Dreams Top Rock [feat. Julee Cruise]

Marcus Schmickler has had a strange musical trajectory. On his first release, a self-titled 1996 debut under the alias Wabi Sabi, he took a dip into abstract computer-generated music. Dense and impenetrable, the drone-heavy album showcased a few great tracks and anticipated later trends in digital microsound, but was ultimately the kind of record you listen to once or twice and file away. He's also released, under his birthname, abstract electro-acoustic music built from collective improvisation. But he's best known for his work as Pluramon.

Schmickler debuted his Pluramon project in 1996 with Pick Up Canyon, an album that, while featuring prominent digital drones on some tracks, was essentially an instrumental rock project: godlike Can drummer Jaki Leibezeit provided the rhythmic pulse while Schmickler added guitar and all manner of computer effects. Though the record evoked the sound of German rock's heyday, it was very much a studio project, with Schmickler meticulously arranging the tracks to sound like a live band. (You might say that as Burnt Friedman is to dub, Markus Schmickler is to post-rock.) I wouldn't call either Pick Up Canyon or its 1998 follow-up Render Bandits great, but both have scattered moments of angular guitar rock brilliance.

With Pluramon's new album, Dreams Top Rock, well, Schmickler is off in another direction entirely. Let's start by pointing out that Schmickler's primary collaborator this time out in not a Krautrock legend or a pointy-headed noisenik from the Mego camp, but rather, the versatile chanteuse Julee Cruise. Cruise is most famous for her underrated 1989 album Floating into the Night, made in collaboration with Angelo Badalamenti and filmmaker David Lynch, on which she gave voice to the Twin Peaks theme "Falling". She was also in the B-52's for a couple of years there.

So, yeah, that Julee Cruise holed up with Markus Schmickler to make an album of MBV-channeling shoegaze tunes, if you can believe it. Then again, it's not surprising that rock's most texture-focused sound has turned out to be a serious influence on laptop musicians. As M83 established earlier this year, thickets of harmonic-rich drone can reach new levels of poignancy when channeled through a properly handled computer. Schmickler knows how to overdrive his guitar and then weave the resulting mess into a thick blanket to lay carefully over Cruise's delicate voice. These sounds together are what David Lynch likes to call a "perfect combo."

Since he's doing dreampop here, Schmickler edits wisely and lets his ten songs run for only 39 minutes. The centerpiece is "Time For a Lie", which is also reprised later in a different mix. It's clear from the first that there's a roughness to Schmickler's clouds of guitar distortion, as he lets a blocky, cheap-sounding noise linger at the edges. This dissonance throws Cruise's voice, which sounds like it was also run through a dozen delays and filters, into sharp relief. Schmickler ups the harshness considerably on the honestly titled "Noise Academy", sending random spikes of static through the center of Cruise's wordless moans. The beauty generated by the familiar blend of ethereality and brutal noise is breathtaking and makes me wonder how shoegaze ever fell out of fashion.

Throughout Dreams Top Rock, Julee Cruise's bravery in allowing Schmickler's level of vocal manipulation (one might even call it devastation) is admirable. She appears on most of the tracks, offering wordless chants to Schmickler's psychedelic swirl ("PS") alongside articulated dirge-like ballads that could almost be called "folky" if they weren't so sonically fucked up. On "Have You Seen Jill", Cruise's phrasing reminds me of Harriet Wheeler which, coupled with the acoustic guitar at the song's center, brings to mind the phrase "The Sundays Produced by Fennesz." In other words, the music of my dreams.

Every dense record needs a few tracks for the listener to come up for air. "Flagolea" is a lazy, futuro-jazz shuffle that reminds me of something by Flanger, while "Difference Machine" is another ballad with acoustic strums, slide guitar and a strange monologue happening somewhere in the background. These pauses cleanse the palate between the pea-soup thick sheets of sound that are the record's norm. What an awesome surprise. As neo-shoegaze records go, Dreams Top Rock is fantastic, a leftfield experiment for Markus Schmickler that succeeded brilliantly.