Of all of the artists that I’ve heard over the years, Lucid might be the most enigmatic, even more so than the Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus. Some of that’s due to lack of information available about the band. Here’s what I know… Dale Lloyd formed Lucid in 1993 along with Stuart Arentzen and Rebecca Bird, and worked with a rotating cast of collaborators à la This Mortal Coil. During the ’90s, they occasionally performed live soundtracks for silent film screenings, including F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu and Yasujirō Ozu’s Passing Fancy. And they released four albums between 1994 and 2001, only two of which I’ve been able to track down. (I keep hoping all four will magically appear on Bandcamp someday, but I’m not holding my breath.)

Much of Lucid’s enigma, however, stems from the music itself, which combines field recordings, musique concrète, classical, ambient, minimalism, and Bird’s half-whispered, half-sung vocals to create a truly illusory and otherworldly sound. Listening to Idylls and the Secret Remain alternately sounds like a toy store springing to life at the stroke of midnight, field recordings of a desolate alien landscape, the soundtrack to a long-lost Twilight Zone episode, faded wax cylinder recordings, and gentle lamentations.

Along with the band’s debut, 1994’s equally surreal Baby Labyrinthian, Idylls and the Secret Remain contains some of the strangest and most beguiling music I’ve ever heard. These 28 songs and 72 minutes are wildly experimental, surprisingly listenable, shockingly beautiful at times (particularly on gentler songs like “Swarming Sweet,” “Baptised in Memory,” and “Waited All Your Life”), and often feel like part of the music exists just beyond the capacity of human senses to detect. To listen to Lucid, therefore, is to enter a shadowy world where you’re never quite sure if what you’re hearing is real or part of someone else’s waking dream.