dream song

Earlier I was talking about how hard it is to write down the songs from my dreams, although I should have stated that I was frustrated only because earlier I had been so successful at doing this; the songs in Perceival and the dozens of other song-sketches I have on the floppy disks (!) that go in my PSR 550 are mostly dream-based. I say "mostly" because the process of reconstructing a song from a dream is similar to the process of writing a dream diary; a lot of the work is in reconstructing the sequence and logical connection between strange and memorable images. This is a clear imposition of the logical mind. Similarly, the songs are often very specific in certain parts; the timbre is such a big element - and timbre is the hardest thing to sketch out with the keyboard. Usually there is a choice between capturing the melody and the timbre, as there is not enought time (or perhaps concentration-power?) to get both down before the dream fades.

A lot of those tracks are still up on J- d-'s site. These represent tracks that are more finished, the other ones are tolerable to only me.

Writing about this made me remember something that I had forgotten I made. It is always nice to rediscover something. The following video was made from a song that came from a dream I had in Osaka. I remember quite clearly how strange the dream was. I can't write about it here, but the title of the song "tripping in a cardboard box" is a good enough entry point. I had this dream during a period where I was very disoriented, having trouble distinguishing dreams and reality. I guess I have been flirting with this state over the past couple of weeks. A lot of thoughts here, all out of focus, luckily for you, my long-suffering reader. Anyway, I had a lot of fun walking around in the woods in the Watershed and Rosedale Park near Pennington, collecting leaves and shooting footage for this film...


Just erased a big chunk of nonsense I wrote about my approach to melody. It is only rarely that I get embarrassed about being so selfish on these pages.

In my dream last night I was travelling south down route 31 to Pennington in a van with my pops and brothers (sorry moms, but you wouldn't have liked it anyway). It was the future, but everyone was a lot younger than they are now. Route 31 was almost entirely encased in huge angular tv screens that formed a kind of technicolor transport tube, sometimes I could see the fields that surround route 31, still being cultivated (I could see the soil plowed into rows in the cold autumn moonlight) but behind them, beyond the wood's edge, were huge star factories, warm yellow-orange lights arranged in grids in 3-D perspective drift as we glided by, flourescent white steam uprushing in the crystal clear air, reaching waaaaay up into the huge open sky). The screens flashed and formed interference strobe patterns as we rushed through them, dark rotten-pink, spring green, and bright yellow-white. They weren't advertising anything but their own presence, all working in sync, competing only with the moon. I was in the back seat with C-, who was being very very hyper and kept calling everything super-something. Like we're super-driving in a super-van etc. Pops and H- were being really loud and not paying attention to the road at all because they were bopping and singing along to a band called super-devo (which sounded suspiciously like my dad and brothers had recorded some devo covers, except Prince was playing the keyboards and they would only play one line from a song over and over). The song that I remember isn't really a devo song at all, though. I got it on a floppy disk in real life though!

Yay!