"The Traumdeutung project began in 1999 with a one-hour recording of my snoring into a DAT player placed next to my bed in my NYC loft. My snores, re-contextualized here in musical arrangements produced by Arto Lindsay and Alexandre Kassin, range from the mild and blissful to the vulgar and catastrophic. My original intention was to turn something awful into something listenable or, at least, amusing. However, in the mixing stage, unexpected results were revealed and oblique references came into play. The human snore, if slowed down as we did several times in the studio searching for editing points, is almost identical to the sounds of plaintive underwater whales. In listening to these mixes one follows the moods, if not the actual narratives, of the dreamer -- sudden changes in snoring clearly result from changes within inner narratives. These are abstract matters, as we can only witness such inner events through a series of filters. Traumdeutung, the album, is linked to the modern bossa music of Brazil. The meditative or relaxation-inducing aspect of that music is hyper-conceptualized and exaggerated here. Bossa nova drummer Paulo Braga was first asked to accompany the bare snoring track. Later musicians and friends added parts -- guitar, bass, keyboards, samples, etc. Four tracks with spoken conversations are on the album, two in German, one in Portuguese and one in Japanese. The most satisfying result of this project was to create an opportunity for a listener to read or interpret the stream of thought of the snorer -- what brut moods, feelings and narratives exist within it. In these awkward and displaced sounds we can witness abstract processes of telepathy and psychic communication."
--Diego Cortez (scenester and mover-shaker involved in No Wave era New York, co-founder Mudd Club, organized the epochal downtown art show New York/New Wave etc - who died last week)
