Dreaming Animal

I jumped onto the back of the truck, peering into dozens of grey metal buckets filled with some kind of animal. Someone passed around slices of thick, crusty bread and suggested I take your skin and spread it on the bread. You look up at me, as if to beg for safety within this inevitable doom.


Diana ChesterJungle Dreamscape

Jungle Dreamscape was developed for a collaborative exhibition with ceramicist Lisa Hoelzl. The exhibition involved the creation of a sonic and ceramic world of totems and birds, a work inspired by Henri Rousseau’s whimsical painting, The Dream.

Mimi Brunsdon is the featured pianist playing Debussy’s Prelude #10 on two different pianos. There are excerpts of a vinyl recording of Sterling Holloway’s reading of Rudayard Kipling’s, The Elephant’s Child.


Gabi SchaffnerThe Lion Dreams Of Hunting

Inspired by a picture description of Jean Gérome’s painting (Der Heilige Hieronymus, 1874, Staedel Collection, Frankfurt am Main) showing St. Jerome and his lion sharing a nap.

There exist only two lines of text, spoken by a young woman. They were combined with three other random sound files found in the same folder: Tape recorder, bells, air conditioner (of the museum) and a walk in the snow with dog and musical saw. Not much was done, except for sticking the cut out samples to the respective end of the track.


Joan Schuman — Woolgathering

When I asked various people for recordings of their dreams about animal-others, I began to hear ‘scenes’—like dream-retelling itself. “This happened, then this happened, then this really big bear showed up!”

Arriving directly from a yawn-filled recording, along with imagined visual documentation, this ‘scene’ is part of a longer composition, which meanders around collective catastrophes and the contradictory disasters of the dreamscape. Stories confound and charm in their numinous animal skins and bones and bodies.

dream montage: Mallory Brennan

Sarah Washington Deer at the Door

I made this for an installation at a ‘sound art party’ at a friend’s house.

It describes a real life event which took place in unusual whether conditions one March a few years ago, intertwined with a coincidental dream.

The event: seeing deer footprints on the driveway in the snow (I never would expect to see a deer in our street, let alone have one walk up to our house). Seeing the footprints in the snow suddenly triggered a buried dream image from the night just slept – a deer peering in at me through my bedroom window. One of those spooky feelings, exacerbated by the fact that no further deer footprints could be traced anywhere else in the neighborhood.

photo of the sound installation at the party in Trier (Germany), which also featured a photograph of one of the actual deer footprints