Transparent Messages

Writer's dream I am descending upon a distressed landscape of mud and dung. It is a muddied and muffled dream - shapes pushing up through the sodden, shapeless turf; cows' heads, body parts, boxy shapes, sludge and slush, all brown-coloured, embedded in a slurry of shit and mud, rain bucketing down overhead; no visible sky. Very close-up vision, as if I too am being drawn down into the muck. The feeling is not desolate, but promises impending revelation.

Buried Dreams

I dreamed the above dream nearly a year ago, after a week of solid listening to David Toop & Max Eastley's CD Buried Dreams. Being the first dream I could recall for months, it seemed more than usually significant. With hindsight, it appears to bear some relation to the particular impressionability of the best current music; both foreign and recognisable forms visibly moulding into its fabric. In the early days of recording, taped music consisted of what went on on one occasion in the single room of the studio; now a few square feet can contain all the equipment that's needed to turn the inside of your head into a theatre of complex sonics.

This has much to do with the instruments that now let us generate music from almost any material source (footsteps, plimsolls, wind, TV, a day in the country, light). When music is built from sampledfragments of other musics, and noises bearing no relation to recognisable physical acts, recording's previous relationship to the solid presences of notes and melodies, strings and skins, crumbles. The microphone, stylus, wireless, scanner, aerial, portable DAT: these too have become instruments, nets in the trawl. The process of making today's electronic music mirrors the parallel lives of waking and dreaming: the conscious activity of researching and gathering sounds - the learning part - followed by the retreat into the studio to manufacture the track - the stitching together of fantasy.

This adaptability, this malleability, resonates in other areas. Now that power has melted out of its previous, fixed headquarters to be encoded in the flux and transmission of information - political, monetary, or that which relates to the individual - artists' most effective combative action is to learn the language, join the flow.

"I think music is more flexible than any political system," says David Toop, "because any political theory accumulates bureaucracy and corruption as soon as it emerges, whereas music can turn on a whisker. It can change with circumstances."

This mobility registers loudly in the music of - to name a handful - Scanner, Bedouin Ascent, Omni Trio, Oval, and perhaps most compellingly, Aphex Twin (who we will meet presently). On the 12 mixes of the Aphex Twin's new "Ventolin" EP, you can hear the music's armature creaking and complaining; it wheezes and groans like an asthmatic forced to run for his or her life. (Ventolin is, indeed, the drug prescribed for asthma inhalers.) From his early, influential "Didgeridoo" track onwards, Richard James has been combining abstract and familiar elements to hallucinatory effect. His latest releases, "Ventolin" and the ensuing album, I Care Because You Do, are packed with incident. The music flickers between synthesized textures and domestically recorded location sounds, while at other times pollutant blasts of distortion seem to blow in and scrage the music's skinlike a burst of roadworks through an open window. It's a highly plausible suggestion of the borderline state between dreaming and waking.

Flicker dreams

The first movies were little more than flickbooks of Muybridge stills: in a silent riot of movement, they explored as many physical and physiological phenomena as it was possible to engineer. The static camera recorded whatever stood, walked, danced, fell, flew, or fought in front of it. Yet the passive recorder also set in motion the closest conscious simulation of a dream, which has steered the imagination of the last 100 years: audiences were fixed in front of a tableau where nothing could deviate (as in the theatre) from the original version; their vision filled with outsize images, faces, action; and underwent a symbolic waking as the lights came up at the end. 100 years later, movies are all about noise; Sensurround; the verbiage and wall-to-wall rock of Tarantino's world. Or, as in Derek Jarman's Blue, sounds alone: memories, whispers, music, noises all billow through the filtering gauze of the screen. Some stick in the mind, others drift out of reach: the choice of what to latch on to is determined by the viewer/listener.

There are recollections of Debussy sitting down at the piano and playing the impression of an ocean wave into the instrument, much as a painter might sketch the scene on the spot in watercolour. Much of the music peculiar to the 20th century, from Debussy and Ravel's chromatic palettes to more open ended forms such as improvisation, have been concerned with the struggle to make the instrument as transparent as possible, so as not to obstruct free expression. Composers such as Scriabin and Debussy extended the overripe, Romantic notion of expressiveness to take into account the mechanics of the instrument and performance, to achieve a kind of gestural music. Scriabin, unable to perform his own "Black Mass" piano sonata because it gave him nightmares, conceived the first (never performed) large-scale multimedia event, Mysterium, a giant orchestral work which was meant to include a flashing, coloured light-wheel and a barrage of smoke and smells. These intuitive attempts to move beyond the technical and temporal limitations of instrument and performance connect with modern electronic music; both bypassing the figures of iconic rock star, existential jazz soloist and hermitic avant garde composer that pepper the mid- to late part of the 20th century.

"The more delicate the constitution of the music, the more risk there is," says David Toop. "When you're doing complex music, which is organised with a kind of principle of a disintegrating skeleton - bones could fly off at the slightest tremor - it's very difficult. Especially when you're dealing with chaotic principles, where the music has a life; the harmonic and electronic variables build and create their own organic substance, with distorting likenesses and rhythmic accidents.

A Singer's dream She is standing in front of a conveyor belt, on which objects of unrecognisable shape pass along in front of her. These turn out to be component parts of a whole which she must assemble to make up pieces of music. No sense of where they are coming from, or where they go on to if she does not choose them.

Lucid dreams

"Lack of clarity is always a sign of dishonesty" - Celia Green

Every generation has its dreams and its dream weavers. For most of the century that's now coming to a close, dreams have reflected time-honoured symbols and myths back to us through the work of Carl Jung. But there is a secret history for most things this century, and in the study of dreams it has been manifest in the research into 'lucid dreaming'. Freud called dreams "the royal road to the unconscious", but lucid dreamers occupy that road and set up a toll booth.

In Oxford in 1961, a disillusioned research student called Celia Green founded the Institute for Psychophysical Research. As she later documented in books such as The Decline And Fall of Science and Advice To Clever Children, the Institute devoted itself to the study of experiences that can be perceived, remembered and described afterwards, but which do not tally with established scientific explanations of the workings of the world, such as out-of-body experiences, parapsychology, extra-sensory perception and lucid dreaming. Green's highly single-minded approach was, and remains, pragmatically sceptical of all accepted beliefs and theories, taking nothing on trust, especially the luxury of authority which the scientific establishment has enjoyed for so long.