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Six Postcards

by rat dreams

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Fargo Beach 04:48
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Tea Time 04:18
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about

Six Postcards is a wordless attempt to commune across great distances amid catastrophe. Doing away with many of the conventions of popular music that informed our previous work, what emerges is an experiment in full-band environmental music.

Each track is a postcard, based around a field recording, sent from a particular place where we sensed that the generations of the past might speak to us. The music of each postcard was composed in a democratic, round-robin fashion, guided by a set of flexible rules, the most significant of which was that each musician must play at a different tempo. The result is a tapestry of different times that combine, intersect, phase, or simply co-exist within each postcard.

A product of the creative limitations of quarantine, Six Postcards was recorded remotely during the winter of 2021 in each musician’s home. The album takes inspiration from the environmental music of Hiroshi Yoshimura (whose Music for Nine Post Cards also provided a title and underlying conceit to the project), the compositional methods of Steve Reich, Brian Eno's foundational ambient works, and the philosophy of history of Jewish Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin, in particular his rejection of the idea of time as linear and homogeneous. It is music that would have been virtually impossible to write, let alone perform, if everybody had been together in the same room. Yet, even while doing away with the common time of popular music, the music finds another kind of togetherness, grounded in the rhythms and timbres of the field recordings, the interplay between the tempos of the accompanying parts, and the echoing of musical motifs. This is how we learned to play music together without attempting to collapse the distances that separated us.

At the center of each postcard is a field recording. Before any music was written or recorded for the project, each of the six musicians in the band selected a location in response to a prompt drawn from a reading of Benjamin’s "On the Concept of History": "where do you sense 'a secret meeting between the generations of the past and that of our own'?" This prompt was intended to guide us to consider the ways that struggles for liberation cut across time and space and to reflect on the deep histories of the places we frequent. If we listen, actually listen, perhaps we can hear "an echo of those who have been silenced in the voices to which we lend our ears today." We sought out this echo with our field recorders and voice memo apps, each in our own way. But any encounter with the past is, by nature, fleeting. As Benjamin writes, “The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.” A field recording seems to be a particularly ill-fitted tool for the task of documenting this sort of encounter, at once too impersonal and too individualistic, such that it requires commentary, as the individuals who were there (and not there) try to bring forth yet again the long-lost moment of recognition. In this project, the commentary is music.

The music writing process was an experiment in maximum democracy in songwriting, seeking to equalize the influence each musician had over each postcard and the album as a whole. With six musicians living separately in four different cities/villages, a rotation was set up based on the location of everyone’s home, arranged clockwise. This was the order in which each postcard was “mailed” from musician to musician. Each musician titled their postcard after the location or subject of their field recording, picked a tempo, and recorded an instrumental part (or a few) to accompany their field recording. After that, they uploaded the audio stems of their field recording and their part(s) to a shared drive. Then, the next musician in the rotation downloaded the stems, picked a new tempo, and added another part (or a few), and then uploaded it—and so the cycle repeated until each postcard had parts from all six musicians.

We posted new parts and rotated the postcards every two weeks. During the process, no one shared any information about their field recording beyond the title that they chose. No one listened to any postcards other than the one they were working on at the time, or discussed ideas for parts with any of the other musicians. Finally, no one heard their own unfinished postcard after posting their field recording and instrumental accompaniment until it went all the way around the circle, to return complete with everyone else’s parts. All of the substantial communication happened within the postcards themselves.

Six flexible rules guided the writing of parts:
• Each part must be instrumental.
• Each part must have a discernible rhythm.
• Each part must be played as a series of loops.
• Each musician must play their part(s) at a different tempo.
• Each part must be empathetic to the field recording and other parts.
• Follow your intuition.

There were no after-the-fact additions, subtractions, or edits of parts by the musicians. Nor were there any significant compositional changes made during the mixing process: what the listener hears is, essentially, the result of each part being “mailed” to the next musician and never revised. In fact, much of the production heard on the album was actually done in each musician’s home studio before they posted their part. The final mixing and mastering sought to connect all the parts while preventing any one part, or any one tempo, from becoming central. The end result is akin to letter-writing, in which nothing needs to be perfect, but nothing written can be taken back.

This project helped us through last winter—now it is an offering for this year, with hope for a future where all people may thrive.

credits

released February 4, 2022

The following chart lists the tempo at which each musician performed on each postcard. The musician who recorded the first part (indicated by asterisk) also captured the field recording and titled the postcard.

# A / L / C / J / D / W
1. 80* / 60 / 120 / 99 / 320 / 160
2. 70 / 80* / 60 / 140 / 120 / 105
3. 90 / 60 / 120* / 94 / 40 / 128
4. 60 / 56 / 80 / 70* / 92 / 100
5. 76 / 80 / 110 / 119 / 96* / 128
6. 93 / 62 / 70 / 111 / 124 / 93*

*= first part


Recorded and produced by rat dreams in their respective home studios.
Mixed by Will Myers in the Rumpus Room, Athens County, OH.
Mastered by Matt Ciani in Chicago, IL.

rat dreams is
Andrea Gutmann Fuentes
Laura Cook
Carrie Stratton
Jack Doran
Dan Seibert
Will Myers

album cover photography by rat dreams
album cover design by Will Myers

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tags

about

rat dreams Columbus, Ohio

ohio valley folk/art rock.

andrea, carrie, dan, jack, laura, and will.

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