Maika Loubté - Lucid Dreaming
They say dreams are just our brains trying to make sense of random electric signals produced when we sleep. While we often have bad dreams and nightmares that naturally reflect our anxieties and fears, typical dreams with narrative structures may depend more on the individual personality of the dreamer. Like a Rorschach test, how people connect the dots and make sense of things is different for each person. On Lucid Dreaming, not only do we get to experience the dreams of Maika Loubté, but also her thoughts about them, how she interprets her dreams and communicates them to others. Lucky for us, she happens to be a multilingual, creative musician with a beautiful soul and a childlike wonder regarding life and the universe.
The album starts with you being plunged deep into the dream world, and as you come up for air the synth you hear represents rays of sunshine. Literally, the track title is "I Was Swimming to the Shore and Heard This" and was conceived after a dream. This sets the tone of the album, the interesting use of synths and vocals to turn emotions and objects from Maika Loubté's dreams into sounds. Throughout the album, there are bits of beauty and warmth contrasted with dissonance and unease, tension and release. Vocals are manipulated to sound confusing or unintelligible at times, and the use of different languages heightens the sense of mystery, but underneath the digital percussion and sub bass keep things moving along, you keep being propelled forward as the scenes and sounds change before you can figure out what's going on.
A large part of Lucid Dreaming is searching for answers and trying to make sense of things. Who are we? Where do we go when we die? This was inspired in part by a death in the family, specifically on the track "5am", but comes up again on "Flower in the Dark", "Mist", and "Zenbu Dreaming". There's a lot of "Why" and then "I don't know". She questions the hand that is dealt to us ("System"), the meaning of events ("Lucid Dreaming"), and whether the miracle of life is truly real ("Zenbu Dreaming"). Part of this may be just the musings of a young person without a wealth of life experience, but it demonstrates her curiosity and openness to multiple perspectives, and that is reflected in her thoughtful and deliberate choice of words and sounds.
The other constant in the album is water. It comes up in the lyrics on several songs and ties the whole album together. Water itself is a mysterious substance, it gives and takes life, it can be pure or conceal darkness. It's an appropriate element for reflection and pondering the mysteries of life. Most of all, water flows constantly, and similarly the music is very smooth, it shifts and meanders as it carries you through genres such as drum and bass, break beat, electronica and synth pop. Melodies and chords ascend and descend, sounds reverberate and echo like ripples in a pond, and there's even samples of water sounds.
The beauty of Lucid Dreaming lies in its ability to convincingly draw you into a world of dreams as it is consistent from start to finish in concept, exotic and varied in sound, and thought provoking in lyrical content. The album even features a few instrumentals, which are dreams in themselves where she retrieves a demo CD-R from a corpse, and witnesses a badly acted kids' musical. This makes it feel just like a real night of dreaming where you see different episodes as you go through multiple REM cycles. All human beings may have dreams, but on Lucid Dreaming, Maika Loubté has weaved magic to turn dreams into something much more than just random electric signals.