Disquiet

The tape work “Dreaming in Darkness” was performed at the Other Minds festival in San Francisco last month — and already at the festival’s audio catalog at archive.org there’s a downloadable MP3 (and OGG) of the piece, along with six other works performed that evening, March 7, 2008, plus a panel discussion, all as separate files. “Darkness,” by Åke Parmerud, has many of the characteristic attributes of classic tape-based sound: extended drones, near-silence, chance percussion, orchestral (or chamber music) fragments, and street noise. Parmerud blends them into a quasi-narrative that is more disorientating than haunting, more about sense perception than about thrills. According to the Other Minds notes, the work was intended to be “an attempt to create surrealistic fragments of a blind person’s dreams.”

By Marc Weidenbaum