It's late 2022. I'm on my computer, as I often am. I'm probably looking for ostensibly-disposable background music, to work or do the dishes to. I look at the thumbnails that illuminate the screen.
One of them is different. A gentle amber monochrome drawing of a pyramid, almost 1-bit looking. It looks solemn. Beneath it, it just says "desert sand feels warm at night - 夢の砂漠". Oh, and it's four hours long.
The name of the album translates to "Dream Desert", so that's what I'll be calling it from here onwards. The art of Dream Desert itself isn't that interesting to me, I can see how this might not mean anything to a lot of people. But the opening notes of the album are dotted with gentle, droning celestial sparkles, and the album altogether does evoke the loneliness of walking in a desert at night.
Hell, I've walked alone at night in the desert(ish) to this album, during one of my business trips to Dubai. Not quite in the desert, but in a high-rise neighborhood under construction next to the hotel I was staying at. Ghost town vibes, not a soul around, sand everywhere, sweating like a pig despite the sun having set. It's a vibe.
What is wrong with this album? Why am I writing about it in a post called "I Have No Song and I Must Sing"?
Dream Desert can be classed as one of the other -waves I've mentioned a few times. Slushwave is the term that I think fits the best here. This is not the shot to the arm of excitement and cool sounds that Future Funk is, it's not the soundtrack to a tough day at the forklift factory that Barber Beats is.
A few years ago, I shared a song with friend: You & I by Ryan Probert, a song created for a YouTube documentary about a tormented programmer who believed he wrote God. That song is used later in the story, it's telling the musical journey of someone completely losing touch with reality. It's a sad little instrumental song that feels like circling a drain (the whole soundtrack to that video uses Shepard tones to great effect). Her reaction was that this is the kind of song someone would kill themself to. Or would listen to before going through with it, I think.
Dream Desert is not an album to die to. Dream Desert is the soundtrack to already being dead. There's no self-destroying intent in these tracks, to me these are simply the ambiance of bones being bleached by the sun, of worms dispersing discarded flesh. The music is glacially slow, drawn out at 30 odd bpm, with each section of music taking a good five to ten minutes to proceed. The opening track is almost half an hour long, and some tracks push past the 40 minute mark. The vocals are so drawn out, so distorted - it feels like the dying embers of something. You can't make words out, but that's not the point of these vocals in the first place.
It's a bit cliche these days to discuss The Caretaker's albums, but I feel like Dream Desert is a more sincere version of that, that exists as its own musical work rather than something that feels concept-first. I've actually put the album on now, instead of the dead silence I wrote most of the last post in (physical silence - my brain was blasting Slowdive at full volume despite it being not the time), to know what to write, and I find it hard to explain. Writing about music is such an abstract exercise, and while the easiest thing to do in the world would be to link the Bandcamp page, this isn't what I want to do. Telling someone to "just listen to a depressing four hour album" doesn't work.
At most I can recommend that someone try listening to the second track, to get the impression. It's a languid 25 minutes of feeling like the world is slowing to a crawl and dying. Every new sound, every change in section is spaced the length of a whole song away from the last one. Worst of all, I find it devastatingly familiar and close to my heart. I think this track has everything one needs to understand this album.
What happens when most of the musical ideas in my head stop becoming tangible enough to be played on real instruments during real moments with real people?
I finally bought the guitar I dreamed of playing as a teenager. Well, the budget version, and used, of course, and I had to drag it from the Gulf to Beirut with no pre-planning which was an adventure. But it's a beautiful instrument, it feels wonderful in the hand.
I have not played the guitar regularly in the better part of a decade. I have not sung properly in longer. The music I listen to is not campfire friendly or amplifier food. It is brooding beats, disposable house, and occasionally, soul-crushing shit like Dream Desert. There is no happiness in Dream Desert. There is no human experience to share, only torpor to endure.
I've said Vaporwave is unmusickable. That's not strictly true. Some of it is danceable, some of it can be enjoyed with people. Dream Desert is categorically unmusickable. Even Brian Eno's Thursday Afternoon, a generative ambient musical thing from 1985, can be played in a room and can spur conversation. Dream Desert is too gutting, too slow for even that.
Dream Desert is the antithesis of musicking. It is a particularly depressing entry in my current musical canon, but it represents how divorced my musical diet and environment just is from the concept of sharing musical moments. I've seen a lot of comments under uploads of it on YouTube that describe it as healing or comforting, but I can't agree, really. It's comforting the way rotting in bed is. It's not a healthy comfort.
I've started to want to sing again. I'm slowly finding myself thawing from a period of emotional withdrawal. And yet when I pick up an instrument, I feel nothing. I feel two distinct nothings:
One, my fingers have lost their calluses and the little skill I had has not been maintained. Worse, I try to sing out a note, but my throat vibrates wrong, not a single harmonic of what I thought I'd be singing rings out. Instead, a raspy dry squeak, like an old doorhinge. If my motivation was low during years of no musical expression, then I don't even know how much lower it is now. I know it's not an excuse, these things can come back to certain extents with practice. But losing touch of the basics really really feels bad. My skills, my voice, my understanding of the instrument and of music, these are my tools. And out of these, I have nothing.
But two, I have no musical ideas cued up. When I played regularly, most of what I listened to was music made the traditional way: Instruments, lyrics, something that can be played, possibly even with or to someone. I was more than happy to brush aside effects, to reverse engineer chords for more obscure songs, to hammer two unrelated songs together and make them work. I log into my old UG account and look through the tabs I have saved, something I might have done maybe a half dozen times since that unexpected evening mentioned above. Like that night, the songs I've got favorited don't mean too much to me now. These are from over ten years ago. A lot of these were saved by, essentially, a different human being. What do I play? I have nothing to play!
My instrument feels alien, my voice not quite there, I cannot even think of what to play, and yet, I somehow must find it within myself to do it. I need to make art. I need to write. I need to make music. Otherwise something really is decaying. It is too early for any part of my fragile frame to be bleached by the desert sun.
I have no song and I must sing.