Specimens from the Boneyard

Strange Dreams : A Proustian musical mindtrip.

This album has been a long time coming but here, in strange times, finally, are my Strange Dreams.

The sound of the classical guitar has been vibrating in my ears, heart, and soul since I first encountered it’s magical timbre and spirited repertoire in the early 1970’s. I learned how to produce that timbre and play the repertoire—and I’ve done so happily, for many years now. But decades after I began the journey, when I finally had an idea for what I thought would be a great classical guitar album, the inspiration for it shimmered and swirled around the piano, not the guitar.

I found I had no interest whatsoever in trying to make a traditional solo classical guitar album. But the idea of creating a new repertoire largely from romantic and early modern piano miniatures—(an expansive, enigmatic, and mystical genre to say the least)—and bringing them to life with highly textured layers of classical and acoustic guitars, and mandolin—was a fascinating, cinematic, and enduring proposition. I spent years curating the repertoire, finding the unique sounds and layers and textures I was after, and ultimately, getting them well-recorded. For every nocturne or waltz or ballade that worked, there were five that didn’t…

Fortunately, I had under our roof a great shared protools studio space complete with my housemates top shelf classical guitars and my own collection of acoustic guitars and mandolins. I was living with the late great classical/flamenco guitarist Chris Vincent and the studio was always humming—he worked the day shift and I took the graveyard. Our studio ethos was to be completely obsessed with recording the classical and acoustic guitar as true and quintessential as possible; he pursued a definitive flamenco sound while I chased my strange nocturnal dreams. Sadly, after a long run the house was sold and the studio closed down—without either of us finishing the albums we had worked so hard on. My perfectionist friend and ally, the estimable Mr. Vincent, never quite found the recorded sound he was after. And a succession of compulsive incoming film and singer-songwriter projects sidelined my Strange Dreams album, indefinitely. A decade went by and I kept thinking one of these day I’ll get back in there and perfect the mixes… then the hard drive it was stored on crashed for good and all that was left were the CD’s I had burned and the mixes they contained.

Turns out that was enough. In truth, the job was done many years ago and all that was needed was a bit of current mastering magic and little bit of letting go.

The music of Strange Dreams is mostly from the mid to late 19th century, a very interesting and explosively creative time for the strange virtuoso piano geniuses that propelled classical music into the 20th century. Composers like Schubert and Schumann, Mendelssohn and Chopin, Debussy and Satie. Their music was revelatory, fantastical, obscure, enraptured, and entranced—all at once. And the men behind the musical legends were as obcure and fantastical as their music. The ethos of a pale, sickly, otherwordly genius was entirely in vogue. And the two very strange men who embodied that ethos more than anyone else were Frederick Chopin and Erik Satie, both in their dark musical genius and personal eccentricities.

Marcel Proust fits into this curious group quite well. I found in his book, Swan’s Way—which has much to say about nearly everything, and particularly about the relationship between love and art—a long passage recounting the eponymous character’s obsession with a piano composition from the period I’ve been discussing, and it is well-worth sharing. Although it’s full of those infamously long Proustian sentences—his description of music is a most remarkable distillation of what this kind of music is.

From Swann’s Way:

But ever since, more than a year ago now, the love of music had, for a time at least, been born in him, revealing to him many of the riches of his own soul, Swan had regarded musical motifs as actual ideas, of another world, of another order, ideas veiled in shadows, unknown, impenetrable to the intelligence, but not for all that less perfectly distinct from one another, unequal among themselves in value and significance. When, after the Verdurin evening, he had had the little phrase played over for him, and had sought to disentangle how it was that, like a perfume, like a caress, it encircled him, enveloped him, he had realized that it was to the closeness of the intervals between the five notes that composed it, and to the constant repetition of two of them, that was due this impression of frigid withdrawn sweetness; but in reality he knew that he was reasoning this way not about the phrase itself but about simple values substituted, for the convenience of his intelligence, for the mysterious entity he had perceived, before knowing the Verdurins, at that party where he had first heard the sonata played. He knew that even the memory of the piano falsified still further the perspective in which he saw the elements of the music, that the field open to the musician is not a miserable scale of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard still almost entirely unknown on which, here and there only, separated by shadows thick and unexplored, a few of the millions of keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity which compose it, each as different from the others as one universe from another universe, have been found by a few great artists who do us the service, by awakening in us something corresponding to the theme they have discovered, of showing us what richness, what variety, is hidden unbeknownst to us within that great unpenetrated and disheartening darkness of our soul which we take for emptiness and nothingness.