007 - Goamae - Planet Mansion

The music of dreams can take on many forms.  Be it reverb saturated synth pads taking us to beautiful landscapes with their ambience or maybe a soft beat leads us through gentle melodies as we are narrated down a rainy city street at night.  The sound that Goamae (Guild of Advanced Music and Exploration) has created on Planet Mansion falls well within the dreampunk genre, but calls to mind none of the former images. This record takes dream music and turns it on its head.  The rain saturated cityscapes are replaced with oriental mountainsides and neon lights with heavenly meteorite showers.   

Just listen to Heartbeat, the second song on the album.  The track starts off very simply but quickly swells into this massively emotional collection of female vocals,  pan flute, and synth pads that create a sound that is rare inside of dreampunk.  In fact, this sounds more like an old Enigma track or something that Delirium would have written in the late 90’swhile still maintaining the ideals of dream music.  The elements all come together and play off of each other so that none of them steals the spotlight.  I could listen to this track all day, it's so well constructed.  

Goamae consists of two friends, one with an electric music background and the other from a more traditional band setting.  These conflicting styles are meshed together in such a way that the live instrumentation and electronics work in a cohesive fashion.  The mix of organic and synthetic really works well to Goamae’s benefit and gives them a bit of an edge in where they can take their sound.

The band created the album around a concept of a supreme being creating a planet as his lover.  She is the sole resident and she resides in a huge mansion.  This leads the album to two musical foci.  The first trilogy of songs has a strong emotional quality to it, sometimes even joyful.  The second batch of songs has a much more sombre feel to it, sometimes even delving into melancholy with the tones used.  

This change in tone is a mix of intentionality and as the band put it “happy little accidents.”  In the first half of the album they have captured the freedom and exploration that comes with having a planet all to yourself.  The sense of wonder that would come from looking around and through every nook and cranny, wondering what comes next.

They also explore the loneliness that comes with being the sole resident on an entire planet.  Solitude takes a mental toll on any creature, divine or not.  This is explored to a much greater extent on the album’s second half.  

The songs were not expressly written with this in mind. When the duo was working on putting the album together they found that the songs they had created fit into this narrative that they had in mind.  Happy little accidents, indeed.  

The album wraps up with 愛陶酔.  A song that takes all of the elements explored throughout the album and combines them to see us off.  The song simultaneously includes the wonders and yearning for something greater found at the start of the album and combines it with the sorrow and loneliness.  It weaves together many synthetic instruments but also adds in a harp, saxophone, and female vocals.  The effect is staggering in its beauty, and is pretty much the best way that they could have closed out the album.  

On Planet Mansion, Goamae have not only created a very distinct dreampunk album but they have truly embraced the punk element.  The feeling of rebellion, doing the unexpected, embracing anarchy.  They have created a beautiful sound that is entirely within the genre while simultaneously turning its back on every one of the genre’s aesthetic tropes.  

Acknowledgments
Huge thanks to Goamae for taking the time to answer my questions and discuss their album with me.  As always thank you to Blissmonkey and DRC for the promotion and editing.