Style: Ambient, drone, dreampunk
Primary Emotions/Themes: warmth, love
Thoughts: Sometimes I wonder what the appeal for dreampunk was for me. At the core of the genre it's another take on ambient. One typically focused on urban life over nature. Beauty can be found in nearly any setting, and dreampunk tries to put the beauty of the city into musical form.
Standing on a street corner on a rain filled night with neon light cascading down on you is quite the vivid picture. It's taken almost directly from the visual ethos put forward by the first Blade Runner movie, and in many ways the music can be seen as an extension of the music that Vangelis created for that groundbreaking movie.
That said, all things evolve. Musical genres change over time, and dreampunk is no different. One of those artists was never afraid to move their sound forward is F0x3r. Moving from the future garage scene into dreampunk was a huge change in style that came with the Neon Rain album. This album distilled the entirety of the genre into nine tracks that swept me a way into a city of dreams.
Define Love is the current album from Fox and it picks up right where Neon Rain left off. The music contained within these nine tracks embrace the slower, drone filled side of the genre. They encourage meditation and reflection. The music encourages inner peace, acceptance, warmth, and most of all - love.
The music itself may be better classified as drone rather than anything to do with the dreampunk genre. However it is classified though, the album moves me greatly. I am able to close my eyes and be transported to places beyond this earth.
The songs have the slowest and most subtle of melodies going on, and as they progress so do the visuals in my head. Glimpses of distant galaxies and far off cities that are beyond human comprehension. Places where hate and malice no longer exist, places where the citizens are excellent to one another. Places that don't exist on this rock we call Earth.
The music is so pure, so unadulterated from the emotions that are written into it's very DNA, that it's hard for me to find any fault in it. I've listened to it when I'm anxious, happy, sad, severely depressed, and angry. No matter what my emotional state is Define Love helps balance me, it helps me find my center once again. Not many albums can do that with me - bring me to a specific state of mind every time I listen. For this alone Define Love is incredible.
The more I think about these things the more I wonder if dreampunk is a microgenre that has carved out a specific sound within the larger ambient soundscape. If I didn't know that Define Love was classified as dreampunk I would have thought that it was a droning ambient album instead.
I'm not even sure what dreampunk is anymore, but I do know that the time I spent in that microcosmos was mostly a good one. Most importantly the music that I was exposed to helped me get back into the ambient genre that I love so much. Sometimes the smallest things can have a life altering effect on you, and this seems to be one of them. Define Love helps bring back wonderful memories of times past, and for that it is invaluable.
Written October 25th 2023
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