First DREAM DRUNK interview ever:
Featured in the August 2, 2013 Week in Pop post:
Welcome to the Dream Drunk party, Brooklyn's new ripped up and off sample synco-psych-sevants. The album We Own You is available now via Bandcamp. What grabbed us about the double D was the abstract overhaul of these samples for something that becomes a new reassembled beast. Sure "Party Party" still is not free of it's Miley ripped sample attachments, but functions in these lo-fi-low-hum hazes that actually has the audacity to attempt chorus and verse structures (if that's what you want to call it, but they are present somehow). That Eastern Chinatown opening psych-sweet prelude to "Sweet Jane" was not lost on this dreamer in "Sands", then Elton gets hopped up to a new hair plug follicle hop on "Krokodil Rocks", while you might ponder whether or not Nixon was the campaign slogan-proverbial 'one' with the head hurdling "Nixonian". The lights burn bright like cassettes in the sky with "Aurora Borealis?", bumble bee flights circle in a frenzy on "BEES!", the noise experiments get a further work out on "BIRDS!/Hello, Nurse", distortion instrumental dub (of sorts) on "Jahhorror", ambient Japanese sword falling in the galaxy on "Seppuku in Space", ambient cloud like samples float in the cut up work of "Jam", "BingBong" is made to pierce into ice cream truck-wind up music box memories, and it's "Hegemony" or survival in the closing horror-show feature finale; "Hegemony".
Now, get an inside look into the po-mo, post-apocalyptic landscapes of the lush, wonderful world of Dream Drunk.
Amid the sound collages and world of lysergic loops; just how did Dream Drunk come around?
DD: I'd say Dream Drunk as a project officially started in 2010 when I started making sound collages with an iPod and a Boss Loop station. I soon bought a synth and a sampler and it evolved from there. The Loop station, at least to me, makes it hard to catch an exact sample so the fun was pressing down the pedal and hearing how it matched up and how the loops sounded mixed together atop one another. "Regulate!" and "{~_~} That Witch Shall Not Be Name" are both recorded in a single take in this way.
Using an iPod and a loop station allowed for me to also catch certain seconds that I might not have found just scanning a song for the 'perfect sample'. 2:16 on "BEES! "is an example of this. That song was recorded about two years ago that way but then was cut-up and edited into the current version.
How did the name come up? Reminiscent of dream dunk, are you guys basketball fans or more on the Colt 45 fanatic trip?
I honestly don't remember. I had some songs I wanted to put out and had another name in mind but I discovered it was taken. I spent a week or two trying to think of something new and the phrase Dream Drunk crossed my mind. I liked the alliteration and I liked not only the meaning (that feeling) but those two words being together. I think it fits because my music can be fantastical and a bit head spinning. I've had friends say that the music sounds drunk...for better or worse.
I'm pretty obsessed with having intense dreams though so there might be a more psychological reason it appealed to me. I'd say dreaming is a hobby for me in the same way basketball or Colt 45 is a hobby for other people.
What was the story of gathering up these LP lifted audio samples and fragments for We Own You?
The real story is that I recorded an album called Grotesque that doesn't use any samples, specifically, no unauthorized samples. It's just keyboard, synth, guitar and drum pads. But I still had recorded quite a bit of songs that used samples so I wanted to put out an EP as a way to be "done with samples." As I was working on it I felt like I wanted to use more and more of the samples I recorded. So I spent a few months cleaning them up and turning that EP in to the full We Own You album.
That future album Grotesque, the new album We Own You, and my previous release Fantasy, were all recorded more or less over the same two year period. It was just a matter of cleaning them up and turning them into the final versions I wanted to release.
Is the title a weird flip of intellectual property ownership ideas where the original authorial craft become re-appropriated under new ownership, like a land rights coup of tenant-becomes-the-new-
landlord kind of scenario?
I claim Miley Cyrus's land in the name of Dream Drunk!
That's actually pretty spot-on. The title is meant to be a comment on several aspects of that. It is certainly meant to suggest that I don't have the rights to these songs that are released by people held in strict contracts with corporations who own their property and control it (in some cases create it under their name). In a sense the internet allows that property to be more freely available for commentary and distortion by other artists. I also can't make any money on this or claim any rights to it since I don't own have permission allowing other artists to do the same with my own work.
To me, it plays into the fact that We Own You is meant to be a comment on this sense of freedom people feel with the internet. It's at a weird crossroads right now where websites that generate viral content take images random online users to get hits from listicles that are created and paid for by a company to promote their own produced entertainment. It's then commented on by users on social networking websites that are closely monitored by the government whose laws are often lobbied to protect major corporations, many of who are in the entertainment field. Although with advertising becoming so integrated into all levels of media any company with an advertising budget probably falls under that definition of 'entertainment'. More and more paid advertisements, in Facebook feeds or before YouTube videos, [they] distract us from the things our friends are actually trying to share with us.
We Own You also has to do the criss-cross of the internet connecting us but the widening gap of our societal divide. Social media allows people to share truth faster and further than ever before. However this technology has been made available at the same time as when it feels like there is a real global crumbling from the top-down by those in power clinging as hard as possible to that power from Syria to Egypt to certain situations here in the US. It feels like that's the message from the top; We Own You and in a lot of ways citizens are rethinking this role and responding back with the same message "No, We Own You"
In "Hegemony" I use a note on my synth that, to me, sounds like a police siren. It starts with one as an innocuous every day occurrence but it then loops over itself so the sound doesn't stop but continues to intensify. To me this has a visceral effect as it's a sound we're all used to but when it doesn't end you naturally feel more concerned and troubled. By the end when you hear hundreds of cops sirens with no end you feel as if something terrible might be happening. It crosses over from probably someone getting a speeding ticket to something much larger. The same defense used to protect us from riots, terrorist attacks and godzillas are now used to shut down protests or remove people from foreclosed houses. So do we hear protection in the sound of the sirens or do we fear them?
And, yes, I'm saying all this in the three words I wrote over an image in MS Paint that accompany 12 distorted pop songs.
Do you feel that this is an even scuzzier post-modern take over of the friendly pop enviros that Girl Talk made popular to rehash, reconstruct and reshape from the musical pop canons?
In short, yes. Although I hope the samples in the songs feel like something beyond a novelty appeal. I am inspired more by Dan Deacon, Hype Williams, Black Dice and Oneohtrix Point Never when it comes to how I like to manipulate the sounds of pop-culture. The samples are certainly more varied than you'd hear on a Girl Talk album, Velvet Underground, Nurse With Wound and Faust, a Nixon Campaign commercial, "Flight of the Bumblebee", but I think the songs are one unto themselves. Most Girl Talk fans I'd fear, and I could be wrong, don't actually know the names of the songs or yell out requests using the titles he's given them. I would also imagine Oneohtrix Point Never doesn't get told "Sleep Dealer" sounds like 'a fun twist on an 80's soda commercial'.
While I do think these songs are certainly scuzzy post-modern takes on pop music, I genuinely enjoy the sounds I'm taking and want to expand on them to create something new. In many cases this is a complete distortion of the original tracks. Sometimes it is a take on the actual song, like making "Flight of the Bumblebee" more threatening, intense and noise-heavy or trying to give a piece of "Crocodile Rock" the type of distortion you hear on 60s Asian pop compilations.
I like The Resident's "Third Reich'n'Roll" a lot and I once read it was made out of their "love/hate relationship with pop music." That resonates with me. But I don't want to do things the way the bands I like did them. I want to take things further. And do them like I do them.
(http://www.imposemagazine.com/bytes/week-in-pop-barbarian-crying-dream-drunk-terrace)
