Wolf Eyes

Dreams In Splattered Lines fuses together Wolf Eyes' 25 years of DIY electronics with the avant-garde sensibilities of Fluxus and the granite of dreary Midwestern life. Continuing some of the ideas explored on the Presents Difficult Messages record of collaborations, the result is a surreal dreamscape of disorienting sound collages, where hit songs are transformed into terrariums of sonic flora and decimated fauna. As if pulled from a fever dream, the surrealists of the 1960s converge with alien electronic blues musicians in an underworld of mystery. The air is thick with car wash radio white noise, crackling and fizzing like a toxic elixir, spoken word poetry transmissions as absurd and cryptic phrases. Each corroded aural environment is a microcosm of chaos, honed to razor-sharp precision. Swept away in a whirlwind of thirteen perplexing narratives, each one an unpredictable journey through subterranean worlds, a sonic trip of reality folded into itself.

Currently operating as a duo, co-founder Nate Young comments: “This record was recorded after we finished the New York Public Library residency in early 2022. We had spent a lot of time in NYC during the residency but because of Covid we had limited access to the Library archives. We would spend 4-5 hours at the library and then go to museums. The MET’s Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibit was a huge influence on this record. Learning about the Chicago Surrealists’ spoken-word poetry performed with musicians was inspiring and affirmative. "While Surrealism could generate often poetic and even humorous works, it was also taken up as a far more serious weapon in the struggle for political, social, and personal freedom, and by many more artists around the world"

We started by continuing to explore the ideas of short dense sound collages that had similar behaviors to "hit singles". Using a lot of ideas that we established on the Difficult Messages series, we started to look at hit songs like terrariums: folding the idea of music and sound happening inside sound environments we created in the studio. The record starts with a Car Wash that includes a Short Hands track playing on the car radio while waves of white noise and contact microphones are plunging into water buckets. The track is then played in a car while going through an actual car wash and finally layered and mixed in the studio.”

The other half of Wolf Eyes and a member since 2000, John Olson (aka Spykes, Inzane Johnny, and over a hundred other sobriquets via his long-running American Tapes imprint) adds: "Dreams in Splattered Lines is the latest in Wolf Eyes' journey into the corners of unknown electronic subterranean worlds. Thirteen tangled stories razor sharp from the duo's recent Difficult Messages singles foray starting with a unique "suite" from "Radio Box" to "Engaged Withdrawl" and ending with the grim title track, here is Wolf Eyes at their most abstract yet corrupted listening experience yet. For a group that would rather invent genres rather than follow them, Dreams in Splattered Lines is the twisted road that leads another 25 years onward to the unquenchable passion of unknown arcane electronic worlds. Music dreamt in 242 B.C. and horribly born in 20042 A.D.”