Dream Island Laughing Language

We Say...

Review by Douglas Wolk

Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara, the duo at the core of Lucky Dragons, make the most human-sounding electronic music around. Almost all of the 22 brief, hovering pieces that make up their sixth-or-so album (it's hard to keep track of their prodigious output) are built around some element of human frailty. Many of them, in fact, involve the Dragons' voices — murmuring the title phrase of "Drinking Dirty Water," say, or acting as wordless, approximate-tone synthesizers. The other raw materials of their digital arrays are similarly imprecise: hand-held chimes, birdsong, what sound like spinning coins. "My Are Singing" centers on a banjo flourish, and also involves a rhythm track that seems to be clicking tongues, as well as the flutter of two hooting voices run through some kind of digital effect. The inhumanly fast cycling tones of "I Keep Waiting for Earthquakes" give way to a rough-edged ensemble of recorders and piano. Most tracks have regular rhythms, but this isn't dance music, exactly: the repetition serves to hold each sound in place so it can be observed from all angles.

Fischbeck has talked about how the idea of an imaginary language was part of the concept behind this album, and it's rewarding to listen to it as a sort of grammatical primer. Generally, only a few sounds are audible at a time, and they repeat and cycle until they've made their relationship to each other clear; the final two tracks, "Very 1" and "Very 2," are the longest and most complicated on the album, acting something like the complete paragraphs at the end of an introductory language book. That, perhaps, would make the key to Dream Island Laughing Language its most conventionally songlike piece: "Oh I Understand," which is just Fischbeck's voice, harmonizing with itself, singing a little tune that goes "oh I understand/now I understand." It's a Rosetta stone of a record, less baffling and more beautiful every time it's played.