Atlas Sound - Logos

Fri 18th Sep, 2009 in Music Reviews

Your eyes are open. Looking into the darkness, you remember that you are in bed, in your room. Blinking, you feel the memory of your dream begin to evaporate – was in a church you were in, or a carpet showroom? A fishmonger’s upstairs apartment? You were singing, in the dream, it was a song you don’t recognise, but you know it well.

Lurching from your bed, still sleep-stiff, you stumble to your chair, humming the tune as your frantically fight to coordinate your limbs. Wordlessly, you sing what you can remember of the melody into your phone, trying to sing clearly enough to be recorded without waking your sensitive neighbours. The song comes out in uncertain fragments – was there a girl’s name in there? Something about…an orchid, you think.

You remember hearing a guitar, but not seeing it. You fumble through the darkness and find an acoustic guitar. At first your fingers don’t want to behave, but they soon find chords – Beatles chords, like John Lennon used to write. The chords come together, like the song you heard in your dream. You play the song through a few times, smoothing out the progression until it sounds right.

Now that this little outburst is exhausted, you’re starting to nod off again, so you stop the recording and climb back into bed.

Night after night, you go on like this, waking in the small hours to try and record your dreams. Sometimes you grab a guitar; sometimes you fumble through tape loops and cool noises you’ve found. Each song comes out a little bit different (especially after the one about Neu!), but they all flow together, run into each other like, well, like a night of active dreaming.

One night, you pop the song files into a folder for safekeeping. Only it turns out that the folder was The Internet, and everyone heard your stuff. You could sulk and whinge and get bent out of shape, but no, you don’t. You let it slide, let some time pass. All the while, you tinker, you mix and you master, until everything is just right, then you release it. You call it Logos.