Dream Car, 2009
I volunteered as a gallery monitor at La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House: Sound and Light Environment from 2009 to 2016. Shortly after I began working there, I transformed my 1998 Volvo V70 station wagon into a miniaturized bootleg copy of the installation as a response to the limited availability of La Monte Young’s music. I presented the work at AS220’s Foo Fest in Providence, RI and later at an exhibition at Proteus Gowanus in Brooklyn, NY curated by David Mahfouda. Marian Zazeela later told me she found the work “very amusing.”
Here is my original proposal for the installation, which I sent to Foo Fest curator Neal Walsh at AS220 in 2009:
“I have spent the past six months working at La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela's Dream House sound and light installation in NYC (www.melafoundation.org). My experience with the space gave me an idea for a project called Dream Car.
La Monte Young's work is notoriously difficult to hear due to his attitude about recordings. He is very concerned with preserving the purity and exactitude of his work because of its focus on precise tonal intervals. The few recordings that exist are all out of print. Ironically, this results in most people first encountering his work in compressed audio files. For example, my copy of Young's Trio for Strings, a six-hour-plus drone piece, takes up 86.6 MB. That's very portable. As a response to this situation, I thought it would be fun to make a "compressed" version of the Dream House using my Volvo station wagon. I made a bootleg recording of the Dream House sound using my laptop built-in microphone and burned a CD. I'm buying magenta gels for the windows, laying down white carpeting in the back with the seats down, and covering the leather seats with white canvas. The Dream Car allows people to experience a lossy, compressed version of one of the earliest examples of a site-specific sound installation by one of the most important composers of the twentieth century. Its also a way of thinking about the sonic space of cars, which is really the ultimate immersive drone environment.”
