The Reveries are back with their follow-up to Blasé Kisses. They continue to be Eric Chenaux (vocals, guitar, mouth-speaker), Ryan Driver (vocals, quasi-ruler bass, thumbreeds, mouth-speaker) and Doug Tielli (vocals, guitar, saw, mouth-speaker).  And they continue to sing and play standards—sweet pop/jazz from the last three quarters of a century—rendered unstandard; each song existing in a profoundly altered state.  We said it before: “This would be hallucinogenic music if hallucinations were real (there are no illusions at work here).”  And the lymphatic system (and just the lymphatic system) of their daydream machine is still the mouth-speaker network: a signal from everything one Reverie is doing is sent to a small speaker (taken from a cell-phone) held in the mouth of another Reverie; we might hear Eric’s guitar coming out of Doug’s mouth, Doug’s saw coming out of Ryan’s mouth, Ryan’s voice coming out of Eric’s mouth—each signal modulated by the activities of the mouth it is relocated in, an array of fragile talk-boxes wah-ing away.


This time their dream-work is caught at the Angelica Festival in Bologna, Italy.  Festival director Massimo Simonini says it best:

“The Reveries remodel songs, songs “consumed” by time, re-finding and expanding them with unique instrumentation.

Time is a theme to explore, into which one must enter in order to transform.  Removing or placing veils, magic filters; making micro and macro, using lenses to see the past again, first appearing very distant, then coming closer with a different dimension.  We encounter story and style for a moment entering that olden time for a convinced salute, then returning into a space that is taking form.

Think of a song, stop it in time, caress it, observe it and play it—discovering how it speaks.  The error mysteriously disappears; almost everything seems possible. The important thing is to believe it, to have a vision and respect it, between reality and illusion, depending.

Form stops when it is consumed.  To sculpt into a song to find a new form is an answer to necessary movement. (”A form that thinks, a thought that forms.”)

A meditation on form, ironed, dilated, almost a long alap.

Inside a chamber atmosphere, we ask ourselves where we are.  It is dreamtime.  It is all so tragically romantic, looking at the moon, remembering a raga.

Rich of weak strength, delicate.”  (Translated by Massimi Simonini, Doug Tielli, Shiela Tielli)

That’s right.