Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
You could take a straw poll of your friends and family and come up with varying degrees of answers, from the perplexing, through to the bizarre and on to the thoughtfully played out, of how dreams are meant to be observed, studied, and even relieve the soul of the burden they may carry.
Dreaming is such an intrinsic part of human existence, and yet we pay it less regard than chasing the product of those visions, and the benefit of introspection, of interpretation, is lost, allowed to fade into nothing.
The great American writer, Edgar Allan Poe, once wrote, “All that we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream”, and it is in dreams that our thoughts, our inner demons and angels are released onto the conscious; how we act upon it though is up to each individual, and for those that prescribe to the art and theory of lucid dreaming, the dream shows the potential possible and where the recognition of belief begins.
It is in the Lucid Dreamers that reality is only a set of open eyes away, and for Brigitte Beraha the eyes, and the senses have surely been opened wide as she explores the paradox of modern living, the beauty in the simplicity that has been afforded us and the chaos of complexity to which our minds insists that we damage ourselves with.
Using a variety of expressions, in both the accomplished musicians joining Brigitte Beraha and the creative meld that goes in each of the four tracks, Lucid Dreamers doesn’t just take you through a myriad of notes or the dramatic sequences of acoustic and electronic wonder but it adds tension, tragedy, enveloping performance and an insight into how the mind can function when allowed to break down the perceived barriers that other insist you adhere too, that you religiously follow without question.
By breaking down these obstacles that lie in the realm between sleep and roused conscious, Brigitte Beraha, George Cowley, Tim Giles and Alcyona Mick bring the tracks Meaning Of The Blues/Orderly Ruin, Disorderly Ruin, Pandora’s Box and Lucid Dreamers from behind the thinly veiled sheen of romanticised and idealised perfection and instead offer the listener a relevance of truth, the individuality of fragile cohesion in a world consumed by dismissing dreams as flights of fancy.
An explosion of sound, the commotion of silence in wonder driven by openness and a pulse of human activity; Lucid Dreamers is forceful, sustained aural theatre, and it demands nothing but your dreams in action in return. Utterly stunning.
Brigitte Beraha releases Lucid Dreamers via Let Me Out Records on July 1st.
Ian D. Hall