Indie Trends 2010: Hypnagogia
By: Chris Polley
Isn’t June supposed to be the month we’re all finally waking up from our winter/spring semester hibernation? Not falling asleep? That’s what I thought anyway, what with the gorgeous summer leaves and lawns sparkling with effervescent green and the radiant periwinkle sky engorging us with sun rays and open air. But alas, the world of indie takes us by surprise yet again and trends toward the antithesis of what should come naturally. Only this time the trend may not be catching on the way the indieverse had hoped for, which is a first, at least since this feature began back in January. Up until the sixth month of 2010, it was always quite easy to pinpoint the big three critically acclaimed indie records of the past thirty days (the general rule of this little monthly escapade called Indie Trends), but for reasons unknown, June has largely been devoted to Ariel Pink (who was already reviewed here, but does fit into the discussion later in this article) and The Roots. And while The Roots are universally adored, and I hope someone reviews their record here soon, they are an anomaly in the indie world. Not only do they reside on the border between indie and mainstream, but their music hardly ever takes cues from current trends, even when they include guest appearances on their record by Dirty Projectors and Joanna Newsom, two of the trendiest acts in indie today. ?uestlove and crew are who truly woke us up this summer, but the trend that tried to catch but failed is one that’s all about the act of falling asleep.
It all started when I read a review of the new Emeralds record Does It Look Like I’m Here? on the popular indie music review site Drowned in Sound. I had heard/read the term “hypnagogia/hypnagogic” thrown around on the interwebs a smattering of times beforehand, but it wasn’t until this particular post overused the word (like I’m about to) a quadrillion times that I finally decided, okay I’m going to find out what the hell this word means, because I don’t think it has much to do with hypnotism like I once thought. A few googlings later I find myself much more in the know and finally able to write this month’s feature with a couple other records in mind that attempted to get everyone excited about independent music instead of going outside and enjoying the sounds of crashing waves at the beach or vuvuzelas at the bar. For those who’d prefer a shorthand explanation of the new fad rather than your own excursion through Wikipedia and old issues of Psychology Today, I shall provide: hypnagogia is, as the introduction of this article implies, that half-dreamy state one experiences between being awake and falling asleep. Some consider it to be different from hypnopompia, or the half-dreamy state one experience between being asleep and waking up, but others believe the original term can be used as a catch-all for the transitional state no matter when it occurs, in which case one could argue that the three records in question actually are attempting to transition us into the hot humid days of summer, a theory we’ll go into more detail later.
Since the ambient-pop Cleveland trio Emeralds got me into this quagmire of an indie trends entry in the first place, let’s start there. Does It Look Like I’m Here? is technically the band’s first widely released long-playing album and needs to be qualified as such due to their eclectic array of tape, CD-R, and floppy disk releases over the past half-decade or so, all of which suggest that this is not a group that really intended on breaking out and becoming part of a trend in the first place. And yet, possibly one of the few things all musicians have in common is that whether they’re wakeful and large-scale ambitious or they’re sleepy and DIY artists, they all would at least be okay with the idea of their compositions catching on and taking flight amongst the masses. No one wants nobody to hear what they put their heart and soul into, no matter how much slacker or modest posturing is put into the pre-packaged uber-indie disposition. With this in mind, looking at the latest offering from Emeralds is indeed much like both the act of falling asleep, or conversely, the act of waking up, depending on how the tracks from DILLIH? flow through you. On the one hand, the less pretentious way of talking about hypnagogia in music is to talk about the dreaminess of the music’s textures and melodies, how they ebb and flow with such hazy finesse like many of the warm and inviting instrumentals on Emeralds’ new record. On the other hand, the phrase “feels like a dream” really shouldn’t mean anything given the individualistic nature of dreams. I mean I wish every time I fell asleep I felt a soothing combination of relaxing on a fluffy cloud like it’s the ultimate La-Z Boy and the vivid color palette of a watercolor painting, but that’s simply not the truth. Oftentimes it’s more like the tenser building of looping riffs and swelling patterns that appear on the record, possibly not revealing themselves until the second or third listen of the album, depending on how close you’re paying attention.
But the very definition of hypnagogia is that it’s not 100% about dreams/nightmares. It’s specifically hovering somewhere around the 50% mark. Whether we’re in the midst of going unconscious or coming out from under it, there should be a distinct piece of the real world embedded in the music for it to be classified as such. In this sense, the Emeralds record may or may not work for you. It’s more oblique than your average ambient record, that’s for sure, but it’s also equally as abstract and based on the subconscious like the dreamworld is. This makes for a record that could be used as a jarring yet beautiful lullaby, and I’ve actually grown to love it in many ways because of this very fact, but it also makes it a strange object to gaze upon, one that wouldn’t ever necessarily attract a crowd, but would entrance a few particular individuals to close their eyes despite the vibrancy of the summer sun calling for them to play in the sprinkler or at least bask in its lightness.
A more universal attempt to wow through hypnagogia came via another revered album of the month, this one by Tame Impala (entitled Innerspeaker, rather appropriately considering our discussion), which tries to lure more objectively using the sizzling power of the big orange guy in the sky rather than trying to deny its existence. Now what could the very symbol of wakefulness and the daytime have to do with the transitory moments before/after sleep? Well, with a bit of trepidation, I would like to assume everyone’s taken a nap in the afternoon at least once in their life. It’s a glorious thing, really, and if you are one of the few freaks who haven’t, I recommend you remedy that ish right quick and then come back to this paragraph. Because whether it’s in the comfort of your own bed and you try your best to block out the tiny streams of sunshine that inevitably trickle through the sides of your curtain and onto your bedspread or it’s out basking in the thick of it all on a plastic lawn chair, with the heat absorbing your skin until you start cooking like a humorously large piece of meat, the sleep-inducing power of the sun is inarguable. We get tired from work/play or we simply give into the infrequent luxuries that life affords us, like the common nap, and the sun and its minions (humidity, brightness, temperature, et al.) does its work on us. Sometimes we fry like we like it, sometimes we burn, and sometimes we wake up sweaty, but hardly ever do we fall into this kind of slumber or slowly rise out of it with the thought in our head “I really wish my body only wanted to sleep at night.”
And Tame Impala, despite my own reservations on the psych-rock genre in general, know how to communicate this sunburnt joy like they’ve been experts on the subject since birth (and they quite possibly have been – have you ever seen a baby only sleep at night?). These Australians inject more crusty reverb and fried phaser pedal than is probably needed to get their point across, but they don’t care. They’re the zealous kind of beach bums that stared at the sun when they were kids precisely because their moms told them it wasn’t good for their eyes, and then followed it to the sandy shores everyday because it felt like a calling, not because it looked a beacon. And in due time, they suffered from overexposure, creating music that doesn’t just feel dreamy and escapist like an afternoon nap, but also feels like these guys haven’t wanted to wake up for a very long time. The sun is their ultimate distraction, their ultimate diversion, and so the hypnagogic effects on Innerspeaker end up running a very small gamut between mildly trippy/mostly peaceful forays (falling asleep) and hallucinatory effects-laden freakouts (waking).
So while for me, this kind of retro-adventuring into the paisley-colored daze of the 60s doesn’t do the trick other than emphasizing a mutual appreciation for that scorching star at the center of our universe, there is another version of the past I do find more hypnagogically enchanting, and the band Wild Nothing’s June release Gemini knows all about it. In fact, just a quick semantic jump from hypnagogia gets us to dream-pop, where Wild Nothing non-revolutionary guitar and pop tactics thrive and chill. And while the implications of the term dream-pop brings us back to the eternal struggle of differentiating between those intangible inexplicable moments between reality and the dreamlife. On the surface, it very plainly describes its music as the joyous billowy verses and choruses that recall an alternate dimension of the mind, not the tickles of sleep right before it, and definitely not the harsh cold realism of the day. But with hypnagogia entering the realm of indiedom more and more, with Emeralds’ quasi-dark tones and Tame Impala’s sun-soaked exhaustion, it should be of no surprise that another act derived from another subgenre of the past is subtly adjusting its wavelengths to fit more with the trends of the moment, whether widely appealing or not.
This is where Wild Nothing could potentially cause a breakout of mass hypnagogia in the near future if they were to influence other acts, whereas the ambience of Emeralds is always going to be largely ignorable and the analog scuzz-fuzz of Tame Impala will always sound infinitely dated. Gemini is chock full, from beginning to end, with nothing but endearing qualities, from its spunky yet sleepy tremolo-laden guitar licks to its distant starry atmospheres that makes eyes wish they were telescopes and hearts wish they were in zero gravity. And that’s just the dream-pop aspect of the record. Imbued throughout the captivating tracklist is also some of the most effortlessly balanced orchestration I’ve heard this year: and this is exactly what I feel is most engaging about hypnagogia. That a song can lull you into a eyelash-fluttering coma is one thing; that a song can awake in you some startling realization of the vital need to live during your waking hours is another; and what’s even more than either of these scenarios is when an album can inspire you to walk the thin line between the two. One second you’re listening to a song that specifically calls out in a kind of half-groan/half-coo the desire to live in the dreamworld (ironically calling me awake for the first time after listening to both Emerald and Tame Impala), and the other I’m sucked into the slow-motion whirlwind of space and time with the wistful sounds of a band that might actually be playing their instruments in their sleep. Wild Nothing tread the line in a way that neither of the aforementioned artists could (though tried admirably), and this is why hypnagogia is popping up more than we probably realize. Ariel Pink’s certainly doing it under the guise of lo-fi and 80s revivalism, and maybe while it by name and some of its more truer proponents aren’t getting the acclaim it’s floundering to achieve, the reason why is quite simple: how in our hyper-awake world of 24-hour internet, news, and electricity are we to find in this waking life the populism behind something that is innately part of our time away from all three of these incessant troublemakers of modern life?