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
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