20221221
TOMORROW, I DREAMED OF
YESTERDAY’S EROSION
TOMORROW, I DREAMED OF YESTERDAY’S EROSION is about the fascination I have with derivatives of “the wild west.” Maybe it’s influenced by my father bringing my family to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, or maybe it’s because I discovered Hedi Slimane’s Saint Laurent during my formative years in college. Maybe it’s my dad’s routine toothpick after a meal, or the sight of dry plots of land our old houses were built on – reminiscent of valleys and deserts of the suburbs. Then, there’s my obsession with Ed Ruscha and my love for the desert and ocean horizons. All together, these references merge into this facade of a Californian concept that I associate as my American Dream.
8 songs, beginning with this western concept reduced to its essential sound in MIRAGE. Patinated metal of a different era echoes through the valley in ANTHEM FOR NO STATE PT II, welding into the oasis dream of SVEFN–G-ENGLAR. However, age and modernity pause the construction of this western dream, infiltrating through VOLCANIC INSTITUTIONS and FULLMOON, transitioning into a contemporary realization of what once was. A yearning hope approaches the horizon in MESA, only to be met with the onset of reality’s storm. Upon deciphering the dust, we return to distilled forms of our vision and dreams in THURSDAY AFTERNOON. An erosion of the sunset, drifting into the sunrise.
California was the “culture” I knew growing up, however what exactly is Californian/Western culture? The amplification of “Hollywood” would be appropriate – a mashup of appropriation and facades – undertoned with the reality of stolen land, Spanish colonialism, and the onset of loitering transplants in the recent decades. What once were valleys of land have turned into suburban gated communities of cookie-cutter mcmansions, created a la carte based on the categorization of Tuscan, Spanish, or Mediterranean “architecture.” All of it a constant surface level humm of noise and content that bears no true roots to its context – a place where the doesn’t-belongs belong.
I find myself seeking escape from this amalgamation of references and origins, which brings me to this distilled fascination of “westernism.” It’s something that feels relevant to my concept of the American Dream, good or bad, and as I grow older, I look to recontextualize this. I find the most peace in the presence of a vast horizon – endless desert land completely void of distraction. A distillation of this “western” culture I’ve grown up with. Yet there is a dystopian modernity to the minimalism of this historic vastness of nature that seems so foreign to today’s society.
