Scratching the surface of Autohypnosis

Autohypnosis: a self-induced hypnotic state. What better name could my brother have chosen to represent his music? The self is at the center of all the themes in his music, and Nathan autonomously creates all of his hypnotic songs, start to finish.

Beginning with his first EP, The Surface, the altered state of consciousness implied in the word autohypnosis manifests itself in the lyrics, and induces in the listener a similar state. The minor keys and swirling synths create a kind of aural trance. The atmosphere and sonic texture of the EP is unified so as not to break that dream-like feeling. Nathan has always been drawn to the surreal, to that cloudy realm where memories, dreams, and fantasies all blur and tangle. Indeed, his music is informed more by films such as Eyes Wide Shut and Memento and the work of David Lynch than it is by his biggest musical influences, such as Duran Duran. Like Bret Easton Ellis' Glamorama, a favorite novel of Nathan's, in which the sentence "We'll slide down the surface of things" becomes a mantra, The Surface is about seeing behind and beyond the gleaming exteriors people present. The EP's lyrics are also about discovering patterns in the ostensible randomness of the world. A line from "Electricity" perfectly elucidates the area where the self and the world collide: "There is a place between lucidity and dream where all the chaos finds order after all."

Conversation (in) Pieces is not so much a departure from The Surface as an expansion of its sonic palette and a deepening of its themes. The title itself employs a bit of classic postmodernism; the parenthesis opens up meaning into fork-like prongs. Some possible interpretations:

1. Each of the songs that follows is a conversation piece, a discreet unit to be discussed.

2. The album is, instead, a single conversation, albeit one presented in fragments.

3. The songs are the shattered remains of real dialogue, broken shards of communication.

But memory—its unreliability, selectivity, and so on—complicates even the certainty of whom we are listening to. The album is not so much a record of those fractured conversations as the narrator's recollection of them. Even this, however, assumes that there is one consistent narrator of the songs. The essential fuzziness of existence is so present throughout that the listener begins to wonder if the narrator might be lamenting his own long-lost self by the time we reach "Long Lost" near the end. When dreams and memories blur and dissolve into one another, to what extent does a self, a personality, truly exist?

Let us assume for the moment that we are being told a story in pieces by one person. Ostensibly, this is that narrator's account of a failing relationship. A couple is being gradually wrenched apart by habit, repetitious argument, recrimination, silence. In short, super-strained communication. And things are already sour when we meet them. From the very first song, the major themes keep resounding: recurring dreams, names unremembered, selective memories. At least at this early point, though, our assumed couple (the lyrics are ambiguous enough to be interpreted as being about the failure of communication more broadly, but I'll leave my over-analytical impulse aside for the moment, or try to) still converse. "You are in my recurring dream ... I am in your selective memory." Bitter from the beginning, but at least there is still discussion. By the time we've reached "Sleeper Down," the narrator is still dreaming, but no one populates his unconscious mind; he finds no respite from loneliness even as he sleeps: "I dream of isolated chambers and an absence of exit doors ... but to be bold in here would not go far—I'd still be alone."

Echoes of literature, movies, and music abound. The drunken jazz sections of "Post-Everything" recall the music of David Lynch's Twin Peaks, another work about the chaos beneath shiny facades. The menagerie of voices that crescendos in the song's opening minutes feels like a composite of our speaker's confused, uncanny remembrances. When the Lynchian circus music segues into woozy trip-hop, Nathan has moved beyond the personal into a kind of diagnosis of the times. "And I'm talking ... but nobody's listening." This is both a bewildered cry of personal alienation and an ironic statement about contemporary America, which we are so often told connects us more than ever through technology. The narrator seems, at this point, to be talking to himself, completely behind his "wall of solitude," like so many of us who sit at our computers, babbling to the world—but really to ourselves—in chat-rooms, on wall-posts, through our 140-character-or-less attempts to communicate. It seems fitting, then, that "Post-Everything" ends with an apocalyptic boom, as if communication itself has at last halted altogether. The surface has shattered. Bleak, perhaps, but relevant as anything floating out there in the storm of music we now have access to. Conversation (in) Pieces is, above all, an old-fashioned concept album in the vein of Roger Waters' Amused to Death and Radiohead's Kid A (strange that one can legitimately call Kid A old-fashioned at this point).

I feel I have said far too little about the music itself. When I'm asked to describe my brother's music, I often have to resort to what has become the stock-in-trade of music reviews, the mash-up description: It's like Depeche Mode meets Pink Floyd meets Portishead, or some such. But you can all hear for yourselves the range of styles that comprise Conversation (in) Pieces. The infectious synthpop of "In the Loop," the guitar-blurred edges of "Dimension," the acoustic melancholy of "Long Lost," which is just seriously one of the most beautiful ballads I've heard in years. Oh, and Conversation (in) Pieces is a great headphones album. Listen to it in pieces, if you must, but better still to have that rare experience, the unbroken listen. Either way, the layers and shades of sound reveal themselves more clearly each time.

Listen, and then listen again.

Let yourselves be hypnotized.

—Micah Stack, August 2011