In the dream, I'm alone. The darkened sky is heavy, thick with ominous, low-hanging clouds, an eerie yellowish light in the distance. As far as I can see, black concrete covers the earth. Far away, a lone building stands. It is my destination. But I'm blown about by a strange wind, twirling, arms outstretched and stiff, braced against the gust. I slowly march onward, in silence, one arduous step at a time. Will I ever get there?

I had this dream the same week I gave Sara Ayers's latest recording a first listen. She describes A Million Stories as the sound of thoughts. I understand what she means. Explicitly. As a fan of Darkwave, Ethereal, and Ambient music myself—Steve Roach, Vidna Obmana, Black Tape for a Blue Girl, et al.—I began a romance with the dark beauty of this genre in my twenties, feeling blessed to have discovered record labels such as 4AD and Projekt. Ayers uses paraphrased words from one master of this music, Brian Eno, to nail the sensation behind it.

"If you think of music like a painting, a landscape with no person in it, you're free to think what you want about it," she begins. "But as soon as there's a person in it, it directs your thoughts. You start thinking about what that person is doing. If you create music without standard lyrics, it belongs more to the listener than to the composer. The listener creates the narrative, and it becomes a soundtrack to your own thoughts. I adore that. It's so important to me."

A self-taught musician, Albany-based Ayers played guitar and wrote folk and pop songs as a teen, then started singing in punk, rock, and power-pop bands. Though she still loves those genres, she eventually found that she couldn't create that music anymore; it was too ego-driven. Another reason she became bored with rock and pop was because of time limitations. Their songs were three- and four-minute creatures and she wanted to do something more symphonic. She'd been exploring Eno and Ultravox since the early 1980s and knew that eventually she'd be going down a similar vein. It would fall into place when the time was right.

Now is that time. A Million Stories, released this year on Dark Wood Recordings, is an experimental, surreal, 38-minute, 27-second tone poem. The title comes from the first spoken words in the piece, whispered—much in the way Laurie Anderson would have it—over a dark wash of a single low note: "Begin at the beginning. There are a million stories. And just one."

"The most important story to me is my own," Ayers explains. "I might appreciate and be enthralled by other people's stories, but the most important thing is to work on my own story. That's the only thing I have control over."

Ayers hits the bottom of her vocal range in an eerie chant, followed by the sound of wings in dissonance. Starlings in flight. There are unidentified voices. Children. She sings from a deserted place. "You alone will tell the tale. You alone know the road you came on...all I want is for you to remember me..." Eerie chants, a collage of voices, speaking, soaring over dusky hypnotic harmonics, crackling. "I could grow wings," she whispers, hopefully. Textured with urgent spoken voices, the stream-of-consciousness piece floats back into a dark hall of discord. There's nothing comforting in these layers. She explains in her composer notes:

"I don't know what your thoughts sound like. My thoughts, when I'm not concentrating on something, tend to be all over the map. I hear echoes of the last phrase I spoke aloud, mixed in with pieces of melodies, a small amount of tinnitus (which I've had since I was a child, due to some ear surgery), and random musings about this or that. Not very organized or structured, I'm afraid."

On A Million Stories, she occasionally samples from a few of her many previous recordings—Sylvatica, Voices. A third of the way into the dark drifting, the listener is awash with a beautiful waterfall of clapping sticks, a series of samples recorded in stereo and triple-tracked.

"I have a sound garden," the artist expounds. "I live in the country and I had this big pile of junk and started making wind chimes out of it. There's a tree that's rather deformed—it's got a lot of low, big branches, and I started hanging all these self-made wind chimes—gongs made from the tops of barrels, metal tops. And you know those hobbyhorses that are on springs and a frame? My husband's been collecting those for over 20 years. He takes them off the frame and hangs them up in the trees in our backyard, painted white. There are about 40 of them. When he takes the frames apart, there are those sticks you put your feet on. I have about 50 of those hung up on this tree. I went out and recorded it. It was really serendipitous."

Clacking sticks are followed by a flock of crows, trucks on a highway, a series of paranoid, whispered voices over electronica that emerged from the bottom of an ocean. "Did you see anything? It's just a trick of the light. There could be someone here watching. What are you afraid of? We have no control over any of this. Why are you so helpless? Did you hear that? Someone crying? I don't deserve this. None of us do. I think you're all alone here."

Ayers fully understands that this recording is not for everyone. "The weirder your music is, there's only a small slice of an audience out there that it will resonate with. I can accept that. It's great, actually. I tend not to be too pretty, because with a female voice there's this tendency to go into a pretty motif. There's nothing wrong with that, but the focus of what I'm working on right now is this razor edge between pretty and noise. There's this ineffable thing, this feeling I'm trying to capture. Maybe it's the anxiety of the times we live in. It really resonates for me."

Her work apparently resonates with the Chemical Brothers, as they have sampled her work for their latest album, Push the Button. VH-1 also snatched some samples for a "Behind the Music" spot, and the Russian electronic trio Figura recorded an entire album called The Sara Ayers Remixes.

Descriptions of Ayers's recent brand of music is sure to conjure up images of the Goth crowd. "People always make fun of Goths for being so gloomy and stuff," she says, "but I ran the sound system at the QE2 nightclub [in Albany] for a couple years, and my rule of thumb was the darker and scarier the band looked, the nicer and sunnier they were to work with. They were easy, friendly, and happy, whereas the people who came in who wrote these more straight-ahead, happy, pop songs were a real pain in the butt. It's like, what's buried in your basement?"

Not all of Ayers's symphonic electronica is dark. The light and lovely CD Drowning in Light, and the tracks "Winter" and "Sound of Nothing" from Sylvatica are nothing like the darker Interiors, and now, A Million Stories. "I haven't been able to tell yet whether my work has two disparate audiences or one very broad-minded one," she says.

Now back in graduate school, Ayers doesn't have much time for performing, referring to gigs as a "timesink." But she couldn't resist performing on Sunday, November 6, at an event organized by Suzanne Thorpe (formerly of Mercury Rev). Ayers will present a 10-minute piece for the Edison Media Project: Groove Xchange at the Schenectady Museum (www.schenectadymuseum.org), recorded for the first time on Edison-style wax cylinders.

"Schenectady is the home of GE," she says. "They have a lot of esoteric, historical electronic equipment there. This day of interesting electronic music will be recorded on wax cylinder. It's one of the earliest recording media, similar to playing a vinyl disc, but it's a cylinder rather than a platter. You have a two- or three-minute limit on them. It's so ancient that there aren't a lot of people who have even heard of it. I love that we're coming in with all this new technology and creating sound, then recording it with obsolete technology. There's something about it that sits on my brain quite nicely."

Ayers will also curate an art series in January and February at the Chapel and Cultural Center at Rensselaer in Troy, (www.rpi.edu/web/C+CC/ccc/ccc.html) combining works by 20 artists—multimedia, film, flash animation, and performance.

As the wheel of the year turns deeper into its dark half, it is time to turn inward. Pick up A Million Stories on Ayers's website for $10 and listen to the sound of your thoughts, if you dare.