When an album gets you asking the question “what is the purpose of music?” you know you’re onto something unusual. On a first listen through ‘From The Heights of a Dream’ by Deaf Joe it seems necessary to ask this question, as what we get is not the standard fare in any sense. Nine tracks on the record contain perhaps seven songs, with two weird sonic assaults in the middle there fulfilling some sort of purpose probably.

Of course this isn’t an honest analysis of the album.

So then, what is music?

Well, if you want to get technical about it. Music doesn’t really create anything, it takes already existing elements and gives them structure for the purpose of capturing something beautiful and expressing emotion. The difference between what Deaf Joe is doing on tracks like For The Skull And The Bones and Something That Needs Nothing, and what the likes of God Is An Astronaut are doing, is the post-rockers are assembling sounds from the arsenal of rock music, whereas Joe is forming songs out of less traditional materials; white noise, nature, wind chimes, it’s hard to know what exactly.

But whatever it is it is music. There is a form and a rhythm here, but the fascinating thing is studying your own reaction to it. Obviously this is a rare beast of an album, as there’s very little to be gained by leaping around the tracklisting, popping on a song here and there. ‘From The Heights of a Dream’ manifests itself as an aural journey, with Joe acting as a kind of Virgil to the listener’s Dante. He’s present for the opening three tracks, while the disparate white noise imposes itself, giving an oneiric vision of a narrative.

With the arrival of For The Skull And The Bones however we are separated from our guide and made to travel the strange soundscape alone. That track strikes you as a stroll through a surreal forest where the sounds represent things that pass you by but that you can’t quite make out, no matter how hard you stare. Something That Needs Nothing is the end of that road atop a great mountain overseeing a dreamworld. The following title track reconnects us with our guide, and we’re no longer earthbound.

The concept of the album as representing a dream life is wonderfully realised. It starts off in a kind of anger at the arrival of the dream state, but after the middle section it graduates to a kind of acceptance at having escaped waking life, and something of a fear at having to return emerges. It never loses the sense of uncertainty and dread that is ever-present when dreaming, a feeling driven by the fact that the laws of physics don’t apply, and so things can happen that we could never anticipate. Here, the rules of conventional record production do not apply.

Multiple listens reveal this album’s brilliance, so there is more than just a thirty-five minute investment needed to fully appreciate its achievement. In particular what strikes you is Joe’s deft control of mood which he dictates with his piano; the most familiar tool present on the album after his voice. The question you have to ask yourself then is whether you feel the need to discover a musical representation of the dream state in your waking hours.

‘From The Heights of a Dream’ is comparable to very few other artistic works that try to capture the dreamworld. It’s nothing like the polished and pretty psychedelic music of the ’60s that basically ripped off the kind of surreality of dreams for their own nefarious purposes. There’s more of a link here with Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, or films like Paprika. An album that doesn’t bow to the pressures of modern popular taste is admirable, one that executes its concept so well is an essential record.