Lately, more and more artists choose to embrace a variety of arts and intertwine them in search of their own voice or recognition as a novelty. Even more often, music seems to be granted with a somewhat perceivable quality; thus the listener can construct his own new and personal experience. Nevertheless, Joe Frawley steers clear of what is now slowly turning into a norm and gives his twelve melodic experiments a bit of an edge, leaving room for interpretation while dragging the audience to his desired tract.

A Book of Dreams starts its own uniform unravelling with “The City (Map 1),” a fragile piano melody interwoven with delicate vocals, inspiring one to breathe in… breathe out. Slowly, Frawley constructs a singular world, a state of the art city centre jam, allowing you to witness all the car crashes and banalities of everyday life but denying a soundtrack other than your own respiration. This dreamy sonata goes on and on for twelve tracks, transpiring the impression of a life wasted on some reverie’s fringes.

And yet, apart from realistically depicting a sleepy universe, there is something undeniably distinct to A Book of Dreams, for the album explores the pure quality of sound, from the bare touch of piano keys to the organic noise and hollow voices. If anything, this untamed mix grows to become wearisome; it is indeed a musical effort that should, and must remain enclosed within each listener’s private cosmos, otherwise it might strike one as pretentious and dull. In many ways, it bears a certain resemblance to Balmorhea’s self titled album – there resides an almost identical stroke of keys that, unlike the aforementioned, remains undeveloped in Frawley’s album. What he does instead is to father abstract and repetitive doodles that do not expand into something meaningful but bring patterns into existence; it is here where the composer comes out as an artist rather than a musician, as he deliberately moulds every note in shape of a gentle and frail dream, on the verge of being interrupted by an alarm clock.

A Book of Dreams could be easily mistaken for chamber music, if it weren’t for the constant and, to some extent, random dialogue between the well studied and recorded sounds and vocals. Sparse, extremely intimate and constantly undermining one’s imagination, Frawley’s record juxtaposes a series of visual elements that do not however embellish it with any cinematic character. Like the music, the listener’s thoughts are kept at an intermediate level, never straying too far from reality, but offering hints about what can be discovered. And sometimes that is the only thing musical notes are able to do – fasten one to the impenetrable truth of his own present.

-Diana Sitaru