Rural Tapes - Oneiric

A Closer Listen

I don’t sleep, I dream. When you wake (you’re still in a dream). Dream a little dream of me. The dreamer is still asleep. Dreams are like water, colourless and dangerous. You may recognise some of these songs, a sample of tunes concerned with sleep and dreaming. It’s a topic ripe for exploration – numerous songwriters say that a song came to them in a dream (“Scrambled Eggs Yesterday” by Paul McCartney being one of the most famous examples). Some musicians reference lucid dreaming, others mention sleep paralysis when explaining their creative process. Sometimes the songs come to you, other times you (un)consciously pursue the music. And who can say that they have never woken up with a random song stuck in their head? As advertisers claim, it’s the power of dreams.

A quick look at the titles on Oneiric – and, indeed, the album cover and title – indicates that Arne Kjelsrud Mathisen, aka Rural Tapes, has fashioned his new record around dreaming. He’s not the first to use the word as a title – A Closer Listen readers may be familiar with works by More Eaze (emo-ambient) and Boxcutter (bass-quaking dubstep), also called Oneiric, which at the very least underline how individual our dreams are.

What is perhaps surprising is that Rural Tapes has been dreaming of the mid-’90s Birmingham music scene. This is not a complaint, just an observation. After a brief intro, “Flower Lab” comes barrelling in, very much like an instrumental Broadcast track. “Fantasia” could be an outtake from Plone’s debut album, possibly rejected because it’s too tuneful. “Flower Lab” feels a little bit busy in comparison to the softer, more electronic fare found further in, but it certainly grabs the attention. As someone who has woken up with both “Come On Let’s Go” and “Plock” bouncing around the noggin, I appreciate the influence.

There are a couple of dream collaborations on Oneiric as well. Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor guests on the ghostly, ambient “Retire The Fool” which is suitably haunting – it feels slight at first but gradually sinks its hooks in the listener. “Lingering Souls”, the penultimate track, features Gary Olson of Ladybug Transistor on vocals, a lovely pop song that, in a different timeline, could be a hit. Oneiric was recorded on old analogue equipment, with Mathisen soaking up influences from French dream pop to the New York tape experimentalists of the 1960s, which explains the album’s warmth. All of these sounds are wrapped up in the closer “Lucid Dreaming”, which rattles along in the middle section and has a woozy coda, as if the tape was getting stuck on a spindle.

Dreams are weird – it’s like a rapid fire burst of memories and experiences that the brain has to make sense of. In the same way, Mathisen has taken all these influences and ideas and has made sense of them all; it seems from the track titles that he retains memories of his dreams long after waking. It helps that he has the talent to turn these thoughts into reality and infuse the whole experience with a rich ambience. It makes sense that he’s releasing this on a label that has a tradition of charmingly melodic albums that occupy their own insular environment. Rural Tapes and Clay Pipe Music – the dream partnership. (Jeremy Bye)