Have sent the new Fosca album out to various labels. Or rather, emailed them and pointed them to the MySpace page so they can hear four of the tracks now, with the offer of sending the full CD if their breath is bated. Seems the modern and eco-friendly thing to do.

Matinee have said sorry, too many acts already. Elefant have said the same, but they’d like to hear the whole CD anyway. Swedish label But Is It Art are tentatively interested; they’re Fosca fans, though new to the label game. No reply yet from Siesta, Rough Trade or Domino. That’s all the labels I can think of. Or rather, all the ones whose records I buy which are aware of me or Fosca, and are still active.

***

‘I don’t do drugs, I am drugs’ said Salvador Dali once, and my newly teetotal incarnation knows exactly what he means.

Since eschewing alcohol, I’ve found my imagination going into newly strange and dreamy extremes. It’s as if my body is missing the state of drunkenness so badly, it’s providing its own version. I’ve found myself craving oneiric music and art. Or at least, the sort that connects. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless album, the Cocteau Twins’ woozier output, the soundtrack to Mysterious Skin, Death In Vegas’s ‘Girls’, William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, Glass’s ‘Floe’, Ligeti’s ‘Atmospheres’, the Huelgas-Ensemble’s polyphonic choral album, 40 Voices. The dreamier fare played on Radio 3’s experimental music shows like Late Junction, or Julian Anderson’s Book Of Hours from last night’s Proms. The latter was described by the programme notes as ‘bursting into a dawn chorus of high heterophonic skirlings’. No need to get personal.

There’s rumours today that My Bloody Valentine are reforming. I saw bassist Deb Googe at a birthday party in Tufnell Park the other month: presumably she knows. Actually, maybe not. I’ve just found an interview when she says she spent her first two years with MBV unsure if she was in the band or not. And did they actually split up, or go on ‘hiatus’? Hard to tell. Their status was always as woozy as their sound.

I can vividly recall their outrageously loud gig in London ULU, 1990. Catching the last train back to this bedroom in Suffolk, and waking the next day with my ears still ringing.

‘You Made Me Realise’ was the encore at Bristol University a year later, on what I think was their last UK tour. Never been keen on that particular track myself. Too rock. I prefer the woozy soundscape stuff.

When I first played the You Made Me Realise EP, I was amazed they’d given the melodically weakest track pride of place. ‘Drive It All Over Me’, ‘Slow’, ‘Cigarette In Your Bed’, and ‘Thorn’ are superior. The best MBV pickings to my mind comprises those four songs, all of Loveless, half of Isn’t Anything, ‘Swallow’, ‘Off Your Face’, and ‘Sugar’, a track from a flexidisc given away with The Catalogue magazine. I remember buying the magazine in Ipswich, cutting out the flexidisc (it was square), playing it and wondering if was warped or not. And thinking: how can you tell?

***

Also for the first time since my teen years, and staying on a dreamy tip (or indeed, trip), I’ve gotten back into the works of Salvador Dali.

I went through the teenage phase of first loving his weirdness per se, then smugly dismissing him as the favourite artist of, well, teenagers who have yet to really find out about modern art. For me, Dali was something you grew out of.

For years I felt that his work was over-polished, garish and tacky, lending itself too easily to Athena posters and postcards on sixth former’s bedroom walls. He was – by his own intentions – a Surrealist for the masses, a forelock-tugging (well, moustache-tugging) Hollywood showman, and thus inferior to the likes of Bacon, Man Ray, Miro, Rothko, Mondrian and so on. Wackiness and tackiness with no heart, no soul.

I think that’s still true of one or two works on display at the Tate Modern’s current show, Dali and Film, like his non-surreal portrait of movie mogul Jack Warner with his pet dog. It’s so garishly literal, loud and glossy, it might as well be one of those paintings they found on the wall of Saddam Hussein’s palace. But then, subtlety and real-life portraiture were hardly Dali’s defining strengths.

Otherwise, though, I’ve revised my opinion on him entirely. Looking for emotional depth is rather missing the point: if imagination and ideas delight the heart, the connection is made.

Most of the show is a gorgeous, sexy, scary, funny and stylish dream. There’s working drawings and paintings, including some for unfilmed projects for the Marx Brothers, alongside a range of paintings with filmic elements. Some rooms are mini-cinemas showing the films he was involved with, on a loop. There’s his iconic work with Bunuel that has you laughing out loud one minute, then squirming uneasily the next (Un Chien Andalou and L’Age D’Or), alongside his dream sequence for Hitchcock’s Spellbound.

But the runaway highlight has to be Dali’s collaboration with Disney, an animated musical short called Destino. This delight of delights was shelved in the 40s but dusted off and completed in 2003, via the thankfully discreet use of computers. Turns out the film’s original director is still working for Disney – at the age of 95.

In Destino, a beautiful dark-eyed ballerina – realised in a style that’s exactly half-Disney, half-Dali – falls through a Dali landscape in search of her lover (I think): while dodging eyeballs, ants, constantly morphing statues, and those very Dali-esque impossible structures in the middle of a sunny desert. It’s as good as the best bits of Fantasia, or the ‘Pink Elephants On Parade’ sequence in Dumbo. And the Disney touch, coupled with the music, provides the emotion. To my mind, it’s the best thing ever to bear Dali’s name.

At the Tate, the 7-minute cartoon is delighting kids and pensioners alike, all raving about it as they come out of the screening room. Had Disney released their proposed DVD in time, it would make an absolute fortune in the gift shop. Instead, there’s a dozen shakey versions on YouTube, surreptitiously recorded by camera-phone. Supply and demand in action.

The YouTube clips are better than nothing, but you really have to see Destino in person. If you can go, go now. It finishes soon.