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FROM ANDROMEDA AND BACK RADIO: SKIES THAT DO NOT FADE

I remember being in Chicago back in the day, listening to an FM rock station. After a bevy of alternative rock, the DJ suddenly put on the Waltz from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. At the art store where I worked, one of the young hipsters immediately yelled, "Tchaikovsky!" and began conducting with her hands. I'll never forget that moment. We had gone from, say, Throwing Muses to Tchaikovsky, and I remember thinking: How cool was that? Here was music making its own case. It didn't plead. It didn't demand. In its own way, it rocked. And then, after that glorious interlude, it was back to alternative rock. The funny thing was that the classical piece had not seemed out of place. It held its own. It brought to the table its own heft, its own weight. It wasn't preachy. It wasn't better than. It was simply another fiber in the fabric of the day. And maybe that's the way great music should be heard. Not fenced off by genre. Not placed behind glass. Not approa...
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FROM ANDROMEDA AND BACK RADIO: DREAM III


A perfect interlude to move us into some head-clearing space.

Astropilot is the "Who you gonna call?" magician when your head needs to be reset—or when you want to build on what has gone before. Here, "Dream III," from his magisterial Reveries album, does double duty in this regard. It clears the head while allowing "Petite Fleur" to serve as an appropriate prologue.


You can play it as it lays, favorite cool-down beverage in hand, or you can put its peculiar powers to work: liberating the mind from its cobwebs and aiding and abetting, say, a late-night session of writing, calculating or reading.

Astropilot is interesting to me because, with him, ambient isn't just ambient. It's something more.

Reveries isn't merely a soundscape. It's dream-scaping. It's soundtrack-of-the-moment-scaping. It's comfort-scaping. "Dream III," the final track on the album, bobs and weaves through all three. One minute you know it's there; the next you don't. Then, almost without your noticing, it finds its way back into consciousness.

It has a siren's ability to pull you toward it, but unlike those dangerous singers of old, it never leads you onto the rocks. Instead, it seems to create room—room for thought, room for imagination, room for whatever might be waiting just beyond the clutter.

Such a song does not automatically portend what comes next. That's precisely its magic.

It merely announces that the door has been opened.

Anything might walk through.

What that "anything" is?

We'll find out.

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