And All The Dreams You Don’t Remember is a perfect midnight ride album that—to my ears—is best suited for those nocturnal roamings across landscapes of your choosing be they via car, train, plain, foot or a mouse and a keyboard. A foray into minimal dub and deep ambient territories.
Photophob’s And All The Dreams You Don’t Remember suggest that there’s a journey taking place here but it would be too easy to say it’s a dreamy one. This is more hypnagogic in nature (not just in the song that bears the name “Hypnagogia”), existing in that vaporous place between waking and sleep when the barrier between this and other worlds or dimensions is at its most permeable.
Photophob makes tight, atmospheric music in the vein of Basic Channel and the digital drones capes of Loscil that’s most evident in the first opening minutes of “Half Awake” where murky synths bump against slow, deliberate rhythms like the gunwale of a boat knocking gently against the dock its tied to. This is a foray into minimal dub and deep ambient territories. It proceeds into this moody region slowly, with simple additions to the song which slowly fade back out having taken you to another place entirely.
A few of the tracks make interesting use of shifting rhythms which take the listener into one place then showing them they’ve arrived at another destination entirely. “One Sample Dub (at 69.8 bpm, A#)” begins with looping drones that slowly evolve into a complex rhythm in such a way that it appears to have neither beginning nor end but has always existed as such. “Hypnagogia” and “The Distant Smiles of People on Old Photographs” proceed similarly in method while each achieves a different effect entirely using found samples of orchestral music and worn, scratchy sounds like rustling paper or a worn vinyl LP’s surface noise from a broken needle. The listener is mistaken into thinking the time signature is perhaps 3/4 only to be shown it is 4/4 and thus a very different landscape comes into view. “Hypnagogia” uses live cellos and other strings instruments which Photophob also explored on his previous release Large Headroom Collider. And there’s a hint of jazz in the dreamy ambience of “You Won’t Remember My Touch and You Know It” with its vibraphones, synth washes and scratching record noise.
And All The Dreams You Don’t Remember is a perfect midnight ride album that—to my ears—is best suited for those nocturnal roamings across landscapes of your choosing be they via car, train, plain, foot or a mouse and a keyboard.
And All The Dreams You Don’t Remember—and the recently release Falsepositive—are both available on M-Tronic.
