New album is out now!
‚Dreamscapes’ is a journey through dreaming, a moment when we truly meet with our subconscious mind. What can we experience there and how does that impact our life? This album takes us to the space out of this world, full of colors and unlimited possibilities of dreaming and dreams.
Although not strictly linear, the 10 tracks on DREAMSCAPES do follow a natural order. The journey begins with ‘Prologue’, which with its high flageolets open up wide, spacious sounds that allude to the act of falling asleep and entering the world of dreams in all its limitless wonder and mystery, “The feeling and atmosphere suited to an opening, not knowing yet what sort of adventure is still ahead to experience,” says Czocher of the piece. The music gently lures listeners into this alternate universe, with repetitive motifs, improvisational arpeggios, mysterious basslines and glissandos painting increasingly fantastical landscapes with every new track. As cinematic as the music is, it also goes beyond visuals to touch and ponder on deep feelings. On “Forgive”, Czocher touches dark depths of the soul, as if she were questioning the very meaning of dreams and how they may serve their beholder in mysterious ways, “Are we able to work on our subconsciousness in a dream? Maybe sleeping is a moment when we are actually connecting with it and it gives us special possibilities to work on inner dilemmas?” wonders the composer. Drawing clearly from Glass’ string quartets, the piece uses repetition as a way to hypnotically draw listeners deep into these reflections as well as her soundworld.
While the first half of the album is given mainly to the creation of rich atmospheres, colours and textures, the second half of DREAMSCAPES is where the action really kicks off. “Voices” is undoubtedly the climax of the journey – multi-layered and complex, the piece offers a kaleidoscopic vision of musical motives “like many voices which are trying to push us in some or another way,” adds the cellist. The fast and dynamic nature of the piece is given by a light playing technique called the detache bow stroke, which yields a dramatic effect – not quite nightmarish but certainly bewildering. The piece is followed by “Lullaby” which provides a much-needed relief. Long, peaceful and lyrical, the piece is an ode to the universally accessible magic of slumbers. There’s a clarity to the cello’s voice here, as if it were pointing to the truthfulness, even if ephemeral and fugitive, that dreams can provide. “Prayers” carries forward the lyrical nature of “Lullaby”, yet an intensity, built with arpeggios, starts to simmer around the melody. Immersing listeners in a trance-like state, the piece meditates on the journey so far with Paschburg’s providing the spiritual inflections of the piece. DREAMSCAPE‘s last piece, “Epilogue” is the only piece on the album with no post-production at all. “Epilogue” represents a return to waking state, a sobriety that lacks the full-blown fantasy of dreams, where Czocher uses pizzicato lines on the cello to simply sing the melody. This return to “reality” isn’t fully restrained however, it wraps up the album with more questions than conclusions. “What happened in a dream, are we still there? Are we the same people? Did it change us? Where did we go?” provokes Czocher.