Alex Calder
Strange Dreams

But if in the Time of abandonment of spiritual power to the scientists and temporal power to the industrialists.

If between the coffee break and before taking the baby out for a walk, hopping across the crosswalk in a hurry, one had a scant half-hour to nurture a bit of healthy laziness, what could one listen to today?

Just to keep the eyes half-closed for a moment, the warrior's dormant pupils, those lowered shutters and the world outside... to regret that childlike thrill, that sway in the Femme's walk, now grown up though...

(Hype ...)

Alex, I’m talking to you, what could one listen to?

A resounding silence replied to this question.

Obscured by reverbs of amber pop in the style of Deerhunter, by the minimal and artisanal sound of Califone, every attempt to promote this Album was soon enveloped in a misty haze as thick and dense as the darkest wave chapters of 4AD. Mr Calder's direction continued to spin buried dreams of undulating celluloid in that Living Room, inanimate like a Sahara desert, smoking cigarette butts scattered on the floor like burning embers, Harem, incense, myrrh, and spicy mandrake curtains, all absent, sultans and concubines, a low-fi sanctuary with shutters closed all day, Persian carpets and smoking cigarette butts forever, empty and damp rooms, mountains of VHS tapes of vintage films and documentaries about the underwater and submerged world.

Postcards from Atlantis & Babylon.

Leafing through a Rose, every petal an illusion, every thorn a reality, Strange Dreams after a longer-than-usual night, confused memories, glasses of Dry Martini and lots of ice, an otherworldly beautiful nymph, dark-haired and ice-eyed, Paul Eluard’s subtle phrases whispered to his pavilion among the humid smoke of cigarettes. Or perhaps just an illusion, maybe a suspended frame from a Greta Garbo film or merely a Latex Love Doll of Asian import and Happy Birthday from Mastercard.

Strange Dreams, on that stage in the parlor the Pavement in that millennial indie tension, crumpled in the web of a giant spider, in the overwhelming foolery of Wowee Zowee, Malkmus accompanied by dwarves, jesters, a black prince of Minneapolis exhausted and shattered by the verve of his muse Vanity and with a soft spot for cockroaches, the most melancholic chants of Lars Von Trier and This Mortal Coil, the fury of Sebadoh thundered on earth like a wrathful God of Asgard and Grace Slick's cardioaspirin and Smarties, a whole indistinct mist of shadows and ghosts that sounds at the same time childish and spectral.

Fading on a blackboard skewed coordinates for the creation of a beautiful and impossible Pop.

Postcards from my Best Ghost Town.

Yearning for nothingness, idling in the twilight of demigods abandoned by nanotechnologies, the Pop of Strange Dreams in its confused identity and its natural obliquity aims at coordinates of trembling and impossible dance, deflates pistons and compressed air valves plunging the Charts and their figures into an abyss consumed not only by reality but also by the matter of dreams themselves.

And the illusion.

Of Childish Loves.

Of Songs, of Kisses, of floral bouquets.

The vibration of violins, the red wine in the mugs

the Paradise of Clandestine Pleasures.

Alex!

Alex!!

Wake up, they’ve stolen your MasterCard.