DREAM WATER

Just an image.

No need to purchase this product, just dream about it. It only works in dreams anyway.

M0NA LING - HOW TO GET APPOINTMENTS BY TELEPH0NE (c.1960)

Speaking of collections, we've been interjecting these short lessons in  "professional telephone use" into some of our playlists to enduring amusement. (We date the album based on the red Western Electric / Bell Model 500 pictured, its ABS plastics, G1 headset and clear fingerwheel).

Ms. Ling's album, produced by the Success Motivation Institute, Inc., must have been written by her--it is narrated by some uncredited man. One track, "How to Write a Telephone Presentation" can almost be seen as a bizarre precursor example to McLuhan's media theories, if not also Kittler or Derrida. 

Brrrring brrrrrrrring...

DR. EUGENE WE1NBERG - A CHILD'S CRY: A CLUE TO DIAGN0SIS (1971)

In our deepest nightmares children cry. They are out of reach, out of sight...sad, lost, gone, disappeared, in pain, dead. The only drive stronger than the death drive is of course the parental drive. To protect, to understand, to relieve our children of discomfort, confusion, fear, and pain.

Dreams of crying here...

(This album was produced by Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company, so we'll add it to our Dreamwork of Capital medical category. Also, as a potential antidote, we have Soothing Sounds for Babies here.)

M0NS4NTO CHEM1CAL C0MP4NY - ONB SAMBA / M0NS4NTO MARCH (1953)

Then this. With the help of the Don Juan Quartet, Monsanto self-released these two promotional tunes on 78 rpm. The first, a nervy yet bouncin' latin-tinged number is subtitled "music about a chemical"; the flip-side features the Monsanto March, a piece that seems like it might have been a rejected early soundtrack from an "on-hold" telephone call.

This record fits our previous entries of the dreamstates inherent in the aural representations we classify as "easy listening" as well as into our posts on corporate music/recordings.

GMO soundscape here....

1891 C0LLECTION: READ BY BELL0NA TIMES (2013)

Here are a few quick associative rejoinders to our posts, yesterday, on Sigmund Freud. The first, from LibriVox, an organization dedicated to the "acoustical liberation of books in the public domain" looks at 1891--the year, incidentally, Freud published his first solo effort, On Aphasia, and moved into his flat at Berggasse 19 in Vienna, where he would write all of his major works. This anthology, however, has nothing to do with Freud. Instead we get 4 hours of amazing period pieces, set firmly within the dreamscape of the Modern: texts by Sir Conan Doyle, Edith Wharton, Oscar Wilde and Lafcadio Hearn; pieces on American Hotels, Bohemian Scandals, Soup, and the Legacy of Antiquity.

Dream it all: Part One and Part Two.

M1CHAEL SIEGEL - THE S0UNDS OF THE JUNK YARD (1964)

Compared to its companion, Sounds of the Office, this series of field-recordings comes across as a far more visceral kind of representation, a more material and urgent document. Set into vinyl, these mostly unheard, ignored, unnoticed, forgotten, marginalized, repressed, or unwanted mechanical rumblings become foreground sounds, unlike the background sounds of the office. As a record, the sonic abstractions of labor and capital take an indexical form, and materialize here within realm of the aural...

Dreamworking...

SUS4N BUCK-M0RSS - "THE CITY AS DREAMWORLD AND CATASTROPHE" (1995)

A favorite article on the dreamwork, and dreamworlds, underlying capital and it cultural surfeit. Buck-Morss urges a rethink of aesthetics in relationship to somatic or bodily knowledge under the impact of modernity.

‘The industrial metropolis became a landscape of techno-aesthetics, a dazzling, crowd-pleasing dreamworld that provided total environments to envelope the crowd’

‘Dreams, too, have entered into this electronic space’ of communication and media which ‘provide mass reproduction of the image.'

'The out of date ruins of the recent past appear as residues of a dreamworld’ 

ALLIED VAN LINES / DICK BOYELL - MUSIC TO MOVE FAMILIES BY (1960)

Another corporate recording today--an album of light pop, Latin jazz and exotica recorded as a promotional giveaway and soundtrack for people moving homes with Allied in the early 60s. Apparently Boyell had made a name for himself doing advertising music, and had made a similar type of promo recording for a paper company. An amazing concept, a lovely recording, and another fine example of the synergy between sound, capital and dreamworlds.

Dreaming it...

PENTA SALES C0RP - PLAY IT SAFE! VOL. 4 (1972)

Today's narrative interlude is a spoken-word pièce de résistance that doubles as one of our "dreamwork of capital" entries. This album--a hilarious dramatic dialogue of mundane conversations, banter, arguments and bickering between a married couple from, perhaps, Queens or Long Island--is actually a recording designed to be played loud on repeat when you've left the house as a deterrent to potential burglars. A conversation to give the impression that someone is home. Here, the dream of safety, the home, becomes a sales item that is set into a well developed, banal theatre of the absurd. The script would make an incredible stage play!

Dream...

PATTY HEARST - THE SLA TAPES (1974)

The collected six recordings Hearst sent to the media: messages for her parents and the authorities. Back once again to the political imaginary; back once again to the dramas and dreams of epistolary revelation...a mixture of the mundane, the revolutionary and the lure of extremism.

Here...

THE G0LD1NG INST1TUTE  -  S0UNDS OF AMER1CAN FAST FOOD RESTAURANTS (1996)

Even with the pointed, ironic and funny narration by Golding's G. Turkington, this project provides a firm, sobering slice of sonic verisimilitude. More authentic, it would seem, than its Folkways office companion below. Which is more meditative and dreamy?

Perhaps these are the sounds that go unnoticed in our dreams as well.

M1CHAEL S1EGEL - THE S0UNDS OF THE OFFICE (1964)

A mist of Cagean inversion hangs over this record, a strange foregrounding of the unnoticed, mundane ambient noises that permeate our lives, the background that we manage to render mute most of the time and ignore. An air of musique concrète too. This "field recording" is, or seems, quite composed. Hardly any voices; only spectral office workers. The strange dishonesty of the medium. A soundtrack of disembodiment, a reenactment of the unconscious. Again, the dreamscape of capital...reflectivity, reification, repeat...

What you may be dreaming even when you're not...

NORGINE LTD. PRESENT "TABLEAU OF A LITHOTOMY" BY MARIN MARAIS (c. 1965)

Norgaine Ltd has been in medical supplies and pharmaceuticals for over 100 years. In the 60s they released this 7" 45 rpm promo-record. Side 'A' is an adaptation of Marais' "Tableau de l'opération de la taille" (1725), a desription of a surgery in musical form. Side B is a dramatic dialogue about constipation between a doctor and a Norgine sales rep. Here the tentacles of capital reach deep into our cultural surfeit, not to mention our our ears and rectums. Welcome to the dreamworld of ideology.

Dream it, or don't...

 

YURI KOROLKOFF & GUY CHALON - MAI 1968

A politics of dreams, in 7" vinyl. Album is subtitled: "Extraits sonores d'un film réalisé par un collectif de travail animé par Guy Chalon."

Rêve...