provides the perfect volume title for us.  And, if there’s any band that was inevitable for this mix,⁶ surely it’s Dead Can Dance.  Quite a lot of DCD falls into the category of “dreamlike and vaguely menacing,” but I specifically chose “Xavier.” Within the Realm of a Dying Sun is one of DCD’s darkest albums in my opinion, and it’s no surprise that the other tracks off it that we’ve seen have shown up in places such as Phantasma Chorale⁷ and Penumbral Phosphorescence.⁸  “Xavier” is a weird juxtaposition of strings and synths, driven by Brendan Perry’s rich baritone, strangely reminiscent of Sinatra.  But perhaps Sinatra as heard while on ecstasy.

And perhaps the strangest track here is Brittany Spears’ “Toxic.” Of course, Spears doesn’t sing this version—in fact, I disdain that style of music so much I never even knew it was a Brittany track for the first several years I owned it.  This version is by Yael Naïm: born in France to Tunisian parents, raised in Israel, Naïm has a warm, soulful voice and can sing in English, French, and Hebrew; her style is often described as jazzy, her voice as husky.  This tune is utterly unlike anything else I’ve heard from her: it opens with a xylophone or glockenspiel, closes with dueling flutes or some other higher register woodwinds, and somewhere in the middle picks up a buzzing undertone that provides a looming but almost imperceptible sense of threat.  It’s light and dark at the same time; simultaneously child-like and ominous.  It’s a fascinating reinterpretation, and there really was nowhere else it could land besides here.

Next time, we’ll get a little pre-modern and dig up some proper classics.

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1 Wikipedia suggest the label “dream folk.”

2 And too slow anyway.

3 Who we’ve heard from many many times: Smokelit Flashback IV and V, Darkling Embrace—twice—Shadowfall Equinox III, and Porchwell Firetime.

4 Okay, probably a bit more cynicism.  The album is called The Great Cybernetic Depression after all.

5 Wikipedia has no idea whatsoever who either of them are; AllMusic has abbreviated discographies for both, but no bios.

6 Well, other than Devics, I suppose.

7 “Windfall.”

8 “In the Wake of Adversity.”