Stadiums & Shrines
Spain_collage

 

A city fixed upon a spindle spinning. Walkways rounding the afternoon axis. Waterways teeming like eels at high tide on a tight surface. All points arc forward; skip a shadow, graze a brick, hover above the hands of time. Any sudden pinch or push sets dimensions adrift, perspectives anew, crossing thresholds thru arches in shuffling loops.

“Afternoon to you…” a merchant waves and smiles, stepping from the entrance to the cobblestone, tipping the plane sideways for the passerby’s reply; her shop’s flowers slide and re-align when she readjusts the gyres hang.

The next round, skipping past her shop — past the mirrored arrangements, the swiveling invitations, the expired openings — she suggests a different series of doors, to a different passerby, on a different plane. Greeting new ensembles, old townfolk, interloping trajectories interwoven rotations.

“Afternoon to you…”

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Songwriters Julie Byrne and Eric Littmann are radiant spirits ever in motion (touring Portugal at the moment), and dear friends of S&S. Byrne’s 2014 LP Rooms With Walls and Windows drifted among our favorites, and her 2017 follow-up (produced with Littmann) held a space all its own. The mind behind projects Phantom Power and Steve Sobs, Littmann first connected with us on a 2011 visual mixtape. From there, together we’ve done shows and wandered around the city at night. Last week Gold Flake Paint shared their contribution to Dreams alongside a few stories.

They celebrate Dreams with us July 1st at Brooklyn’s National Sawdust.

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Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith - Dreams of Yugoslavia

 

Balkan decoys, elaborate and beautiful, affix, shielding a forgotten mist, a village; an archaeologist arches her architectural theory, squinting down at the photograph believed to be the only of its kind. The people, stoic and oversized, walk above rather than within… they must reside behind rather than inside, she figures. Water falls from the margin. But how — she scribbles into her fading field note book — how can it, with the homes so close. Perhaps they needn’t worry over being swept at all; nearly weightless, though real, floating, she determines, this paper town on a cliff.

Into focus: a frayed corner, peeling to another image beneath the first.

The archaeologist gently brushes off the original exposure, which, suddenly of its own accord, takes flight. Awestruck, she follows the winged photograph out the door, across a modest yard, beyond her wildest hallucinations, to the paper town, at water’s edge.

Snap, a camera echoes in the distance. A photograph ruffles its feathers.

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Raised on the Orcas Island off the coast of Washington state, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith is a modular synthesist who has composed sound for musicals, films, the hidden worlds of national parks, and in this project, an imagined world within a static image. In 2017, she released The Kid on Western Vinyl, and earlier this year announced her new label Touchtheplants. The inaugural offering, “Abstractions,” is based on the works of filmmaker Harry Everett Smith, and comes accompanied by “a comic about two friends — a plant and a human being — having an existential conversation.”

Smith recently joined us at Moogfest to discuss “the value of dreaming in the present, interdisciplinary collaboration across mediums, engaging the surreal, and escaping into the ambient beyond.”

Head to Noisey for the history of Dreams (out soon on Cascine) in a thoughtful feature by Colin Joyce, who said this one “feels like looking at a cloudy summer sky through a kaleidoscope.”

Dreams of Quebec

 

Peripheral maroons, blues, and ecrus stretch beyond the sled’s icy spray. Accelerating downward, cascading slope, past cheers, speed’s climbing silence.

The children glide through unknown clearance, piercing the cavern, the illustrious halls of Perce Rock illuminated by temporal projections. Witness to their time-lagged descent broadcast onto the arched rock face interior, seeing their locale moments before, as they skim through time, touring new and absolute fantasias.

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Lead by pianist and composer David Moore, Bing & Ruth often swells into an ensemble as they did here in 2014 (two upright bassists, two clarinetists, a cellist and a tape delay tech). We’re thrilled to revisit the piece in advance of Dreams, a double LP compilation and 20-page gatefold book out this June on Cascine. It can be pre-ordered via Bandcamp and the label’s site.

On July 1st, we’ll celebrate the release at Brooklyn’s National Sawdust, featuring performances by Bing & Ruth and Julie Byrne with fellow Dreamers Yumi Zouma DJing soft sounds throughout, all organized by AdHoc Presents. Tickets go on sale this Friday, RVSP here.

Dreams of Quebec
Dreams with Yumi Zouma

 

Under the falling Alps, a drapery system

A1 – char 1 (drape/curtains) – shaken, caving from the weight of dusty constellations
B2 – char 2 (wax) – liquefying, a starry drool, down pillars, secrets
A3 – char 1 (drape/curtains) – being a ghost of the Alps, thrown back by the pull on a cord
B4 – char 2 (wax) – cooling into crystallized crags, hardened froth and rivers of ash
B5 – char 2 (wax) – casting forms for bells, or molds for vases, or visages
C6 – char 3 (wind) – pulling pressure from one quadrant to the next, across a valley
B7 – char 2 (wax) – clinging under a nail, after scraping a pillar in the dark
C8 – char 3 (wind) – gently deteriorating, glancing other passings in the halls of the heart
C9 – char 3 (wind) – rustling a cloth back from the dead, and making a vein dance
A10 – char 1 (drape/curtains) – being peeked through, parted slightly and looked past
C11 – char 3 (wind) – slamming a door as it exits, after entering through a window
A12 – char 1 (drape/curtains) – being drawn open
A13 – char 1 (drape/curtains) – being drawn closed

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Yumi Zouma is New Zealand’s Christie Simpson, Sam Perry, Charlie Ryder, and Josh Burgess. It is a true honor to collaborate with the Yumis, who usher us down ‘Grands Boulevards’ to the following news. Dreams is leaping to the physical world June 15th, 2018, thanks to our friends at Cascine. The double LP compilation and 20-page gatefold book are up for pre-order at Bandcamp and through the label’s site. Immense gratitude to every artist who’s dreamed with us since the start of this project, which will continue.

Art by Nathaniel Whitcomb
Words by Dave Sutton & Matthew Sage