‘Dreamtime’ by Toru Takemitsu

Listening to Takemitsu's tonally ambiguous, stirring, ever-shifting music brings forth images of waves and clouds and initiates fantasies. In fact, it brings forth almost everything. It has the power and hypnotism of a spell...

Takemitsu has created some of the most dream-like orchestrations I've ever heard, which is why I was so excited to discover a piece by him titled Dreamtime. It's music of abandoned houses, autumn, leaves being carried on a gust; a beautiful mystery. Oddly, for me this is not music that conjures Japan or Europe, but America. It is quasi gothic in tone: music to accompany a Grant Wood painting; an infinitely deep Rothko; the quietly disturbing serenity of a Hopper; the photographic work of Clarence John Laughlin; or, most intriguingly, the score to a Shirley Jackson novel.

Dreamtime drifts along, never settling, always moving, undulating back and forth in its intensity, positive yet negative. It's emotionally indecisive, obsessive, gorgeously dissonant,  frightening, pensive, the musification of  doubt. A premonition.

Hauntingly potent, it's an affair lingering long in the imagination, akin to an enigmatic love dream upon waking. There just aren't enough ways or words to describe and express it - make of it what you will and savour every spine-tingling moment. Go find it.