Memories of a distant place and time haunt The Dream My Bones Dream, the sixth full-length album from Japanese singer/songwriter Eiko Ishibashi. These songs began taking shape after her father died two years ago, prompting Ishibashi to investigate a period of his life spent in Manchukuo, a puppet state created by Imperial Japan before the start of World War II. “It was just an abstract concept, like something that happened in a faraway land,” Ishibashi said in a recent interview with The Wire. Talking with relatives and finding photos from the era made it real, inspiring her to connect this foggy family past to her present life. This set not only became an experiment in bringing memory to bear on this moment but also a nine-song summary of Ishibashi’s oeuvre.
Since Ishibashi launched her solo career in 2006, each of her albums has represented another stylistic upheaval. She moved from the instrumental maximalism of 2008’s Drifting Devil to spacious, piano-based songs on Carapace only three years later. She has since pivoted to smoky jazz and even burrowed into the space between Merzbow’s static blasts. U.S. expatriate and producer Jim O’Rourke has been a constant in her recordings this decade, although he steps back a bit for Dream, leaving all the musical ideas to Ishibashi. (“I kind of decided to be almost invisible,” he told The Wire.) Many of Ishibashi’s contemporary interests reappear during Dream, from the upright-bass-assisted jazz of the title track to the piano sparseness of the saccharine “To the East.” New electronic elements afford these familiar approaches a dreamlike atmosphere.
Though Ishibashi has gravitated toward keyboards recently, she played drums in Panicsmile, a noisy rock band that incorporated complex rhythms into their whirlwind. She places a renewed interest on rhythm here, a surprising turn that gives these songs an anxious urgency not found on other recent releases. The beat of “A Ghost in a Train, Thinking” subtly mutates from a militaristic march into fragmented meters, pulling listeners deeper into its slow motion. Twin drums disrupt “Agloe.” Sudden kicks and snare hits that lurk deep in the mix add tension by taking unexpected shots at the lush keyboards and vocals at the song’s center.
Drumming contributes to the album’s exploration of a part-reflected, part-imagined past, too. The rhythms across Dream often recall trains, connecting the numbers to Ishibashi’s original inspiration to explore another newly revealed fold of her family history—that her grandfather worked on the Manchurian railroad, a vital transit line running through the Japanese puppet state. On “Tunnels to Nowhere,” Dream’s most aggressive song, the beat pounds beneath lurching keyboard bursts and swelling strings, arranged to enhance the claustrophobic feel. It’s unnerving, a fitting reminder that nostalgia often hides something ugly. By comparison, the weakest moment here, “Silent Scrapbook,” lacks the ballast of drums and feels vaporous.
The past fades in and out of these songs. Using transistor radio snippets of speeches and musical performances, “Agloe” becomes a collage of uneasy atmosphere draped around the bones of a soft pop song. (September’s After the Smoke plays with similar ideas and, in retrospect, is an experimental prelude for Dream). She occasionally accents its lyrics in Mandarin with chants of “remember,” the effect again reconnecting the past and present.
During “Iron Veil,” someone speaking Mandarin announces train station names as the drums rumble on. This is Ishibashi’s most direct attempt to place this release in a geographical and historical context, but the setting seems just out of reach, not actually there but imagined. Rather than offer answers, The Dream My Bones Dream grapples with memories that aren’t one’s own and tries to find some kernel of wisdom within them. It’s a multilayered, foggy work and one of Ishibashi’s fullest collections to date, showing us how the past can propel us forward.
