Dream Interpretation seems to have been made as both an escape from and therapy for the difficult times that Japanese ambient maestro Kazuya Nagaya was living through while composing the album, but though it is sonically certainly a warm and embracing record, the comfort it offers is also desolate and at times piercingly sad.
The nine tracks (eight if you don’t include the alternate ‘Old Theatre Mix’ of ‘Dream Interpretation I’ that closes the album) are self contained, but the whole album is enveloped in a kind of resonant, yearning ambient glow which, along with the rich but intentionally limited sound palette, gives the album its particular character. Although on the whole the pieces (especially those in the middle of the album) are textural rather than melodic, there are enough tunes to place Dream Interpretation in that liminal space between ambient and modern classical music, rather than being an ambient work in the true sense. This kind of ethereal mood music can easily become wishy-washy and New Age, but thankfully, the solemn feeling of quiet but pervasive melancholy distances it from the world of the relaxing massage soundtrack, but it is, for the most part a very soothing piece of work.
The album is an encapsulation and maybe an exorcism of dreams that have particularly resonated with the composer over the years, and in interpreting them he has captured that universal combination of strangeness and familiarity that dreams – especially troubling dreams – have for us all. At the same time, it’s a specifically Japanese work, its layers of flute-like synths and passages of strangely bittersweet strings enriched with the textures of Zen Buddhist percussion. In Zen practice, the rumbling of singing bowls and the bells and gongs are believed to have a cleansing effect on the soul, but although those elements are present throughout the album, it’s a work that often feels saturated in regret rather than freedom or peace of mind. The opening track, ‘Thanatos’ is, despite the title, one of the album’s most beautiful pieces of music. Based around warm, but (I guess appropriately) funereal organ tones, it’s deeply sad and although it is perhaps consoling in its warmth of sound, it’s not music to raise your spirits so much as is a womb to crawl into and wallow in.
More unsettling aspects of dreams come with ‘Mother Wading in the River’, in which a pretty, but ominously reverberating sample of what sounds like a Japanese nursery rhyme or lullaby is swallowed into a vast and rumbling cloud of dark ambience, pierced by chimes that sound less cleansing than they do warning. Strangely reminiscent of Vangelis’ Blade Runner score, its mixture of melancholy and eeriness is potent and very effective, though hardly comforting. The stately ‘Dream Interpretation I’ falls somewhere between those two different aspects, being built on a foundation of chanting voices and gongs, but although haunting, it’s never disturbing and the sense of unease created by ‘Mother Wading in the River’ disperses, never quite to return; a shame in a way, as the otherworldly, calm and sad sound of ‘Dream Interpretation I’ persists through the next few tracks (‘Tibetan Philosopher’, ‘Wolfman’s Dream’ and ‘Dream Interpretation II’, all individually fine pieces), making the centre of the album sag a little.
It picks up again with the bass-driven ‘Heathen’ (the only piece on the album to have a beat as such, although it’s far removed from the near-techno of Nagaya’s ‘Cold Moon’), a piece of moody low-key electronica in which the shimmering ambience and bells provide a kind of aura around the dynamic bass. As well as being one of the album’s stronger tracks, ‘Heathen’ breaks the mood of listless melancholy, creating something more stormy and dramatic. The brief (3:32) ‘The Book of Sunken Memory’ is more dreamlike, a brittle and tense composition, guiding the the album towards its end on a insubstantial and mysterious note. The Old Theatre Mix of ‘Dream Interpretation I’ that follows has a more organic sound than the earlier version, but isn’t hugely different, but it’s stately flow closes the album in a more satisfying way than ‘The Book of Sunken Memory’, leaving the listener as they came in, in a cocoon of still and sombre sadness.
Dream Interpretation is an odd, often beautiful album. Clearly a deeply personal, even cathartic work for its composer, to the listener it’s immersive and often soothing, but, as interpretations its pieces are mysterious rather than revealing. Although the dreams that inspired it are potent and vivid enough to have stayed with Nagaya for years, what he leaves us with are vague images and fragments as gnomic and obscure as dreams themselves; but as magical too.
