Dream Dream Dream – Madeon

I fear the weight of my dreams

Your codeword is “Slip”

The fulfillment of artistic intent is a controversial measure of a song’s quality because it’s the measure that is easiest to unravel, and once you do it rarely goes anywhere. It’s all good and well to say if a song sounds pretty to your ears, or if an artist is weaving every line into a tapestry of poetry and emotion. But how do you explain to someone that this is simply what it is, but it’s everything it needs to be.

Dream Dream Dream is hard to take out of Madeon and the context he exists in, playing second-fiddle to the pioneer of a whole movement of aesthetic in electronic music: Porter Robinson. Saying Madeon was only every “more Porter” is oversimplifying massively, but it’s not exactly the easiest to untangle their appeals. Spitefire sounds a lot like the stuff Madeon was releasing on Youtube around the same time, and while Worlds ventured more into the -Steps of the world and Adventure dabbled in Complextro and French House it’s hard to deny that they weren’t experimenting in broadly the same way, even if it was in different genres. And Madeon always drew the short straw because he seemed to reliably be a year behind Porter on release schedules. This is all before Shelter, by the way, which blended together their audiences even further whilst giving Porter all the credit when y’know… Madeon was the one who made the song.

The fact that unless you’re a EDM fan you don’t know what any of the things I just referred too are kinda of illustrates the whole point. It’s always been hard for Madeon to just be Madeon. So when Porter moved on to Virtual Self, fans of Madeon were left awkwardly waiting to see what his next move was supposed to be. Was he just going do his own take on Vitrual Self’s 90’s cocaine trip through Jungle and Speedcore? Madeon stayed quiet though, he released a dark-mix of Shelter but that’s about it. The summer of 2019 came around and we got our answer to that looming question. The new era of Madeon was finally here and it was…

…it was okay. All My Friends is a pretty fun song. In retrospect it was a pretty gutsy move to make his lead single after half a decade of silence essentially say “I’m scared nothing I release after so long will meet expectations”. But it was fine enough.

Then a month later he released Dream Dream Dream and oh boy, it is absolutely the most flawless song of the year.

It’s flawless not in terms of being the most universally appealing song of the year, but rather flawless in the same way a gemstone is categorised as flawless. It’s crystal-clear in every possible element, there’s no muddying clouds of influence and expectation in Dream Dream Dream, no moment where Madeon allows himself to let off his vision of the song he wanted to create. The moment where he finally gets to stand on the edge of the shore of enlightenment and watch the anxieties of the world he’s created wash away underfoot.

I fear the weight of my dreams. Is such a powerful Modus Operandi to build your message around. Breaking out of a feeling of dissatisfaction with one’s self is a paralysingly scary concept. It drives stronger people than most to have the courage to follow your dreams because dreams are heavy. Immeasurably heavy. Dreams can and will grab your brain by the stem and squeeze every last drop of life out of you because they know how much power they have over you. The prospect of not only letting them, but feeding them borders on madness if you lack the will to do it properly. Madeon doesn’t shy away from that fear; It’s hard to heal the pain after all. But by blending together the technicolour lifeblood of his own sound with the heavenly subtext that comes with twisting Gospel music around his producer fingers he takes that leap.

Dream Dream Dream’s formlessness adds so much to its feelings of freedom also. The song lacks anything resembling typical structure, it comes across more as one 4 minute bridge than anything more coherent. But that’s okay. Life doesn’t need to have structure. It just needs to begin and you’ve got to keep moving forward through it. Let the individual moments flow past you like lilies down a river, watch them float away and never go back for them. Don’t try to force the stream to flow with you, just have the good faith to let it continue around you as you push further upstream towards the source. And as the track dissolves further, as the voices fade and the stormy final drop descends before it too peters out into the quiet, you’re welcomed in the silence to find what you’re looking for.

That’s why Dream Dream Dream is the song of the year. It achieves an artistic nirvana unlike any other.