84000

Eva Popov’s second album as Hello Satellites scans the vastness of life, from its beginnings to its myriad possibilities, writes ANTHONY CAREW.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] On the second album for Melbourne’s Hello Satellites, songwriter Eva Popov is forever falling asleep or waking up, pondering the meaning of dreams, and spending her daylight hours daydreaming. It's an album about our ‘addiction to dreaming’ – where love is “a dream that we forget upon waking” – but, in that, it’s a record attuned to temporality: the way the experience of existence is mediated through memory and fantasy, diffused by an obsession with the past and constant desire to project forward.

84000 refers to the number of pores Chinese medicine has calculated are in the average human body, not the number of days the average human body will live (that’s one-third thereof: 28,000), but Popov’s songs are often scanning the vastness of life, from its beginnings to its myriad possibilities. The motif of dreams taps into the markers of that endless expanse of days: the one-third of those hours spent sleeping; the daily routine of laying down and rising giving shape and form to the narrative of existence.

‘Belly of the Sun’ begins life on Day One (“You’re born in blood to a woman whose body has opened up/like the Earth when two plates collide/and we emerge yelling into the light”), but the songs mostly forsake the formative to linger in a more late-20s malaise, in which the concept of ‘home’ is hard to reconcile; whether it’s a mythical notion held onto from an ever-receding childhood, or where you lay your head, and whom you lay beside.

“The songwriter awakens, anew, in every verse.”

“I still wake up homesick/for somewhere I don’t know,” Popov sings, beautifully, on closer ‘All Fiction’, in which the themes persisting through 84000 get the most explicit. The songwriter awakens, anew, in every verse, sometimes yearning to return to the safety of the dreams she’s just been drawn from. “Why do I still wake up empty/with all the joy I know?” she asks, over pianissimo piano that almost entirely lingers. “Here with you sleeping beside me/when I close my eyes I dream alone.”

For an album so conversant in dreams, 84000 doesn’t play with the musical tropes of dreaminess. The electronic washes, layered vocals and thick ambience of the self-titled 2010 Hello Satellites LP are clarified. Popov and various producers/studio-hands – J Walker, Nick Huggins and Joe Hammond – employ woodier sounds and ensemble arrangements, painting with woodwinds, brass, strings and piano, but always preserving a sense of negative space.

For all the delicacy of the sounds, and the lyrical obsession with dreams, Popov is unafraid of the bodily; of the physicality of love; of the bed as place for things other than sleeping. ‘In Love’ breaks down the mythical sensation – subject of songs eternal – into chemicals in the bloodstream charging an animal compulsion; ‘Hollering Saints’ is about desire mounting whilst waiting for a lover to arrive; and her description of prayer as being “down on my knees, mouth around the open” is surely meant to be sexually evocative.

The record’s sense of the infinite can only begin with the reproductive act – “You’re made in love/by two people wrestling each other wrestling themselves” – that serves as our own personal Big Bang, setting into motion a chain reaction of cells dividing and consciousness arising, all the days and nights of a life filled with its own physical, emotional and existential wrestlings.

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‘84000’ is out now on CD and digitally through Two Bright Lakes/Remote Control. Hello Satellites play Saturday, May 31 at The Newsagency in Sydney with Georgia Mooney and Friday, June 6 at The Front Gallery in Canberra with Julia & The Deep Sea Sirens.