These Dreams of You

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It’s a music of breakdowns and blackouts and “futuristic rhythm and blues”—the singer with the red hair calls it — about lovers in the Wall’s shadow, and sons of the silent age and electric-blue rooms that no one leaves. “Fritz Lang’s Metropolis starring James Brown!” the singer tells Jasmine excitedly one evening; she’s actually come to find such grand pronouncements rather endearing. While she isn’t sure she fancies the music or understands it, she senses it’s not to be dismissed, though she’s not inclined to let him know that. In the Schöneberg flat, the nearby table is stacked with art catalogs, jagged little polemics on aesthetic theory, modern novels. “You’re really reading that, are you?” she says to him behind the thick paperback.

He shrugs, “I’m half Irish — me mum,” and laying the book on his lap says, “Do you worry, luv, whether every note of an Ornette Coleman piece has meaning?”

“Maybe I do,” she says, but she doesn’t really listen to Ornette Coleman.

“Of course you don’t. It’s simple, really, a very simple tale — man sets out on a twenty-four-hour walk looking for home and, riding a wave of notes, finds the New World. It’s a song we’ve all sung, haven’t we? In this case it’s Dublin but it could be Berlin or London or L.A.”