Yume Bitsu (Japanese for "dream beats") are a space-rock quartet from Portland (Oregon) that plays mainly instrumental drone-oriented psychedelic music (Alex Bundy on keyboards).

Giant Surface Music Falling to Earth Like Jewels From The Sky (Ba Da Bing, 1998) introduced their sonic world of lengthy, trancey, ethereal suites with a dramatic edge, reminiscent of both German cosmic music and British shoegazers.
Of Freedom and Flight (11:12) begins with a limping waltz-like rhythm that slowly picks up speed. Then the guitar breaks the uniform banging and intones a feverish hymn-like phrase. Only towards the end the singer joins the fervent prayer, which has risen to majestic proportions.
The spiritual journey continues with Travels over Seascapes (11:40): a calm tide of discrete guitar tones is ruffled by higher and higher surfs of percussions, guitars and melodic piano figures.
Where Fod Blurs and Covers Emptiness (16:17) concludes the journey with a tense raga, but the mood is far less blissful, almost menacing. The obsessive, repetitive patterns echo the darkest Tibetan liturgy as well as droning, Velvet Underground-ian acid-rock. The music dies a slow and painful death, ground into galactic dust.
These three monoliths are separated by two shorter pieces, the ecstatic, catatonic and distorted The End of Pain Is Near, which is the most obvious tribute to the shoegazing school, and the moving elegy of Flight of the Navigator.
Texture and mood are the two fundamental axes of Yume Bitsu's art. Their technique is mainly "pointillistic": a thick layer of colored dots (percussions, guitar tones, repeated chords) that creates the illusion of shapes and stories.

Yume Bitsu (Ba Da Bing, 1999) could be the quintessential album of extended psychedelic jams. The six tracks are all at least eight minute long. Guitarists Adam Forkner and Franz Prichard paint (or, better, drill) soundscapes of incredible brightness, enhanced by the surreal palette of Alex Bundy's keyboards. The childish theme, the nursery rhyme repeated endlessly by a crystal guitar within the gliding, floating keyboard tones of Team Yume weave more and more complex patterns of interference while the drums pick up strength and a distorted guitar soars in the skies. Surface I is simply a galaxy of dark sounds that spin majestically while they drift away at supersonic speed. Surface II, the most abstract piece on the album, is the breathing of a black hole as it approaches nirvana.
The human voice sets the melody of I Wait for You in motion, which the guitar then reprises, amplifies and finally grinds into twitching sand, and opens the 11-minute Truth, another rather languid and turgid cosmic piece which sounds like a brief excerpt from Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon frozen and cloned over and over again.
The 18-minute juggernaut The Frigid Frigid Frigid Body Of Dr T J Eckleberg is ruined by vocals that mimick the Waters/Gilmour standard a little too faithfully, but the instrumental core easily ranks among their most trance-inducing crescendos. One of the guitars intones a moving, wavering hymn to the universe while the other one, heavily distorted, babbles about more galaxies and more black holes and more unknown lands to discover.

Auspicious Winds (K, 2000) is a minor work compared with the previous masterpieces, but, still, the 14-minute echo-and-delay shoegazing orgy with psalm-like invocation of Wedding Procession, the delicate 13-minute psychedelic swoon of Mothmen Meet The Council Of Frogs, the ambient cosmic watercolor of Doctor Trips and the 12-minute crescendo of Into the Hole, that turns a slowly-revolving nebula of chords into a pounding, cacophonous maelstrom, are captivating, while the catchy-noisy Sharp Twisted proves their skills at crafting ballads.

Surface of Eceon is Adam Forkner (now relocated in New York) accompanied by most of Landing (Forkner on guitar, vocals and trumpet, Aaron Snow on guitar and synthesizer, Daron Gardner on bass, Dick Baldwin on guitar, Phil Jenkins on drums). The King Beneath the Mountain (Strange Attractors, 2001) is an album of epic-length triple-guitar textures. The forcerful, almost Eastern-mystical, crescendo of The Open Sea weds Pink Floyd's Set The Controls for the Heart of the Sun with mantra-like guitar vibratos and Hawkwind's distorted spare-rock. The spiritual aspect of their music also permeats Deep Gray Night, a solemnly calm sea of languid notes that recalls both Popol Vuh's Hosianna Mantra and Pink Floyd's Dark Side, but refracted through the lenses of Dali's surrealism.
The dreamy and soothing (as in "Windy & Carl") drones of Silence Beheads Us coalesce in a dark, menacing mass of chords, which then radiates back loose slabs of sounds.
The relatively lively The Grasshopper King relies on a pulse a` la Velvet Underground's White Light and stratospheric guitars a` la Helios Creed, achieves a terrifying volume of passion. That tension is reprised and sustained in Council of The Locusts, their wildest maelstrom.
The album's tour de force, the 17-minute Ascension to the Second Tier of the Outer Plane of Dryystn, abandons the ebullient energy of the previous pieces and indulges in soft, catalectic repetition. A lot happens beneath the surface of this apparent dead calm, a lot disturbes the filigree of this ambient music, but little transpires to the eye of the observer.

Planetarium Music is Alex Bundy's side-project and Traditional Psychedelic Electronic Music (Strange Attractors, 2002) its second release (after a CDR in 2001). Heavily influenced by Klaus Schulze and the German electronic school in general, Bundy pens the majestic frescoes of Another World. but his electronic soundscapes pulse and purr in a different way. Neither is the tone of his keyboards relaxation-friendly nor ir the swirl of his melodies "Star Wars"-grade. Metal is even harsh post-industrial noise. Tribute is rather a tribute to Brian Eno, and Annual is sub-ambient music that borders on purely static repetition. The slowly morphing nebula of Neighbor is the closest to Schulze's original dogma that Bundy can concoct.

The Golden Vessyl Of Sound (K, 2002) was obviously not thought out at all. The band deemed this improvisation meaningful and decided to release it. This is what happens when making discs becomes too cheap. 1 and 6 are extended jams that contain a couple of intriguing moments, but for most of the album the music is simply meandering and pointless. 7 is a meeting of psychedelia and electronica: one idea that they should develop further.

Surface of Eceon's second album, Dragyyn (Strange Attractors, 2003), is culled from live performances (i.e., it doesn't employ the overdubs that were pervasive and massive on the first album). These sessions could have (and maybe should have) been edited down a bit, but the live sound has its pros. First of all, it proves that the calculating intelligence of the first album was there from the beginning, with or without studio overdubs. Second, it displays a broader range of styles. The epic whirlwind of Stolen Wind contrasts with the delicate filigree Council is Called (nine minutes), while the sleepy stream of guitar tones of A Curious Vessyl (eleven minutes) is the antithesis of the slowly-accelerating hymn of Freeing the Wind (19 minutes). Best is Overland OVer Ice (eleven minutes), whose cosmic trance is interrupted by hypnotic wavering and fluttering patterns. Last but not least, it brings back Yume Bitsu's genome, which had been lost in the first album.

Adam Forkner is also active as [[[VVRSSNN]]] (K, 2003), a project of lo-fi synth-pop.

Adam Forkner collaborated with Jackie-O Motherfucker's vocalist Honey Owens on World's World (Marriage, 2005) and Can You Feel It Coming In The Air Tonight? (Onomato, 2007), a collection of rarities.

Zome (States Rights, 2005), recorded in 2003 with members of Landing, inaugurated a new ambitious project by Adam Forkner: White Rainbow. The overture Guilded Golden Ladies actually sounds like a languid Pink Floyd ballad. The dilated psychedelic litany How High A Ridge I Could Not Tell takes issue with the traditional song format. Germany is a synth-pop ditty that seems to hark from the 1980s. If these pieces did not amount to much more than amateurish experimentation, the 20-minute Zome opened new horizons with its elegant and fragile filigree of droning and vibrating guitars; a major tribute to dilated ambient shoegazers such as Main.

White Rainbow rapidly became the most prolific project of his career, yielding within one year: the five-CD box-set Box (Marriage, 2006), the massive suite of Sun Shifts (Yarnlazer, 2007), the more fragmented Prism Of Eternal Now (Kranky, 2007), and Sky Drips Drifts (States Rights, 2007). All of these were now mainly inspired by Terry Riley's repetitive minimalism, Brian Eno's "discreet music" and electronic new-age music for meditation and self-healing. The latter contains five lengthy pieces. Sand Sift evolves slowly from a beginning of tinkling electronic tones, as the synth-guitar starts improvising languid jazzy phrases. Sundune Sandset Sundrip exales a massive reverbed drone that lays the foudation for a processed Tibetan-style chant. Bubbling percussion and dancing voices bestow a shamanic quality on Sun Shadow Drifter. The 19-minute Dream Shakers Of Exalted SunLIFE is a hypnotic blend of floating vocals, tribal percussion and electronic drones. The most interesting moment comes when a funk guitar unleashes a few good riffs, but it lasts too briefly. There is too much fluff, although most of the ideas are intriguing.

New Clouds (Kranky, 2009), an even more ethereal case of dream-pop, was divided into four lengthy pieces that explored four different paths to ambient bliss. This time the inspiration came from Terry Riley's Rainbow In Curved Air and Robert Miles' Children.
The 18-minute Tuesday Rollers and Strollers loops voices and synths over a digital glitchy beat. As the details emerge more and more clearly, one realizes that there is another thread, a sort of videogame-like noise that works both as additional beat and as counterpoint to the synth's melody. As the instrumental tide soars, the voice disappears. But then the roles get inverted, and the voice returns (just an abstract galactic wail) while the electronic machines abate.
In Major Spillage delicate chords of acoustic guitar break against a digital trotting beat. Slowly, the piece introduces the chanting voice and the thich electronic drones that will battle to the end.
A vibrant Middle Eastern rhythm propels the sloppy drones and cascading vocals of the 20-minute All the Boogies In the World. For a while it is the rhythm that dominates the "ambience". Only towards the end do the drones and the voice regain control of the flow, and virtually put it asleep.
The 16-minute Monday Boogies Forward Forever is a blend of acoustic guitar, digital beats and electronic drones that follows the usual pattern of crescendo and decay.