dreamTX "Living In Memory of Something Sweet" [Silver Vinyl]

dreamTX is a post-post rock project by Nick Das, a multi-instrumentalist and producer from Dallas. 'living in memory of something sweet' marks his debut album under the alias, though Das has quietly been recording and performing across the US since 2016, playing electronics/guitar in shoegaze group Kraus, co-writing with Maggie Rogers, and making early albums that bear the bent-toothed twang of Modest Mouse, a striving formalism and regard for words, for poetry, a wooly, handmade charm, a Smog-iness. In 2019 he made a break away, towards the spiritual grounds of the first great awakening, to Woodstock. Life became swirls of density: Hudson School hues, sanded brown, pine green, bugs and heat, intensity, exercise, and working himself up mountains. Real freedom, aloneness, and happy, and maybe deranged by the sun. dreamTX recorded most of living in these new surroundings, and devised a unique way of thinking about songs, mapping their structures according to the linearity of an out-and-back trail system wherein you traverse new ground, sounds, and melodies for half the song, and then retrace those same parts in reverse, but through a retinkered, degraded lens, where there’s recognizable elements from before (a musical phrase, a chord), but re-contextualized in new spaces (magnified or pushed into the distance, crunched, mangled, or echoing and smeared together... ) to create a progressive arrangement out of the same materials, like japanese boro patchwork. “What happens to a song when you rewrite it one hundred times over again? I wanted to make whole songs that feel like they contain all of me – the quiet, erratic, raw, inward, obscure, and bristling power that passes through me. I wanted to notice these changes, and document them. Some artists think their best songs are written in 15 minutes, but for me, I'm not so sure.”