DREAM WATER

Just an image.

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

ANDRÉ H4MEL / LA NEF ENSEMBLE - LES MUSIQUES D'URN0S (2017)

This outstanding release by Quebec composer Hamel features the Early Music NEF ensemble. The stunning project attempts to resurrect the 5000 year old music and instruments of the Urnos shepherd people in the Harappan-era Indus Valley.

As I understand it, evidence of advanced musical notation was discovered in the region around 1940. Hamel has spent years piecing together and imagining the melodies and musical rituals of this marginal historical community, resulting in this bagpipe-addled masterpiece of primordial revelry, droning folk/baroque tones and  mystifying, dream-worthy beauty.

Dream it here...

THE FOLKL0RE OF PL4NTS (2017)

Works by 31 artists comprise this fructuous, conceptual compilation:  "Flora Britannica, the matter of Britain. This island’s plants clothe the landscape, characterising the country, lending it colour, scent and texture. They also colour the human imagination, suffusing it with a heady pharmacopoeia of mythic legends, local tales and magical lore."

Short pieces: meditative, pastoral, elemental, summery. Highlights include J. Bonnetta, Paper Dollhouse, Sam McLoughlin, Bridget Hayden, Dean McPhee, Modern Studies among many.

Midsummer's eve potions and poisons....

FRED FR1TH - R1VERS & TIDES (2003)

Frith's soundtrack to a documentary on artist Andy Goldsworthy, directed by Mr. T. Riedelsheimer. Subtitled "Working with Time." Guided by piano, violin, and soprano sax. Like our waterways, this is serene, calming and meditative, but also churning, surging and, at times, roaring. (More Frith soundtrack work here).

It is sometimes said that water in dreams is an image of the unconscious reflecting itself.

EL1ZABETH CLARE PR0PHET - S0UNDS OF AMERICAN DOOMSDAY CULTS (1984)

Chants, sermons and invocations from Ms. Prophet on behalf of the Church Universal & Triumphant, Inc. in Montana. I'm not too sure of the subtleties of their core principles. They do pay credence to a group of "ascended masters" including Christ, Buddha, El Moyra, Zarathustra, Hercules and the arc-angel Michael. They also certainly hate popular music and mass culture, which they pray to destroy. While this is certainly terrifying stuff, perhaps the most nightmarish quality is their unique (can we say innovative?) chanting style that could likely emerge from (or into) your most discomforting dream.

Dream it here...

DANTE / JOHN C1ARDI - THE INFERNO (CANTOS 1-8) (1959)

Folkways released this Immortal Drama of a Journey Through Hell, with the poet Ciardi guiding the way with monotone severity. "Abandon all hope all ye who enter here," Dante tells us. Indeed, the relationships between nightmares, death and even hell is on full display here. These connections--ingrained through centuries of acculturation--continue to underpin our unconscious thoughts and dreams. And they continue to bubble up in our waking hours, guiding both our social interactions and civilizing impulses (see Freud, here).

Dreaming Divine Dark Comedy...

EL1ANE R4D1GUE - MILA'S J0URNEY INSP1RED BY A DREAM (1987)

Two electronic dream-themed works today. Tried and tested while awake, in fatigue and in sleep. Highly recommended.

Ms. Radigue's Mila is Milarepa, the 11th century Tibetan Yogi. His place in sacred history is etched into the Kagyu "Whispered Transmission" lineage of Tibetan Buddhism; he is one of the sect's so-called Four Pillars. It is claimed he built and founded the large, nine-storey towered monastery in Lhodrag. His story is one of spite, revenge, sorcery and murder, as well as redemption, extreme self-deprivation and eventual enlightenment. He is often depicted with a greenish tone...for much of his later life he supposedly subsisted on a diet of nettle tea, a practice that tinted his skin.

Radigue spent over 20 years studying Milarepa's life, songs and poems, this 1984 recording being one of many works from this period. Robert Ashley narrates the story of the dream-inspired titular journey, while Lama Rinpoche interprets Mila's song--poems that, it is said, would erupt spontaneously from the Yogi's lips in times of enlightened states of consciousness. Radigue scores the polyvocal narrative with an unyielding yet gentle field of drone.

Dreaming into action...

LESL1 DALABA - TIMELINES (2004)

A sonic response to evolutionary history from the origins of life through climactic disasters, natural selection, mass extinctions, ice ages and human migration. Based on the artist's research into geophysics and archeology, the music is composed in temporally relative terms (recording comes with a timeline). The results are spectacular--elemental and beautiful. With Z. Parkins, I. Mori, C. Kihlstedt, and A. Denio.

Dreaming, deep time.

MAR4IS & M1RANDA - NATURE S0NGS (FR0M BALLADS FR0M THE AGE OF SC1ENCE) (1963)

A charming science-for-children album that some of us might have had the privilege to hear when we were young. The few grating melodic moments, and somewhat dated approach to natural science do not lessen the impact of this fantastic educational document, whether you have kids, a deep-seeded nostalgic compulsion, or an interest in innovations in recording, arranging or orchestration. Or, of course, if you are fascinated with the dreamy auratic potential of historical documents themselves.

Dream it...

AFRICA: WITCHCRAFT AND R1TUAL MUSIC (1975)

To purge some of the demons of our last daemonic posts, we present this attempt at exorcism. Of course, it can be easily said this album replicates much of the baroque--and nonsensical--spiritual dreamwork of the albums below. Nonetheless, we in good faith present these fantastic, indeed "spell-binding," Fanshawe field recordings from Kenya and Tanzania as some sort of therapeutic offering for whatever demons we may have attracted or repelled with the last posting. We'll likely have to post another offering later to quell the demons we evoke with this exoticist offering...an exorcism of an exorcism, exoticization of the exotic...infinite regress, progress. (Nonesuch did change the title in later issues, thankfully particularizing the two actual nations from the continent).

ANT0N LAVEY - THE SATAN1C MASS (1968)

The High Priest of the Church of Satan leads this mass in San Francisco on a September Friday the 13th, III Annos Satanas. It's a live recording, and carries the faults of its production. But underneath the unrelenting didactic poetry of the sermon (with, it would seem, its fairly quotidian Libertarian message), is some innovative orchestration and electronic-aided vespers sonority. Like all sermons, this is performance art. The album documents this orgy of propaganda, its fervor of raving nonsense.

This album kicks off a few odes to the dark majesties--a well-rendered dreamworld within our already baroque religious cultural narratives.

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law..."

A.A. ALLEN - CRYING DEM0NS (c. 1980?)

Put out by Miracle Revival Recordings, the album gives us the controversial pentecostal evangelist himself doing his Voice of Healing type of sermon and exorcism.... These are "amazing recordings of demons speaking through people who are possessed by them."

Dream it to believe it...

THE L0UV1N BR0THERS - SATAN IS REAL (1959)

A well-produced and (at times) captivating slice of country gospel, warning us of Satan's ways, his guises and disguises, and of course an offer of the antidote to temptation and evil. When the songs aren't offering petty judgement, small-minded bigotry they are actually quite funny and catchy. Dreamdevil.

YAQUI D4NCES: THE PASC0LA MUS1C OF THE YAQUI IND1ANS OF N0RTHERN MEX1CO (1957)

Fiesta music from an indigenous people native to the area that is now, largely, the states of Sonora and Arizona. Pascolas are ritual performances, historical reenactments, invocations, and of course the ritual of the party. Fiddle-driven country-folk music with driving, trance-inducing edges and swirling, serialist wormholes.

Dreaming high, high desert...

MAJA SK R4TKJE - CREPUSCUL4R H0UR (2016)

The audio component of a larger multimedia issue. A bold "triple-band" approach to ethereal vespers music: three choirs, three noise-music duos, all of them supported by requisite pipe organ. It's a dramatic listen, with a sprawling dramatis personae.  Although sounding like some kind of religious canto, the music is indeed a material, secular celebration of natural phenomena--crepuscular sun.

Praise the rays....

M4RINA SAB1NA - MUSHR00M CEREM0NY OF THE MAZ4TEC IND1ANS OF MEX1C0 (1957)

A Folkways ethnomusicological field recording purportedly documenting a psilocybin ritual in Oaxaca. Sabina, the shaman, directs proceedings. I wish I knew more about the details of the ceremony itself--what it celebrates, investigates or heals--but instead I simply allow my colonial ears to enjoy the repetitive, lulling chants, invocations, humming, snippets of conversation and background sounds of this ceremony. I suspect this ritual is much like ours, about getting baked, listening to music and attempting to have intercourse with the divine.

Dreaming is a ritual performance...

S0FTWARE - CH1P MED1T4TI0N (1986)

Here is a third release from Innovative Communications, a rejoinder to the Asbjornsen book from a couple of days ago. Here, the cosmic dreams expand inwards, not outwards, into the micro-worlds of technology, bits and bytes. Ghost in the machine... A.I.,.the Turing Test. Can machines dream?  The Devil in the details.

Meditate...

D4G ER1K ASBJØRNS3N - C0SM1C DREAMS AT PL4Y (236 pages, 1996)

Definitive cultural history on 1970s German Progressive and Electronic Rock. A nice addendum to the space themed posts of last week... Sagan, Voyager I, etc.

Dreams, at play here...

C4RL SAGAN (FEAT. STEPHEN HAWK1NG) - A GL0RIOUS DAWN (2009)

A little songified stardust from a 7" single sided plate, produced by a White Stripe on his Third Man imprimatur. A hastily made, kitschy little auto-tune sample job and sound collage that nonetheless counts as likely the best astrophysics song ever written: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." I even had it on repeat at one point. The addition of the guest verse by Hawking is pure editorial genius. A cosmological cosmology. Or vice versa.

Dreams in dark energy...

MURMURS 0F EARTH (THE V0YAGER INTERSTELLAR RECORD, 1977)

Aka "The Voyager Gold Record," pictured here, now physically somewhere beyond the heliosphere, edging into its 30,000 year journey through the Oort Cloud. The reference material here is the sound/music portion from the 1992 multimedia box set. The choices are both predictable and surprising, a fantastic artifact and depiction of its day, and ours still. What additions and excisions could we make to this artefact now, since 1977? This is an sonic project of dreams that both represents and enacts the wayward urgencies of the human imagination in concept, content, form and material.

Dreams in the heliopause...