#the window is the dream

[plusie]

🖥 - computer plushies!!

[mienar]

at the artist's loft

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[rocy5]

[tagerrkix]

Eden was their ✨disney princess era✨

[one-time-i-dreamt]

My roommate came to me crying because she accidentally installed windows on her Mac by using a Windows charger on it.

[radio-4-is-static]

The Dream | Jana Horn

The Window is the Dream began as a failed poem. I wrote it as I was waking up... the last thing I want in this breath of existence / is not to throw myself into it / as any bird might stop flying / when the window is the dream. I think the original line was "toad breath." My classmates were nice about it, even the teacher.

I was taking a class on esoteric lit, a fiction workshop, a poetry class. And while the poem wasn't quite... a poem... a song did rise from it, like smoke from a fire put-out. The song is called The Dream, which maybe the album is pointing toward. These recurring lines which depict the image of a bird hitting a window, though not out of oblivion, but because the bird knows something we don't.

***What if birds aren't singing, they're screaming? (Aldous Harding)

***What if nightmares were cries from hell? What if nightmares literally took place in hell? Why not? Everything is so strange, even this is possible. (Jorge Luis Borges)

I think of a line from a favorite story of mine, "Car Crash While Hitchhiking," in which a man is observing someone badly hurt, and about to go: And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.

I won't bore you with more quotes... but perhaps my idea with this song, and album, was in part to help keep this broader, ongoing conversation in the air, like a beach ball.

I wrote these songs in the thick of a writing program. I was reading all the time, sometimes five-hundred pages a week or more, there was no music on, for years maybe; my record player broke, the stereo in my car, my laptop’s was on its last speaker and then it started twitching. The feeling of those days was holding on, as though centripetal force alone was keeping everything going. Songs spilled. Days go by / they don't have time. Even the walks I took were circular, around the cemetery and back.

The album was recorded in the breaths I could take away from school, over about a year. Once I had a number of songs, I drove to upstate New York where my friends Sarah and Jared warned me we could make something beautiful. I think I was the first, or one of them, to record in their barn, which is now a bonafide studio. The whole thing was a family affair. Jonathon, one of the guitarists, and I even have the same last name. I like the songs that we play together, how his guitar and my voice sound like they’re having a conversation, or arguing, or trust-falling into one another. There’s more of this, I think, a kind of dialogue throughout, between the voices in the room.

– Jana Horn on her new album The Window Is The Dream

[inkskinned]

i had a dream last night that i organized a tumblr meetup and we all agreed to go to a local bar together. so i go to the bar but it was a really busy night and i didn't want to ask every stranger "are u here for tumblr reasons" bc that's embarrassing and i'm shy. so i just got a drink and felt very awkward & hoped someone would approach me. tried to look inviting and like i was from tumblr but not like i was "from tumblr". when i left some girl stopped me to ask if i was there for the meetup but i was too shy and asked what's tumblr?

in the dream i went home to make a post about how nobody showed up to the tumblr meetup but my entire dash was people saying they'd gone to the bar but were too fucking shy to admit to being on tumblr so we'd all just had a drink and gone home

[roccio2]

[wonderrosss]

When you look at your reflection, who do you see?

[dustedmagazine]

Jana Horn — The Window Is the Dream (No Quarter)

Photo by Ebru Yildiz

The Window Is The Dream by Jana Horn

The title of Jana Horn’s second album, The Window Is the Dream, offers a clue to the subtle shift in perception her music demands. Though this half-hour-long record is a superficially simple, relatively unadorned series of songs built from guitar, bass, drums and voice, with the odd instrumental embellishment here and there, Horn weaves in an undeniable magic. Much like the soap bubble on the album’s cover, hold this music up to the light and it refracts a surprising array of beautiful colors.

Single “The Dream” feels like the key to unlocking the album’s secrets. A faint vapor trail of feedback, a shaker, and a handful of guitar chords summon the song into existence, soon accompanied by a punchy drum pattern and some intricate lead guitar work from Jonathan Horne. The song’s chorus offers up a poem that sketches out the space Horn’s songs seem to orbit within: “The last thing I want in this breath of existence / is not to throw myself into it / as any bird might stop flying / when the window is the dream.” The meaning of these words is more felt than understood. 

Horn’s voice also goes a long way towards cultivating a liminal atmosphere, at times reminiscent of the plain-speaking tunefulness of Suzanne Vega, at others reaching into the haunted realms of Broadcast’s Trish Keenan. Horn sings with control and poise, but there’s emotion shimmering at the edges of her carefully enunciated phrasing. Compare the album’s bookends for a full sense of her range. On opener “Leaving Him,” the words are laid out delicately over a dreamy bed of vibraphone and tom-toms, as if gradually waking to a realization whose true meaning is only just coming to light: “Everything is in the past when you've made up your mind / Going to the door only to have it open from the inside.” Horn sounds measured and collected, but the imagery of the words is uneasy and vaguely sinister. The album’s closer, “The Way It Is,” is similarly unadorned, just electric piano and vocal, but Horn’s voice is vulnerable and defeated, reflecting upon a relationship that perhaps shouldn’t have been initiated in the first place: “Didn’t know to stop my heart from beating against a door that was closed.” 

Between these two poles, the album feels more confident and energetic in its first half, becoming more listless and mournful in the second. As the album progresses, it’s like watching color drain from someone’s face as they realize the truth is not what it seemed. Despite its suave presentation, reminiscent of the Astrud Gilberto classic “The Girl from Ipanema,” “After All This Time”’s lyrics are shot through with ambiguity: “After all this time / there is only so much I can say for sure / Looking out the window is not the same as opening the door.” Similarly, “Days Go By” betrays its confident guitar-focused backing with words that suggest an internal monologue spiralling out of control: “Days go by, they don’t have time… I leave myself inside and go out / Looking for her in the other.” In the album’s second half, “Old Friend” and “Energy Go” each see-saw anxiously between a pair of chords, as if worrying about the best way forward, while “Song For Eve” evokes prime Broadcast with its glistening synths and reverb-drenched bass. 

Though short, The Window Is the Dream is a perfectly formed and bewitching album that offers both immediate gratification through its measured performances, plus plenty of depths to explore as its themes gradually reveal themselves. This one will be sure to feature highly come the end of the year. 

Tim Clarke

[vamprisms]

the emotional whiplash of viewing nosferatu 2024 and it lodging itself in my brain forever as a metaphor for sexual abuse and the way patriarchy enables rape just to come home to see people refer to it as the monsterfucking movie and moving on with their day. like yea she fucked that monster alright but she was not having. a good time.

[ruushes]

have to imagine viago isn’t thrilled about the rook de riva/lucanis relationship or at least isn’t in my worldstate primarily because it would be very funny to me but also because 1) he disapproves of everything my rook does on principle 2) proximity to any first talon is dangerous enough generally and specifically he’d put lucanis’s life expectancy as first talon at around five years tops if he’s feeling generous and 3) lucanis threatened to kill him once by “gifting” him a knife of overtly intimidating high quality

[rocy5]

[toyastales]

A well deserved cat nap.

[zu-is-here]

Would you draw some cute Cream moment?

the morning kiss