Dreamtime II

"Colourless and Dangerous"

[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 series introduction for general background.  You may also want to check out the first volume in this multi-volume mix for more info on its theme.

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.]

As I discussed last time, Dreamtime is one of the mixes (the first, actually) that I developed after the pre-modern mixes but before the “modern” mixes.  (I used to call these “mood” mixes, but it wasn’t a very distinguishing term, which is why I now use “transitional” instead.¹)  None of these were every designed with any thought to burning them on CD, which is why part of the challenge of updating them is finding natural volume groups.  Even after adding a few tracks to what is now Dreamtime I, what I had left over from the original Dreamtime playlist wasn’t really sufficient to make a volume II ... in some ways.  It had just about enough length, but it didn’t have any throughline, and it also had that really long track that I mentioned last time, which meant that pretty much as soon as I started adding tracks to make it a bit more coherent, it became too long.  So, I set aside a few tracks for a potential volume III—including the really long one²—and started filling out the rest.  And now here we are.

There’s a few returning artists.  Of course we need to hear from the inimitable A Produce again, and once again he’s our closer.  A Produce tracks are just really great for that, and “The Far Shore” is no exception.  It’s slow, mellow, and dreamlike in the way that reminds you of the sensation of moving in slow motion, which is something that you’ve only ever done in a dream.  And I wouldn’t want to leave out the darkwave twins, Black Tape for a Blue Girl and Falling You.  From the former, we get one of those Sam Rosenthal concoctions which starts out as one song—minimalist, but almost carnival-like (if somewhat creepy)—and then, halfway through, becomes an entirely different song: a folding and intertwining of sinuous background whispers, underpinned by a lonely synth melody.  From the latter, a more classic John Michael Zorko composition which is Jennifer McPeak’s only vocal track on the magnificent Touch,³ though this time Zorko eschews the trip-hop bassline and just does an extended, almost ambient synth noodling, while McPeak abandons words altogether and just provides an almost operatic, swooping vocal track.  At 7 minutes long, it was probably never going to land in any of the usual places I tend to slot Falling You,⁴ but it’s kind of perfect here.  And I wouldn’t want to skip This Mortal Coil, of course, who often provide dreamlike instrumentals thanks to Ivo Watts’ tendency towards synth minimalism.  “The Lacemaker” is a curious little tripartite track that starts out as just that, then becomes a lonely wind behind which you gradually start to pick out a voice on the breeze (speaking our volume title, as it happens), which is then superseded by some adjacent-to-creepy chamber music.  Songs like this (and the BTfaBG track) that sort of don’t know exactly what they want to be are often impossible to slot into typical mixes, but the advantage of having a mix based on feeling like you’re in a dream is that weird transitions actually fit the theme.

And we couldn’t forget Ensemble of the Dreamings, those weird snippets of music I found on the very early Internet that were supposed to go into a dreamlike videogame.  I’ll mine them all eventually; for this volume, here’s two more: “Processional” is about two minutes of vocals that you can’t quite make out with the standard synth backing, while “Angel Knife I” is (naturally) an angelic voice for which you can mostly make out the words, and a slightly more coherent melody, but it’s barely more than a minute before it melts into our other returning soundtrack, Mirrormask.  “Meeting the Sphinx and the Dark Queen” is an anticipatory track which climaxes but then keeps going into a very unsettling groove.  Iain Bellamy turns in another great track that wouldn’t really fit anywhere else.

The only new artist to achieve two tracks on this volume is Al Gromer Khan, a German-born sitarist who spent seven years learning the instrument in India, and only added the “Khan” to his name after being accepted into the Khan-I-Gharana tradition.  “The Anahat Syndrome” is something I first heard on a Hearts of Space program (specifically, “The Perfumed Garden”), and I was inspired to pick up the full album (1984’s now impossible-to-find Divan I Khas).  It’s a lovely, dreamy piece of sitar work that’s been on the Dreamtime playlist forever.  Adding “Oiram Qarz” was a much more recent inspiration; I felt that “I No Longer Remember the Feelings” just needed a better lead-in, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the fading strains of “Oiram” butted up pretty nicely against “Remember.” “Oiram” is a bit more slow and meandering than “Anahat,” and it works pretty well right after our opener, Angels of Venice’s “Persentio,” especially if you overlap the fade-out and the fade-in just a skosh.  “Persentio” is a fairly typical outing from AoV (who we’ve heard from many times thus far in these mixes⁵), meaning it’s some lovely harp work from Carol Tatum with cello and flute backing from her collaborators du jour, but I always felt this particular piece had a bit more of a feel of the nighttime breeze through the trees.  I think making it the opener of volume II was part of my more recent rejiggering, but honestly it feels so natural at this point that I can’t really remember for sure.

Ambient tracks can be dreamlike too, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to see Deborah Martin and J. Arif Verner back (we’ve seen them twice so far, both on Shadowfall Equinox⁶) with “Inter Astrum”—this sprawling, synthy track makes you feel like you’re traveling between the stars indeed.  And that bleeds nicely into “Anahat,” which in turn bleeds nicely into some Twin Peaks music.  Unlike most of the music from that show that I’ve used, though, this is a more guitar-driven track by Lynch himself, off the Fire Walk with Me soundtrack.  “The Pink Room” is a bit menacing, a bit minimalist, and thoroughly Lynchian.

Dreamtime II
[ Colourless and Dangerous ]

“Persentio” by Angels of Venice, off Forever After
“Oiram Qarz” by Al Gromer Khan, off Divan I Khas ⁷
“I No Longer Remember The Feelings” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off The First Pain To Linger
“Basketball Dream” by the Presidents of the United States of America, off II
“Processional” by Ensemble of the Dreamings, off Chthon [Videogame Soundtrack]
“... a cry for the broken-hearted” by Falling You, off Touch
“Inter Astrum” by Deborah Martin & J. Arif Verner, off Anno Domini
“The Anahat Syndrome” by Al Gromer Khan, off Divan I Khas ⁸
“The Pink Room” by David Lynch, off Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me [Soundtrack]
“Party of the First Part” by Bauhaus, off Swing the Heartache [Compilation]
“Dreamscape” by Nox Arcana, off Legion of Shadows
“Mesonoxian Visitors” by Midnight Syndicate, off Carnival Arcane
“Circus Waltz” by Sweetback, off Stage 2
“Angel Knife I” by Ensemble of the Dreamings, off Chthon [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Meeting the Sphinx and the Dark Queen” by Iain Ballamy, off Mirrormask [Soundtrack]
“The Lacemaker” by This Mortal Coil, off Blood
“Words of Tranquility” by Koop, off Sons of Koop
“The Far Shore” by A Produce, off Land of a Thousand Trances

Total:  18 tracks,  78:53

One of the tracks which has been on this playlist for the longest is Bauhaus’ trippy little song called “Party of the First Part,” which lets the non-Peter-Murphy contingency of the band⁹ do some classic goth noodling in the background of clips of (of all things) The Devil and Daniel Mouse.  This oddity is, so far as I know, only available on the CD reissue of The Sky’s Gone Out, but it’s well worth tracking down in my opinion.  And it was a great excuse to get the goth legends onto this mix.  (Plus, if I’m honest, I’ve always loved this song—possibly due to remembering watching the cartoon that provides the samples in my youth—and where the hell else was I going to put it?)

But what to put after it?  For a long time, it just fed directly into “Angel Knife I,” which was ... okay, I guess.  But I really felt like it needed more there, so I came up (again, fairly recently) with the weird little trilogy that now follows it: “Dreamscape” by Nox Arcana, “Mesonoxian Visitors” by Midnight Syndicate, and “Circus Waltz” by Sweetback.  Now, the first is a creepy synth vibe, perhaps inspired by some of the soundtracks to the John Carpenter classics of the 80s (particularly Halloween, but also The Fog and Prince of Darkness), but then the second (from Midnight Syndicate’s album Carnival Arcane) really starts to lead into the creepy carnival vibe.  Which is what you’d expect from these two purveyors of what I like to call “gaming music” (meaning it’s often used as mood music for TTRPGs), but then the Sweetback track is a bit of a surprise.  Sweetback is the backing band for Sade,¹⁰ and normally I would describe them as “smooth jazz” and just leave it at that.  And, “Circus Waltz” has a bit of smooth jazz in its DNA to be sure ... but there’s also something more here, an auditory glimpse into a carnival that’s just a little off, and I thought it worked perfectly after “Mesonoxian Visitors,” which sounds like the arrival of said creepy carnival on a Depression-era circus train.

Which only leaves us with two more tracks in the “unexpected” category.  I’ve put a lot of Koop on these mixes—on Salsatic Vibrato,¹¹ on Moonside by Riverlight,¹² and of course on Zephyrous Aquamarine—but “Words of Tranquility” is something different from their normal electrojazz.  It’s the first track I’ve used off their debut album Sons of Koop, which is way more electro than jazz, and it’s ... dark.  I don’t know how else to describe it.  The vocals are credited to “K (23),” which is certainly a bit mysterious; whoever she is, she provides the vocals for four of the ten tracks on that album, which is more than any other singer, and more than there are instrumentals as well.  The words are intelligible, which doesn’t mean they make sense: they include lines like “my desires are made of cold” and “I’m a pilot, I’m above, you’re a chauffeur, down below.” It’s definitely very dreamlike, and definitely couldn’t fit anywhere but here.

Finally, perhaps my favorite track here is the very strange “Basketball Dream,” by the Presidents of the United States of America, the closer of their very simply titled II.  This is some basic guitar noodling backing a spoken word description of a dream involving Magic Johnson, as recited by a young boy.  It’s very weird, in that way that makes you believe it was an actual dream, and you can hear one of the band members feeding the lines to the kid, and sometimes the kid just giggles in delight at the preposterousness of it all.  Just a delightful track that epitomizes the dream state.

Next time, more meditative, autumnal fare for getting work done.

⇐ Dreamtime I

Dreamtime III ⇒

__________

1 In this blog series, anyway.  In my tracklists/ directory, they still live in a subdirectory called moods/.

2 It’s just a second shy of 20 minutes long, if you must know.

3 Jennifer provided all the vocals on Falling You’s debut album Mercy, but became a more infrequent collaboration on later albums.

4 The “usual” places in this case being Smokelit Flashback, where we’ve seen them so far on volumes II – V, and Shadowfall Equinox, where they’ve appeared on I, II, V, and VII.  But Falling You is nothing if not versatile, and I’ve also used them on Tumbledown Flatland I, the previous volume of this mix, and slotted them for several other mixes that we will, presumably, come to in the fullness of time.

5 On every volume of Numeric Driftwood so far, on Shadowfall Equinox VI and Darktime I, and, somewhat atypically, on Fulminant Cadenza I and Penumbral Phosphorescence I.

6 Specifically on volumes VI and VII.

7 This album seems to be impossible to locate these days.  The link is to a YouTube video which contains the full album, which is annoying to parse individual songs out of, but it is what it is.

8 Same album as the previous Gromer Khan track.

9 Occasionally known, eventually, as Love and Rockets.

10 In fact, they were recommended to me by a coworker who was a Sade fan and was surprised to hear me play one of her tracks in one of my mixes one late night in the office.

11 Volumes III and V.

12 Twice on volume I and once on volume II.