Sealed LP: Dreamies: Auralgraphic Entertainment

$

211

Dreamies: Auralgraphic Entertainment

FACTORY SEALED LP

• Program Ten
• Program Eleven

• Bill Holt : Guitar (Acoustic), Vocals, Moog Synthesizer
• Stanton Swihart : Liner Notes

• Inspired by the aural collage of the Beatles' "Revolution Number 9," as well as the musique concrete of composers such as John Cage and Terry Riley and Bob Dylan's conscientious rock lyricism, Bill Holt quit his straight job in 1972 to follow his musical muse, hoarding various electronic gadgets and an acoustic guitar and holing up in his basement. He emerged a year later with Dreamies, one of the finest pieces of experimental pop from the era. Unlike the Beatles' White Album collage, though, the pair of sidelong, 26-minute epics -- "Program Ten" and "Program Eleven" (as if progressing directly from "Revolution Number 9") -- that Holt created were much more than symbolic representations of the chaotic times. At its heart, the album is a blend of folk and pop/rock, and in many respects, Dreamies fits in with the singer/songwriter scene that flowered in the early '70s. Instead of relying simply on the juxtapositions of his sound samples to impart subjective meanings, Holt composed lovely, downhearted melodies (very much recalling John Lennon) and trippy lyrics as a jumping-off point for each collage and then let acoustic guitar guide them through the gauntlet of sound. In fact, "Program Ten" is a combination of two identifiable songs, "Sunday Morning Song" and "The User," the two melodies weaving in and out of the cacophony of noise-crickets, atmospheric sounds, a John Kennedy speech, NASA chatter, news reports, glass breaking, a thunderstorm, sports broadcasts, and gunfire while a synthesizer spits out spacey alien sounds or cuts like a kettle whistle, and an ominous bassline oscillates beneath it all. "Program Eleven" exchanges that white noise for airport sounds, creepy Sgt. Pepper-style chants that bubble up from beneath the single melody fragment ("Going for a Ride"), game show catch phrases, and popping corn. Of the two pieces, "Program Ten" is the more socially charged commentary, setting the innocent recollections of youth -- the sounds of summer and nature -- against the misanthropic confusion of war and politics to powerful effect. "Program Eleven" is more psychedelically eerie and haunting, aurally dense, and thick with bad vibes, but wonderful nonetheless. The spoken samples are mostly more buried in the background and difficult to make out. It adds both intrigue and mystery to the piece, a foreboding end to what began optimistically. The music, in other words, ingeniously mirrored the sort of evolution of consciousness that was so much a part of the era. Dreamies went virtually unheard when it was released, perhaps because it was the antithesis of commercial rock at the time, but, despite its grounding in the ambiance and issues of the '60s, it still sounds outstanding decades after the fact.

• Bill Holt grew up obliviously happy in the 1950s in Springfield, Delaware County, a suburb of Philadelphia. As for many kids during the period, it seemed a time of wonderful affluence, characterized by innocent pop music, paper routes, frogs in jars, and Schwinn bicycles. In stark contrast was the emerging world of the Cold War and rock & roll, hot rods, and young-rebel movies. Despite his guileless upbringing, Holt came of age during the changing times of the early '60s, and his latent political and musical bugs began to stir inside. Still, in July of 1963 at the age of 19, before he could act on his musical whims, Holt instantaneously became a husband and a father, and was forced to enter the straight world of work and responsibility to support his new family. He bought an apartment with his wife, and spent nights and weekends watching the world change before his eyes on a black-and-white television set: the assassination of President Kennedy, the emergence of the Beatles, and Vietnam. By the late '60s, Holt also immersed himself in the ambitious pop music of the Beatles and Bob Dylan and read about experimental composers such as John Cage and about musical forms like musique concrète.
• By early 1972, at the age of 28 and after ten years wearing a suit and working for a Fortune 500 company, he had had enough of the American dream and realized his musical calling. The next year Holt quit his job, found the same sort of Ovation acoustic guitar that he had witnessed Glen Campbell playing on TV, and bought one of the original Moog synthesizers and a four-track reel-to-reel recorder. Approaching 30 years of age, Holt set out to reinvent himself as a musician and composer, despite the fact that he had no prior experience writing or playing, other than strumming guitar a bit in his past. He entrenched himself in his basement and set about creating the aural collages that became Dreamies. The end result of his transformation was a self-titled LP, Dreamies, released in 1973 by Stone Theater Productions. The album was a sensational extension of musique concrète and the Beatles' "Revolution Number 9" (off The White Album), a pair of sonic collages that expertly incorporated sampled dialogue, sound effects, psychedelia, political commentary, and wonderful bits of melodic invention. Unfortunately, the album failed to find a public, and it also placed Holt in financial difficulty, requiring him to return to the work world he had previously given up and, thus, bypass his music. At the beginning of 2000, Gear Fab reissued Dreamies on CD.

FINE PRINT

• All pictures are of the exact item being sold.
• This record came from a record store called "Phantasmagoria" which was located in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Phantasmagoria went out of business in 1978. I purchased most of their leftover inventory some years later when I owned a new & used record store in Catasauqua called "Music Madness".
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