Dreamsea Lucidity I

"But You Dream About Islands and You Go to Them"

[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.]

Like nearly all new(ish)—or newly popular—subgenres, “lofi” means different things to different people.  In point of fact, lofi is neither new, nor limited to only what you can hear on YouTube if you do a search for it.  Wikipedia tells us that it’s just “a music or production quality in which elements usually regarded as imperfections in the context of a recording or performance are present, sometimes as a deliberate choice.” And that’s why you usually hear static or “scratchy record” sounds in lofi music videos.  But, if you think about it, that tells us nothing about the music itself: theoretically, one could just put some imperfections into any song and call it lofi.  So what type of music is what you will inevitably find tons of if you search YouTube for “lofi”?  Well, it’s a form of chill (a.k.a. “downtempo”) that is sometimes called chillwave or chillhop.¹  It’s basically trip-hop crossed with chill, mostly instrumental, and set to anime loops and labeled “music to study by.”

Now, a lot of what you can find on YouTube as “lofi” these days is pretty formulaic: one gets the sense that there’s just a generic lofi factory somewhere, churning these out over and over.  But there are standouts.  I discovered Finland’s Kupla because I kept listening to those 2-hour-long mixes of various lofi songs, and it seemed like every single time I would actually stop and say “oh, I like this one; wonder who that is?” it was them.  I discovered New Jersey’s Autumn Orange because they share with me a love of Critical Role, and they make lofi mixes for CR characters.  In fact, it’s the one he did for Caduceus Clay, Destiny and Dead People Tea that gives us our mix starter, “Islands (You Dream Of).” (And it’s the volume namer, too.)  Once I heard that, I was so intrigued by AO’s weaving in of quotes from the Critical Role crew and recontextualizing them to music, and giving them perhaps a heft I hadn’t originally ascribed to them ... well, I started to wonder if I could put together a mix that was a little bit dreamy, a little bit psychedlic, and maybe just a little bit deep.  Music that’s perhaps not trippy enough for Smokelit Flashback nor poppy enough for Candy Apple Shimmer.  In naming it, I went back to Clive Barker’s notion of the “dream-sea”: a place of dreams that is more real than dreams (a characteristic it shares with Robert Jordan’s Tel’aran’rhiod), which he names Quiddity.  This is music that sails along the dreamsea, but perhaps it also provides some moments of clarity ...

Of course, I don’t like to restrict my mixes too much in terms of musical subgenres and styles, so we’re going to broaden our scope out beyond lofi chillhop ... but let’s start there.  Besides the aforementiond Autumn Orange track, which really is the core that this volume is built around, I of course had to throw in some Kupla.  While almost all lofi these days is set to Miyazaki-style animation, Kupla really does seem to capture the feeling of background music from a Studio Ghibli film.  I love many of their pieces, but “Lavender” is one of my faves.  I had to restrain myself from using multiple tracks of theirs, but I figured I’d save something for future volumes.  So I went to Sweden for a track from Theo Aabel—I guess these Scandinavians are pretty good at this whole chillhop thing.²  Unlike Kupla, I don’t necessarily like everything Aabel does, but “Constellation” is pretty awesome.

From there, I started by branching out into general trip-hop and the more psychedelic forms of dreampop.  Old favorites Naomi³ are of course a good pick: “Heavy Little Lights” is possibly too long, but a real classic of this type of music.  And of course former Enigma producer Jens Gad⁴ can provide a perfect fit in his more upbeat moments, such as “Navajo.” British DJ Jakatta’s track “It Will Be” is a lovely piece of upbeat trip-hop⁵ that manages to make a voice delivering the time over and over interesting.  Finally, Morcheeba is a British trip-hop artist built around the smoky vocals of Skye Edwards; while I don’t dig all their tracks, some of them are just transcendant, and I think “Slow Down” is one of the best.  Here, it signals the winding down of the volume, where everything—from the title itself to the synth noises that sound like lonely winds—does that job perfectly.

To keep going even further afield, we can bring in a little electroworld with Carmen Rizzo;⁶ “Through the Sunlight” is an almost ambient piece that works nicely to bring the mood to a more mellow point after the first third.  We can drift through ambient with tracks from Keven Keller and Amethystium: the former, so far featured only on Shadowfall Equinox,⁷ provides a contemplative piano piece called “Hawi Moon”; the latter, so far only seen on Incanto Liturgica, gives us “Avalon,” which has a more mystical feeling.  And that brings us right to dreampop, where of course we first must sample the masters: the Cocteau Twins, whose “Fluffy Tufts”⁸ is a multi-layered track that provides just the right amount of dreaminess.  The next most logical choice is probably This Mortal Coil: “D.D. and E.” is a short bridge that takes us from the proper trip-hop of Naomi to the much lighter touch of Anugama, but it’s an excellent 48 seconds that just felt perfect for this mix.  And Kendra Smith, who was Hope Sandoval before Mazzy Star,⁹ has a number of psychedelic-adjacent albums, including the one I draw from here, Five Ways of Disappearing.  The real draw is “Drunken Boat,” which is both dreamy and evocative, both lyrically and musically, but her little bridge “Dirigible” serves as the perfect bridge from the trippy Jakatta track to the more buzzy Tashaki Miyaki selection.

And, if you drive through dreampop long enough—especially if you cross back and forth into ambient a few times—you’ll eventually hit Enigma, and that’s the last stop before you’re truly into New Age.  I thought I’d give Enigma the last word on this volume: “The Dream of the Dolphin” is a short track from their sophomore album Cross of Changes, featuring Sandra Cretu’s breathy talksinging saying just a couple of lines, and it’s the perfect closer.  As for New Age, the vast majority of it is going to be way too mellow and downbeat for this mix, but I thought that Anugama’s “Tropical Morning” was an exception to that.  It’s entirely too long, really, but, as 8½ minute songs go, this one is pretty solid for not wearing out its welcome, so I basically made it the volume’s centerpiece.

Dreamsea Lucidity I
[ But You Dream About Islands and You Go to Them ]

“Serial Angels” by Miranda Sex Garden, off Fairytales of Slavery
“Ilomilo” by Billie Eilish, off When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?
“Islands (You Dream Of)” by Autumn Orange, off Destiny and Dead People Tea
“Navajo” by Jens Gad, off Le Spa Sonique
“Constellation” by Theo Aabel, off Endless Memories
“Lavender” by Kupla, off Melody Mountain
“It Will Be” by Jakatta, off Visions
“Interlude: Dirigible” by Kendra Smith, off Five Ways of Disappearing
“Keep Me in Mind” by Tashaki Miyaki, off Tashaki Miyaki [EP]
“Outside” by the Primitives, off Pure
“Through the Sunlight” by Carmen Rizzo, off Ornament of an Imposter
“Heavy Little Lights” by Naomi, off Everyone Loves You
“D.D. and E.” by This Mortal Coil, off Blood
“Tropical Morning” by Anugama, off Jungle of Joy
“Hawi Moon” by Kevin Keller, off Nocturnes
“Almanac” by Widowspeak, off Almanac
“Fluffy Tufts” by Cocteau Twins, off Victorialand
“Drunken Boat” by Kendra Smith, off Five Ways of Disappearing
“Avalon” by Amethystium, off Odonata
“Slow Down” by Morcheeba, off Charango
“Everything Is On” by Asobi Seksu, off Citrus
“The Beautiful” by P.M. Dawn, off Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience
“The Dream of the Dolphin” by Enigma, off The Cross of Changes

Total:  23 tracks,  82:32

With all this chillhop and dreampop and ambient and even New Age, you might think there’s no room for anything a bit harder ... but you’d be wrong.  I’ve often said that Mazzy Star should be its own genre—or at least that we should have a name for what you get when you take shoegaze (arguably derived from dreampop in the first place) and feed it back into dreampop and get something really interesting.  I didn’t pick any actual Mazzy Star here, but I found a couple of artists that I think are Mazzy-Star-adjacent.  First and foremost, the most amazing Tashaki Miyaki, who I discovered via LittleBigPlanet and therefore have featured mostly on Paradoxically Sized World.¹⁰  “Keep Me in Mind” is one of those tracks that seems deceptively like just a pop song with some buzzy guitars, but it really grows into something bigger and more expansive the more you listen to it.  I think TM is probably the best of the Mazzy-Star-adjacent bands, although I know many have a fondness for Beach House.  Honestly, though, my second choice isn’t them: it’s Widowspeak, whose excellent “In the Pines” I used on Smokelit Flashback V.¹¹  For a long time I tried to transition directly from Keller to the Cocteaus, but it just didn’t work.  Finally I remembered that Widowspeak has a brilliant little bridge called “Almanac” that has the perfect dreamlike quality to make the connection.  Finally, Asobi Seksu (which is apparently Japanese for “sportfuck,” which was the band’s original name before they wokred out that no one was ever going to give them airplay with that moniker) is a bit more experimental in this space, which means that I often don’t care for the results.  Still, they have a good one every now and again, and I really thought that their bridge “Everything Is On” made the perfect step-down from Morcheeba to P.M. Dawn.

And that brings us to the first of the really unlikely candidates.  P.M. Dawn was a band that I always thought of as merging rap and New Age, which is as unlikely a combination as you’re going to run across, and yet they not only make it work, they consistently make it work.  As I’ve noted with other such weird combinations (such as Dread Zeppelin or the Diablo Swing Orchestra), a lot of times such artists produce the occasional gem, but their output is very inconsistent.  Not so P.M. Dawn though: every song on their debut Of the Heart, Of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience is a winner, and I fell in love with the album after receiving it as a Christmas gift from my brother.  I’m surprised it’s taken me this long to work it into a mix, frankly, but then P.M. Dawn is one of those bands that has a unique sound that often doesn’t really fit it with anything other than itself.  But as soon as I started this mix, I knew that they deserved a place here, and I went with “The Beautiful,” which works perfectly as the penultimate song on the volume.

For pure alternapop, though, I didn’t think there was much that would work here.  Still, I thought there might be a Primitives track that might work, and “Outside” proved me right.  It’s slinky (which is why I used them on Slithy Toves), but also shimmery (which is why I used them on Candy Apple Shimmer), and overall fits the mood here perfectly.  I was perhaps stretching a bit further by including a Billie Eilish track, but I think once you hear “Ilomilo” (especially in context) you may understand why I chose this tune, which is both atypical of her music and yet quintessentially Eilish.  Finally, our opener is Miranda Sex Garden, who has been called everything from neoclassical to folk to goth, which only goes to demonstrate how hard they are to pigeonhole.  This is another band I’ve not yet used, primarily because there are only a few tracks of theirs I really like, and also the whole “hard to slot in” factor.  But “Serial Angels” is an excellent example of their dynamic, starting with gentle, almost inaudible notes that have a toy piano feel, which then build, and build some more, and then burst into drums and guitars and wordless vocal screams, and then drop back down to fade into Billie Eilish.  I think it works pretty well.

Next time, let’s drift away again.

__________

1 Apparently there’s some sort of subtle distinction between what counts as chillwave and what counts as chillhop; inasmuch as I understand the difference—which ain’t much inasmuch—I would say that what this mix features is more chillhop than chillwave.

2 And, don’t forget: some of the best trip-hop acts are from there as well, like Ugress and Röyksopp (both from Norway), and Trentemøller (from Denmark).

3 Seen primarily on Smokelit Flashback (volumes I and II), but also a couple of tracks on Cantosphere Eversion I and Bleeding Salvador I, one on Shadowfall Equinox V, and even one each on Rose-Coloured Brainpan I and Wisty Mysteria II.

4 Seen previously only on Shadowfall Equinox (volumes V and VI).

5 For a more downtempo track, see Shadowfall Equinox IV.

6 Seen on Smokelit Flashback IV and Shadowfall Equinox IV, as well as Rose-Coloured Brainpan II and Moonside by Riverlight II.

7 Specifically, volumes II, III, IV, V, and VI.

8 From my all-time favorite album of theirs, Victorialand.  For more on that, see Smokelit Flashback II.

9 By which I mean that she recorded with Dave Roback as Opal, which then morphed into Mazzy Star when she departed.

10 Specifically, volumes III and IV, but also once on Darkling Embrace I.

11 As well as another track on Dreamscape Perturbation I.