SunPath - Dream Music

Pitchfork 76

Given the hazy, post-genre melange of Leaving Records founder Matthewdavid’s own releases, it makes a certain kind of sense that he’d be interested in signing artists who represent his diverse tastes. The Leaving Records roster represents an almost baffling mix of post-house experimentalists (Seiho), hyper live-samplers (Deantoni Parks), American primitivists (Guy Blakeslee), world music pioneers (Laraaji) and straight up New Agers (Matthewdavid himself under the “Mindflight” moniker). Throw in some “Where did this come from?” reissues and you’ve got a label almost like no other. Leaving’s latest release, SunPath’s Dream Music, is in some ways its most obscurantist yet, but shows the label definitely has an ear for the uncommon and special.

Following last year’s triple cassette reissue of works by Laraaji (known most for his work with Brian Eno on the Ambient 3 album), Dream Music is a reissue compilation of two self-released records from the early ’80s by a beyond-obscure New Mexican New Age artist named Jeff Berry. The Laraaji release seemed to trigger a growing interest by the label in New Age, as it was followed by Matthewdavid’s own Trust the Guide and Glide under the Mindflight moniker. Trust the Guide channels the genre’s most familiar (and cloying) tropes, playing like a love letter to sounds many already struggle to take seriously. Dream Music, however, is something else entirely: an entrancing and truly weird blend of New Age, ambient music and outside art that still sounds remarkably fresh 30 years later.

It appears that Berry’s career of music-making was entirely limited to these two records, Yasimin & The Snowflake Dragon (1980) and SunPath 2 (1984), each of which consists of two 30-minute pieces of music and both of which were made during time Berry spent living in Northern New Mexico, which he described in an interview to Aquarium Drunkard as inspirational because “[It was] fresh. Unspoiled... The place oozed magic.” It’s easy to read this quote today and roll your eyes, but the quest for spiritual meaning and the hope it could be expressed through sound is core to the identity of not just New Age, but much experimental and ambient music as well.

In going after these visions, Berry’s goal with each of the four compositions on Dream Music was to evoke images, which lead to him spending a considerable amount time searching for specific sounds and/or inventing ways to manufacture or capture them. Beyond the driving moans and whirs of his Prophet synthesizer—which dominated ambient, New Age and synthesizer music in the late ’70s and early ’80s, as the first polyphonic synthesizer—and a handful of flutes, the instrumentation on Dream Music is conjured by a variety of homemade instruments and field recordings by Berry himself. The list of sound-makers he provides is lengthy but highlights include “Peyote ceremony water drum; self-built & chromatically cut glass; Mexican dove ocarina; field recordings of two Colorado streams: one outdoors & one inside a cave”; and “a field recording of a raging snowstorm captured under a full moon outside of the cabin window.” The latter two of course read like back-patting “Oh, of course you dids,” but to Berry’s credit, you can actually hear and identify these sounds within the recordings, and understand how they contribute depth and fullness to the compositions.

You can feel the infusion of these found sounds most acutely on the two tracks that make up the second cassette, the SunPath 2 album, specifically on second track “Stream and Crystal,” which begins with the stream recordings. Here, he leads with the stream recordings that run from beginning to end, giving off the sense that the synths are there to embellish the running water and not the other way around. Additionally, “Stream and Crystal” is the only cut of the four featuring vocals, with a two-minute spoken word recording of Berry’s own gentle incantations. “I awakened in a cave holding one of the crystals in my hand, becoming aware of my heartbeat, becoming aware of my breath...” he says, and continuing onward as the musical parts float in and out. After twenty or so minutes, the ornamentations drop off and only the sound of echoing, flowing water remains, bubbling and drip-dropping for another nine minutes as you feel yourself drift internally, before the water sounds build slowly and loudly into an unexpected crashing thunder that makes you realize Berry has literally lead you inside the cave to the base of a rushing waterfall. As cheesy as it might sound, the full experience of listening for thirty minutes to just running water with a careful dashes of synth and flute on top actually imparts the precise feeling Berry described—an awareness of your heartbeat and your breath.

“Gá Te,” the other track from SunPath 2, is the darkest and most emotive of the four. Beginning with the aforementioned “raging snowstorm” recording, “Gá Te” delivers a dark-of-winter tone of lonely menace that makes it easy to imagine yourself alone in a car or on a hill trudging toward a remote destination alone. As the snowstorm fades away, apocalyptic '80s television soundtrack synths emerge, setting the mood, before stark, quiet Prophet chords arrive to ring and hum ominously in a way that might recall for modern ears the sounds of “Vletrmx” or “Garbagemx” from Autechre’s Garbage EP. Both tracks from the first cassette Yasimin and the Snowflake Dragon have their moments as well, though neither touches the majesty of these two.

What is so impressive about Berry’s approach and technique—let alone the fact he made all of it in a pre-computer age—is that he manages to create these beautiful canvases while feeling neither contrived nor cheesy. His work is less redolent of George Winston, Enya, or Yanni than of Eno’s Apollo, Tim Hecker, or Oneohtrix Point Never. And impressively, Dream Music is actually “meditative” in a way that things described as being “meditative” rarely are, and despite the possible goofiness inherent in talk of “crystals,” “magic,” and “other dimensions,” it exudes a kind of naive authenticity of a spiritual experience that is just breathtaking.

Apparently Berry felt that the magic of New Mexico ran out in 1985, which led him to head for Wyoming, where he still lives today, no longer making (or at least, sharing) music of any kind. But thanks to Matthewdavid and Leaving Records, we now have Dream Music, which joins other notable recent reissues in making a quietly compelling case for New Age music as a respectable form of art.