Dream Library - Released 2022/04/15

Dream Library is... a big one. I've been working on this album for longer than anything else I've ever worked on. Initially I was going to release the album just under my name, but I've switched to using Dream Library as a pseudonym for anything that sounds like, well, this album. That's partially because I just prefer the name Dream Library, but also because my musical output is stupidly broad, even this album switches genre a whole lot. I guess you could call it an album that at times is an ambient/electronica album, sometimes breakbeat, sometimes industrial, and at other times a synthwave album that draws heavy influence from dream house but also maybe progressive house depending on your definition of progressive house? Or has the sheer amount of C418 I listen to caused me to make the synthwave equvalent of of Excursions? Probably not? I don't really know so I'm just going to say "electronica" and get on with talking about every single track.


The title track (Dream Library) is... a long one. I was considering splitting it into multiple parts for the track listing, but I felt it worked better as one cohesive listening experience, if you're willing to sit through it all. I recorded at least three versions of this track, one entirely with software synthesizers, one mostly with a Yamaha Reface CS, and the final product which uses... a few things. This is one of the tracks that I absolutely cannot put a single genre too, it starts off pretty ambient, then the synthesized drums come in and it starts to build in intensity before there's this massive climax part and you know what you should probably just listen to it and decide for yourself.

A short tour through the human subconcious is fairly upbeat from the beginning, mainly because I wanted a snappy transition from the first track to it. It's probably one of the only tracks I've deliberately written to contain a key change, since I wanted another smooth transition to the next track. And it's also a weird track in that it contains a fair amount more industrial influence than the rest of the album (you could probably compare the intro to Ringfinger from NIN's Pretty Hate Machine if you wanted to, but please don't because Reznor's debut outing as a musical artist is FAR better than mine is here).

Crepuscular Rays is one of the more melodic tracks on the album, but at the same time it continues the theme of repeated arpeggios and whatnot. The original title (before I learned about streaming platforms' very strict name rules) was しくしく泣く, which translates to "whimper", I believe. I think I must have asked someone to give me a random word, which I then fed into Google Translate in order to get a slightly more interesting title (I'm definitely not very good at names!!).

Green Tea (titled Greenティー on Bandcamp & SoundCloud, an amalgamation of a title that theoretically translates to Green Tea) is a slower, synthwave-ish version of Tea from the Dream Encyclopaedia EP, but with more layers. Despite being vastly different to the other two, I prefer this version even over the original. In fact, it's one of my favourite tracks on the album.

Real Sleep is an ambient introduction to the track that follows it. The name comes from an episode of the analog horror anthology series Local58. The ambient noises in the background of certain parts of the track are just slowed down synthesized speech samples.

No Sleep is one of the "heaviest" tracks on this album, giving more of an electronic/industrial rock vibe than a synthwave vibe with all those compressed and sidechained electric guitars. The main intense section went through numerous reworks and was one of the most difficult parts of this album to make, it took a very long time to get all the instruments to sound not terrible and it also took a very long time to mix properly. The other sections were not nearly as irritating, however. The calmer middle section features another (heavily processed) guitar playing a repeated melody, something I wouldn't normally do due to the fact that I am not that good at guitar.

Local Library is where I accidentally let my C418 influence show a little too much. I mentioned Excursions before, but I think this track (as well as ELEVATE) draws the most from that album's style.

If this album were on CD, Sunbeam would be the last track of the first disc. That's part of why I chose to mirror the chord progression from Look to the Stars near the end. (It is also still referred to as "untitled 2" in my project files, so I don't break anything.)

Look to the Stars returns from Dream Encyclopaedia, but heavily reworked from the original 2019 version because I am somehow incapable of being finished with a track. Even after I release something, I still find myself fiddling with patches, occasionally adding in entirely new instruments because I am ever so slightly a massive perfectionist when it comes to music. The two versions of this track (and another track which we will get to soon) stand as a prime example of that.

Dream Logs. One of my favourite parts of this song, is the ending song transition, specifically the final chord of the piece, a G# major, then with a flattened tonic note to turn it into a C minor, which is the key of the next track ELEVATE and allows for a very natural sounding transition into that track's ambient intro section.

ELEVATE is, in my opinion, the (one of the) best track(s) on this album. Unsurprisingly it was of the last ones to be finished. Parts 2 and 3 of this track were released as a single, interestingly enough they were released before I finished part 4. It started with this 2 minute buildup inspired by Flamingo by Infected Mushroom and Thunderbird by C418 (once again, from Excursions), though it slowly morphed into this prog-house-ish synthwave "epic".

stuck is an interesting one to me, as I recorded the synth piano line at some point because I didn't want to forget about an idea I had, then forgot about it, then found it again and suddenly had a completely different idea to the one I had before..? You'll notice it stops abruptly, and that's because I stopped the recording there after I made a mistake. Rather than record it again and stick to whatever my original plan was, I thought I'd have the piano cut out as part of the music, leaving the rain ambience in the background, and then have the melancholic strings slowly fade in, similar to the end of Oxygene Pt. 7 by Jean-Michel Jarre (who's influence can be heard extensively throughout my first EP as Dream Library).

re:fractured is a remake of a track from an EP I released in 2018 (laugh at the fact that I originally wrote "over 2 years ago" here, thinking the album would have been out by the end of 2020. how naive). Of the few tracks on that EP, this one was my favourite, and I wanted to remake it but with better sounds. I ended up adding a completely new melody in one of the middle sections.

Final Day (REM Mix) returns once more, and this time it's got more instruments. I felt that the original version of this track on Dream Encyclopaedia (2019 release) was a bit empty, which worked fine, but at the same time.. perfectionism. So there are two versions of this version of a track that will also get infinite versions.

Light Pollution was the very last track to be finished, which certainly shows in my usage of breakbeat, more complex guitar parts, a Yamaha SY-22 which I purchased a few weeks before finishing the album, and EastWest's fantastic Hollywood Choirs, which sings some nonsense unintelligable words near the end of the track. This and ELEVATE are tied as my favourite tracks on the album, something about the combination of styles makes me quite proud of what I've created, a feeling I don't often get.


Bonus tracks include the original recording of Tea, several alternate recordings of Dream Library, and a really old piece of mine that was just good enough that I couldn't have left it out. These are all included in the Bandcamp download, some are on streaming platforms too.

You can listen to Dream Library on a variety of platforms, from Spotify to Apple Music to Amazon Music, however if you really want to support my musical endeavours, please consider purchasing the album on Bandcamp.

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