Daou - Forgotten Stories

A Closer Listen

Daou‘s Forgotten Stories prompts nostalgia, its sounds hearkening back to antique equipment: stylus crackle, peeling photographs and perhaps forgotten stories of one’s own.  The patina is everything: notes abraded by tape and time, melodies distorted, memories blurred. Loops suggest rumination or regret, while underlying drones imply the cumulative weight of decades.

And yet, the album is not altogether melancholy.  On “Last Sunday,” the tone brightens as a voice emerges from the ether, and while it doesn’t last, it’s enough to brighten the spirit.  Soft footsteps and a hint of radio transmission ground recollection in reality.  “Silent Garden” extends the connection through the voices of children.  A party makes polite conversation.  All the while, the record goes round and round, the needle skirting wearily through layers of years, as if playing a tree trunk.

On “Ephemeral reflections,” backward masking sends the mind reeling into the past.  The deeper the brain goes, the thicker the drone grows, as if the buried memories are too painful to recall, or the hippocampus too foggy to produce sharp images.  In “Worn journal,” the inability to decipher distinct words justifies the title, suggesting that temporal clarity may be beyond reach.  The brain misremembers, distorts, and invents.  The conversation of “Neighbors” is clearer, but merges into background hum.

The closing titles ~ “Interference” and “Vivid Dreams” ~ reference the elusive nature of memory, which seems blurred when one is awake and sharp when one is unconscious, only to fade again in the morning light.  Edgar Allan Poe asks, “Is all that we see or seem / But a dream within a dream?”  While playing Forgotten Stories, one imagines a different question: even without clarity, is there not beauty in the blur?  (Richard Allen)