It’s perhaps no
surprise, given the glorious restlessness of the critically-acclaimed
idiosyncratic folklore pop that formed his previous two records,
2011’s Witchazel
and
last year’s KillThe Wolf,
that Matt Berry’s forever fertile mind has been affecting his
sleep. About a year ago, the celebrated actor, comic, writer and
musician found himself staring at the ceiling night after night in
his London flat, suffering from insomnia. With his creative stimulus
in overdrive, however, he turned the deprivation into a new
expressive outlet: two long-form musical pieces under the title of
Music
For Insomniacs.
A huge fan of
producer Mike Oldfield, most notably his famous 1973 opus Tubular
Bells, Berry
places Music
For Insomniacs in
similarly rarefied air. The 45-minute work twinkles in an outer orbit
of isolated space, away from the more explicit themes and earthy
locations of his previous musical endeavours, using languid and
otherworldly Moog and synthetic sounds to create a feeling of calm.
For Berry, who recorded next door to his bedroom in the dead of night
when sleeplessness struck, the album’s creation became a therapy of
sorts, as he sought to find the balance in the music that could
equate to serenity in his mind. “I looked into the kind of music I
was listening to during bouts of insomnia and found the ambient
minimal pieces were sometimes too uneventful and just kept me awake,
but then the pieces that were too hectic ended up having a similar
effect too,” he explains.
As such, Music
For Insomniacs
is constantly changing shape even within its dream-like constancy.
Occasionally it breaks the long, sweeping electronic brushes with
nursery-rhyme keyboard motifs; at others it brings the listener back
into the real world, samples of human voices and whispers drifting
through his ethereal constructs. He’s also not afraid to pool
layers together to form louder passages, creating dense swells of
sound that rise and fall away. In contrast to his previous record,
Music
For Insomniacs
was recorded alone; “insomnia was something I suffered on my own so
I wanted the creation of this album to be an equally solitary
experience,” he says. “It had to be completely personal so I knew
I had to record every note myself.”
After doing this,
Berry would listen to every recorded segment backwards and pick out
anything that would work as part of the composition by adding to its
lucidity; “the results hopefully give the listener the effect of
slowing down, moving backwards or stopping and resuming the journey
in slow motion,” he says. The onus is very much on personal and the
abstract space, leaving any themes as blank as possible so that the
listener can form their own images. This way of soundscaping,
creating a uniquely vivid but vague tapestry, stems from Berry’s
long love of long-form electronic works, of Oldfield’s and also the
likes of Jean-Michel Jarre. “The draw of this long form music was
that it felt like I was embarking on a journey that I knew was going
to continue longer than the usual 2:35 or a bunch
of 2:35 songs stopping and starting,” he explains.
“Albums like Tubular
Bells
and Jarre’s Oxygene
hugely affected me as a youngster. I found greater stimulation
brought about by the range of different emotions felt by persevering
with one side of an album of continuous music. Not a month
passes still that I don't revisit one or both of those records.”
Thankfully for
Berry, he has beaten his insomnia, thanks to this project and advice
sought from, among others, magician Andy Nyman on inducing sleep.
However Music
For Insomniacs
remains behind, left as an aid to others suffering from the
affliction, but also as a beguiling document of his own state of mind
during this period, resulting in a wonderfully still 45 minutes of
music, set apart from the non-stop bustle of 21st
century living.
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