Review Summary: Pursuing the dream palace.
Dreaming is a private thing. At least that's the final takeaway in Isaac Asimov's 1955 science fiction short story of that same name. In the story, Jesse Weill helms Dreams, Inc., a company that produces tailor-made dreams, known as "dreamies," for private, individualized consumption. He is dismissive of a rival company's new idea: "dream palaces" for collective experiences of the same dream. It'll never work.
While he was inspired by the same dream-making concept in Asimov's story, I'm not sure if Bill Holt had the same business model. He couldn't make bespoke dreams exactly, but he did want to create music for the mind to visualize, beyond simple hearing (what he called "sound visions"). Maybe listeners wouldn't share the same dreams exactly, but through his strange, sample-driven wormhole of an album,
Dreamies, the dreams of his listeners would at least share his homespun thread.
Bill Holt is an unlikely protagonist in this story of experimental psychedelic music. Holt was a junior executive working in Philadelphia, living a white-collar life in starchy suits. But at home, he was entranced with the adventurous edges of original music: Avant-garde composer John Cage,
musique concrete, and perhaps above all, The Beatles' "Revolution 9." That eight-minute sound collage is not a typical Beatles fan's favorite track, but to Holt, it represented the daring experimentation possible in music. The biggest band in the world could forsake their popular appeal, if only for a track, and plunge into the abyss, emerging with brave new sounds. The possibilities....
The urge to make his own puncture in the edge of music led Holt to take a radical step: he quit his job to devote himself entirely to the project. With no musical training but a guitar and a basement full of electronic recording equipment, Holt set about creating his "sound visions." After a year, in 1973, Holt emerged into the light with
Dreamies, a nervous, peculiar, engulfing odyssey into the racket of the mind.
The work is a sonic projection of the anxieties of late '60s/early '70s America, in tone and in the literal sampled reference points. Holt doesn't escape from reality in his sound visions; the social and political moment is the dramatic anchor. "Program Ten," the album's first movement and notional successor to "Revolution 9," is framed around a wary guitar strum and Holt's gentle singing, looping through careening electronics and TV news clips with hypnotic effect. In the midst of swirling sound effects, a time capsule of the period emerges: TV ad jingles, news anchors interrupting your program for a special report, Muhammed Ali's beguiling boasts, presidents waxing poetic on our grand future, and the sounds of war in Southeast Asia that betray that optimism.
"Program Eleven" steers further into the strange void. "Just dream" becomes an urgent robotic mantra. Throbbing murmurs bubble below the clanging of kitchen pots and the mundane conversations of tourists in an airport. While not as politically salient as "Program Ten," the second half of
Dreamies becomes more patient in its flowing, mesmerizing drones.
Dreamies received a very limited, mostly mail order distribution in the '70s. With bills piling up, Holt no longer cared for the starving artist lifestyle, instead choosing to start his own company manufacturing and installing home alarm systems. But his oddity of a record continued to circulate in almost complete obscurity until finally being reissued twice by Gear Fab Records in 2000 and 2006.
What is resurrected in this reissue is a gem of psychedelia, early sampling, and radically DIY music. Long before the internet brought a world of sounds and the tools to manipulate them to anyone with a laptop, Holt was messing with unfamiliar hardware, pursuing an obscure artistic kernel almost from scratch. His adeptness in melding sound collage with haunting melody, being untrained as either a musician or producer, remains remarkable today.
To create
Dreamies, Holt had a "sound vision" of his own, and he quit his job to pursue it (so let that be inspiration for the upstart musicians out there). His basement-born project would remain underground in the psychedelic music scene, but it hasn't been lost to time (not yet). "Dream palace"? Maybe not, but certainly more than a private thing.
