Living In Memory of Something Sweet

dreamTX is a post-post rock project by Nick Das, a multi-instrumentalist and producer from Dallas. 'living in memory of something sweet' marks his debut album under the alias a nod to Terisius Nash, the logic of sleep, grand southern skies tho Das has quietly been recording and performing across the United States since twenty-sixteen, playing electronics, guitar in shoegaze group Kraus, sometimes co-writing with Maggie Rogers, and making early albums that bear the bent-toothed twang of Modest Mouse, a striving formalism and regard for words, for poetry, a wooly, handmade charm, a Smog-iness. In twenty-nineteen, he made a break, away from the new frontier of Texas, away from Drag City worship, and towards the spiritual grounds of the first great awakening, to Woodstock. Life became swirls of density: Hudson School hues, sanded brown, pine green, bugs and heat, intensity, exercise, and working himself up mountains. Real freedom, aloneness, and happy, and maybe deranged by the sun in july being without an a/c. dreamTX recorded most of living in these new surroundings, and devised a unique way of thinking about songs, mapping their structures according to the linearity of an out-and-back trail system wherein you traverse new ground, sounds, and melodies for half the song, and then retrace those same parts in reverse, but through a retinkered, degraded lens, where there’s recognizable elements from before (a musical phrase, a chord), but recontextualized in new spaces (magnified or pushed into the distance, crunched, mangled, or echoing and smeared together... ) to create a progressive arrangement out of the same materials, like japanese boro patchwork. “What happens to a song when you rewrite it one hundred times over again? With each subsequent track, I dedicated longer periods to produce them. I spent nearly 9 months on a single song. I wanted to learn how that song might unfold, to see how many of my own hands could touch it. Our impressions, ears, perceptions are changing all the time. I wanted to make whole songs that feel like they contain all of me – the quiet, erratic, raw, inward, obscure, and bristling power that passes through me. I wanted to notice these changes, and document them. Some artists think their best songs are written in 15 minutes, but for me, I'm not so sure.”