Robot Dreams – Freddie Hill (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Science fiction, more importantly the point where it became a science fact, and music have always made very easy travelling companions. I guess there is a certain element of the “blank canvas” at work here. If you don’t really know what the future will look like, who can say what it will sound like? And, just as science fiction is able to take grand ideas and outlandish theories and make them palatable, so the music inspired by such future thoughts also need not follow rules and expectations to deliver something satisfactory. In fact, it is much better when it doesn’t.

Not that Freddie Hill’s album Robot Dreams contains anything particularly “out there,” the nature of the music, when you consider its elemental building blocks, is quite familiar, but, as always, the sonic architecture he builds with them is the revelation here. Many music makers would use the subject matter or concept as an excuse to blur the lines between the accessible and the avant-garde, not so here. Here, we find him blending funky grooves and soulful licks, urban beats and jazz refrains, occasionally more Yacht Rock polish, and I mean that in a good way, and liquid electronica into these instrumental pieces. So, whilst he may be musically describing concepts and themes that are off the beaten track, or at least off the usual track for popular music, he is doing so in a very familiar musical language.

It would be fair to say that Robot Dreams is a concept album or at least an album of concepts based around the interface between man and machine and where such a path might take us in the future. Like all instrumental music, it foregoes the option of direct communication, which come built in to music with a lyrical component. But I never see this path as being detrimental or in any way inferior to the usual worded musical approach. In fact, quite the opposite is true. If lyrics inform the listener precisely what you are trying to say, the point you are making, then instrumental music instead conveys mood and emotion or perhaps uses such devices to create vibes or express broader concepts. And within these concepts, the listener is free to draw their own conclusions and think their own thoughts. The song might remain the same, but how it speaks to and what it says to each listener is different from one person to the next and even every time it is played.

But that is enough supposition about the nature of the music. Generally, the only thing that you can do to truly understand it is to dive in and soak it up. Circuitry kicks things off with a blend of funky grooves and sleek West-coast-sounding moves, Freddie Hill’s keyboard cascades, echoing both the traditions of electro-pop past and positing the possible direction of new musical forms towards the future. It plays brilliantly with dynamics, wandering between dance floor licks and more spacious stomps, and even these first four minutes tell us a lot about the album to follow. But that is not to say that there aren’t plenty of sonic tricks and musical innovations to be navigated and marvelled at.

At the other end of the spectrum from the fun and funk of the opener, the title track feels darker, more brooding, introducing some lovely down-beat and descending trip-hop beats and progressions. Music that perhaps captures the essence of the fitful dreams of sleeping machines. And once you have made such connections, you realise that via just a title and some expressive music, you have been delivered into the territory of the likes of authors such as Asimov and Dick and their explorations of what it means to be human.

Algorhythm (note the spelling) sees us enter hip-hop territory, although what is hip-hop without its all important lyrical layer? Ambient-hop? Cinematic Beat? Chilled Dance? Maybe something else altogether. Thoughtless Feeling is urgent and driven before evolving into something else altogether more understated, Future Hustle a cascade of liquid sonics broken up with off-kilter electro-classical sounds and Fractals ends the album somewhere between rock and a harmonious place.

As I said earlier, instrumental music such as this opens up all manner of conversations and comes to any number of conclusions, but never universal ones. Instrumental music suggests all things to all people; it is myriad conversations being had simultaneously, the same question being posed and thousands of different answers being sent back in response. And if that isn’t the sort of dialogue, the kind of openness and imaginative thought processes we need to be having about where humanity goes next, then I wonder what is.

Who knew that a mere album of instrumental music could do all of that?