ALBUM REVIEW: 100 Psychic Dreams - Clock Dreams
“If you need motivation to keep going, if you need a soundtrack for a night of danger, or if you simply enjoy music that takes the idea of genre and breaks it over its knee, look no further.”
Those who know the mind behind 100 Psychic Dreams & VCR Vortex know that he's no stranger to John Carpenter (and a hundred other horror and scifi directors you've probably never heard of). The sometimes mainstream, sometimes cult auteur has put sugar plum visions of alien takeovers, evil zombie sailors, ghosts from Mars, shapeshifting monsters, genre-defining slashers, and.... Elvis into our hearts and minds.
An oft unsung component of his recipe is the music that swells behind the vision. Too few know that Carpenter was also the chief composer for most of his films' soundtracks. He was an early embracer of synthesizers, his sound strange, sometimes dated, sometimes futuristic, but most often pulling from a timeline and dimension that is outside of our own.
Using these works as inspiration, Shane Sanchez teamed up with fiddle player Oona Grady and multi-instrumentalist James Gascoyne (of Drank the Gold) to make Clock Dreams, an EP that feels like a lost soundtrack to a movie that would've rocked the horror genre. The tracks slither and crawl from your speakers and deeply implant the feeling that something way out in the distance is watching you with malicious intent. There is a masterfully displayed unease about the tracks, not in the way of a sophomorish mismatch of sounds, but in a way that communicates with laser focus that you are not safe and that you must keep going.
I often step with trepidation around works that try to fuse acoustic and electronic instruments, but in this case there's a story to be told that allows the many layers of sounds to coexist with just the right amount of tension. The violin dances over the twinkling arpeggiated synths. The often amorphous low end booms in a way that isn't quite man or machine. Sometimes the tracks make me feel like an eyepatch-sporting badass working my way through the streets of a post-apocalyptic NYC. Other times I listen and feel that I can't trust those around me, no matter how much they look just like the people I think that they are. These songs don't tell you what must be done, but they insist that if you don't take action, something or someone else will.
I hate to reduce these songs to the plane of referential media, though. They are so much more than that. Works by Carpenter, Goblin, & Frizzi were clearly not a blueprint, but a platform to jump and ultimately soar from. If you need motivation to keep going, if you need a soundtrack for a night of danger, or if you simply enjoy music that takes the idea of genre and breaks it over its knee, look no further.
Listen now on Bandcamp.