Weird Dreams streams new album ‘Luxury Alone’

It was a steady progression over 3 years. In late 2012 everyone who was playing in Weird Dreams either moved to another country, or out of London, and as I had always written everything anyway, I continued working on things the way I always had. I met two musicians - Dave Wade Brown and Michael Bateson-Hill - and began to work through new material, but still fairly lacking in solid direction.
Michael plays guitar, piano, oboe and saxophone, and so I began to want him to play more and more keys parts. I was using, what were, at that time, very Pet Sounds inspired slash chords for piano that I was playing on guitar, back onto keys.

From this I think a process began to form, and I was slowly discovering a new personality / identity in myself (and gradually discovering Robert Ashley, Éliane Radigue and digging deeper into a life time love; Ryuichi Sakamoto and so many incredible artists he collaborated with or played with in YMO. Also Yasuaki Shimizu and Hideki Matsutake. OPN also) and just allowing the sound to come with me. There were full albums of material, lots of discarded tracks that we recorded…. but I needed to keep developing a sound that did not fulfil clichés in the vocal delivery, the instrumentation, the song dynamics.

I wanted a very deep corporeal and emotional connection with the textures and timbres of the layers of synths, rather than it to be stated in the vocal, and so I mixed the record myself. It became its own very specific world / environment, that perhaps I needed to exist in, as I had become so disconnected from reality due to ongoing mental health difficulties.

As that sound formed into something absolute, I removed any songs that didn’t make sense to it, where, the playing was too expressive, or the lyrics too sentimental. Every single tone, texture, word, drone etc of Luxury Alone is intended to represent exactly how I was in the world and had been for as long as I can remember.

Not in the sense that it felt like I was overcoming anything, or necessarily processing things - it’s just what I have always done. And as everything else in my life had, what felt like, suddenly fallen away, it was the only part of me I recognised. It was not 3 years of methodically working each moment of every day on these songs, I had breakdown after breakdown until it really felt like there was nothing and no one. It was, essentially, all I had.

No, I think music has a completely different meaning for each individual, and that varies in different cultures, whether you’re the author, or the audience. I don’t necessarily think that such internal and self-focused work like ‘Luxury Alone’ is a particularly good thing, with regards to creating progressive or interesting work, as it can seem solipsistic. But this was the album I had to make to bring myself back into the world, and I really hope it can help other people suffering from similar mental health difficulties by accepting the way you are and understanding that you don’t have to suffer silently. Musically, the future is out there, rather than in me.

Well, I would say largely because I could not move away from my own own mind, living in the hurt of the past and the fear and anxiety of the future - never present, just in a continuous loop. In every moment it felt like there was something blocking me from even basic interaction, and that eventually led to not knowing how to act like my ‘self’. Getting up in the morning, or even going into a shop started to become a huge problem, like a very numb groundhog day.

I had been silent about the anxiety, depression and derealisation I had always experienced but eventually decided - or had no choice due to certain circumstances and situations - to get more professional help and be honest with those around me. Letting the pressure out I guess. The loops began to dissolve, like the resolve you get at certain parts of the record, and at other points an uncertain atonal drone that sits somewhere in the sympathetic nervous system. That low feeling. The hyper fantasy of the synth sounds, the end of ‘Digital Water’, they’re just as important as these loops and cycles, as they create an antithesis to the emotion lacking in the vocal, and the dehumanising of the musicians performances. It plays with sincerity also, while the loops address different durations and a sense of atemporality within those infinite loops.

My tastes developed to a position that, at certain points, wasn’t concerned with contemporary music of any kind. I wasn’t getting anything from it, and so I would go to galleries on my own and found so much joy in artists like Josef and Annie Albers, Malevich, Bridget Riley, Daido Moriyama, Takuma Nakahira… mostly abstract work. This became my main interest and I felt like a lot of music wasn’t addressing itself enough, in terms of what it meant to create that thing, at that point in time. I felt disappointed with how much music seemed to originate from a single source of influence and its merits were based purely on its authenticity. It’s boring, and the context is weird. So I need to constantly experiment, in the way that everybody should constantly be experimenting. Music is digested and shit out at such rapidity due to infinite reproduction and content culture, that I really felt like, if I am to release anything, it needs to be worth the space it takes up, and not have the intention to serve that model.

Weird Dreams’ new album ‘Luxury Alone’ is out tomorrow (10th June) via Tough Love.

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