Review Summary: Perchance to dream...
I’ve “listened” to this album while in the state for which it was intended all of three times. I have not listened to the complete album in one sitting while awake, though I’ve tackled it in bits and pieces many times, enough to know each part, what it sounds like, and what its ostensible purpose is. I’ve noted its effects on my sleep, its (slight) impact on remembered dreams, most clearly the mood it put me in during that stage when everything has begun to soften, become indistinct, when the last cobwebbed cares of the day are beginning to be brushed away by the gentle hand of unconsciousness. I’ve appreciated these effects; but none more clearly than that it lives up to its purported intention, that the album does move best within that enigmatic state of being that is most characterized by silence.
Sleep is the backdrop for Robert Rich's ambitious musical endeavor, a to-the-bone thrust towards the limits of Eno’s “ignorable as it is interesting” dictum. The audacity of shifting a piece of music’s intention towards a different state of consciousness isn’t without precedent; after all, psychedelic music was doing its thing long before this dropped. But the notion of listening to music while sleeping challenges conventional wisdom about the role of auditory stimuli during rest, as well as the role of the listener in bringing her attention to the music, its atmosphere, its rhythm, its development. Traditionally, silence is the key to sleep, darkness and stillness are its conditions. However, Rich challenges this assumption by offering an alternative perspective.
Somnium posits that music, when carefully composed and attuned to the rhythms of sleep, can enhance, or even alter the quality of rest, serving as both a companion and a journey through that most familiar of altered states, rather than a disturbance.
If this concept sounds unbearably woo, your suspicions might be well founded. The more cynical might dismiss the whole thing as a gimmick, a marketing trick to make an overburdened ambient piece stand out from the multitude of twinkly, vaporous and overlong meditation soundtracks. To take it as such would only be valid if the album didn’t at least partially live up to its premise. But take its central conceit cynically or at face value as you will, the content of the music itself not only lives up to its premise, but makes for a nearly unimpeachable piece of ambient music.
Somnium unfolds like a hypnotic tapestry, woven with intricate layers of sound that seamlessly blend into the listener's subconscious. The album's expansive duration mirrors the extended periods of sleep, the initial insect sounds, dripping water and enigmatic flute sounds meant to be heard on a conscious level, while the listener is in that state between wakefulness and sleep, shifting to darker, more amorphous passages that nudge at the perimeters of consciousness rather than engage it. Rich employs an array of synthesizers, environmental recordings, rumbling bass tones and drifting, liquid textures to create an immersive environment that evolves organically, mirroring the fluidity of the sleep cycle. The music is a continuum, moving through ambient drones, misty flutes, gentle waves of electronic pulses, and subtle tonal shifts, like drifting on a boat along some unexplored river, catching glimpses of flames and murky silhouettes of temples through the mist. The absence of structures, the subtle graduation of shifts in tone and timbre allows the mind to wander freely, creating a symbiotic relationship between the music and the listener's dreamlike mental landscapes.
I experience the world of
Somnium as an enigma, as a journey into the unknown, into a strange world that uncomfortably tugs at some piece of lost memory. On that level, if it had been a mere 1-hour version of the same album written around the concept of sleep, it would have been a success.
Somnium, however, invites listeners to cross the boundaries of conventional musical consumption, immersing themselves in an odyssey that seamlessly intertwines with the enigmatic landscapes of a state of consciousness that we so little understand, despite spending a vast part of our lives in it. Listen to the album when awake and let the mind drift to whatever deep pools of memory and mood it wills to go. Listen to it asleep, and who’s to say you won’t do the same? In either case, by the end, all there is left to do is wake up.
