When Steve Wynn's band originally formed in 1981, The Dream Syndicate's live shows often featured extended improvisations. However, long format songs were never a particular feature of their six studio albums. Although named in tribute Tony Conrad's 1973 Krautrock album 'Outside the Dream Syndicate', their sound was more like a cross between The Velvet Underground and Neil Young's Crazy Horse.
However, the noodling eleven minute title track to 2017's comeback album, 'How Did I Find Myself', presaged the radical direction the band have now taken on this remarkable new release.
'The Universe Inside' consists of an edited down version of an eighty-minute jam recorded after midnight in a Richmond studio. Initially there was no idea that the results would be turned into an album.
What Wynn calls a "formless, trippy mass" consists of five tracks with a playing time of just under an hour. The song lengths are respectively 20:27, 7:36, 8:56, 9:55 and 10:53.
What you hear on the record is what the band played in order. Only horns and vocals were added later or, as Wynn puts it, "all we added was air".. In the same spirit of spontaneity, a one-take test run of random, unconnected lyric ideas are the vocals that made it to the record.
The twenty minute plus opening track, The Regulator, is a kind of psychedelic musak best experienced while watching the striking visuals in the accompanying video directed by David Daglish.
As well as the four piece band, this track features The Long Ryders' Stephen McCarthy on electric sitar and saxophone parts by guest Marcus Tenney (a member of Richmond's all-instrumental 'Butcher Brown').
Aside from the obvious Jazz and Germanic Prog-Rock influences, you can also hear elements of early Roxy Music. Eno inspired Roxy tunes such as 'For Your Pleasure' and 'The Bogus Man' are obvious touchstones.
Some notion of the range of sources can be gauged by the fact that Apropos Of Nothing, is described as Musique concrète meets Miles Davis.
By the time you get to the final song, The Slowest Rendition, you can practically hear exhaustion setting in as Wynn sings/speaks lines like "I am the derelict conductor of the broken symphony"
Of course, this is all a far cry from Wynn and company's Paisley Underground roots. The result is more akin to the marijuana induced headspace of La Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music. Back in the 1960s, Tony Conrad and John Cale were members of that collective and the subsequent 'Dream Syndicate' project was, in John Cale's own words, "motivated by a scientific and mystical fascination with sound".
With similar intent, the head music of 'The Universe Inside' offers a portal to another world; an escape hatch into an alternative reality. Perhaps this all timely since, the way the world is now, there's never been a better time to revive the hippy philosophy of turning on, tuning in and dropping out.
