Dreamsploitation

What I love about Dreamsploitation is that the music is glorious, celebratory, and positive without being campy. This is not easy to pull off, yet Dreamsploitation do it in spades. There is a high level of sincerity that runs throughout the entire album. "The Night Everything Changed" sets the tone- it is frivolous, flippant and playful. Chuck comes across as a sonic auteur, mixing and matching forgotten string flourishes with gorgeous melodies and infectious rhythms. I love the dizzy, almost euphoric quality of the music. I've heard material in this vein before, but nothing exactly quite like this. "Anxious Lullaby" sports gorgeous vocals and pseudo far-eastern undertones. It is smart and artfully beautiful. Blips like "Monochrome" waft by like a half-remembered dream. The songs culminate in an album that is jazzy, cinematic, worldly and pop infused. This is the sound of a technicolor 1950's Hollywood, modernized and spiritualized by the hand of technology. I so enjoy how this album floats by on a breeze of whimsy. Excellent. (sept '08 issue) - Nightwaves

Dreamsploitation's "Continue to sleep, if only dreaming" is a traffic jam of auditory commotion. The driving horn arrangement begins hitting every red light within a two second span, slamming on the breaks and succinctly pounding upon the car horn. A robust pushing and pulling, presumably a keyboard, follows a triumphant trumpet gathering split second momentum. Slam, the driver is forced to hit the breaks. The car horn blinks sixteen times over; finally the iridescent red changes to green. The locomotive rolls into a blissful state of cruise control.
A lullaby enters, almost as if cajoling the driver into a subdued, contemplative state. The tinkering of piano keys resembles suburban homes and manicured lawns. Just beyond these city limits an expansive prairie sky comes into view. All seems grandiose in contrast to the mathematical maze of concrete trailing behind. A sense of melodic freedom sifts throughout the airy notes. A climbing bass line recalls the magnitude of towers and buildings–a diorama of urbanization shrinks in the rear view mirror.
Freedom is an open road, a sleeper soundly sleeping. The heroic notes of a brass instrument soar. The bass line threatens to overwhelm. Abruptly the daydream cracks, traffic once again interrupts. The driver has fallen asleep at the wheel, a relentless car horn throbs, clashes and blurs into the memory of what could be. The dream is revisited, sounds collide, a kaleidoscope bursts open. With the final note everything dissolves, reality returns, all is lost.
- SHANNON WEBB-CAMPBELL (Sept 20, 2008)

- I Wanna Listen To This

*Dreamsploitation's 'The Soft Focus Sound of Today' makes the 'Best of 2008' list @ Textura.org - http://www.textura.org/reviews/2008top10s.htm*

Recordings assembled from samples can be as inspired as Amon Tobin's Permutation or as middling as Ekkehard Ehlers' Betrieb and Andrew Pekler's Nocturnes, False Dawns & Breakdowns. Without question, Chuck Blazevic's Dreamsploitation opus Soft Focus Sound of Today belongs in the former category. Though he only initiated the project in summer 2007, the twenty-three-year-old record Bedford, Nova Scotia native brings a fetishist's love for detail and a composer's ear for melody and arrangement to the fourteen tracks on the forty-eight-minute release. Stitched together using the rare Monome 256 sampler, Blazevic combines dozens of micro-samples lifted from obscure vinyl releases with recordings of his own instrument playing which, true to genre form, are then reshaped and re-formatted into galaxial tapestries that variously reference ‘60s lounge music, B-movie soundtracks, disco, and acoustic jazz. Sounds float in and out of the heady mix as one track after another briefly transports the listener to half-remembered dreamscapes.

The album's sunlit spirit asserts itself immediately in "The Night Everything Changed," a dizzying kaleidoscope of breezy female vocalizing, shimmering keyboard patterns, gently funky, and bass-thumping rhythms, and the tracks that follow make good on its promise. Blazevic nicely digs into instrumental clip-hop on "Major Seventh Gates" with dusty piano and vibes melodies and acoustic bass lines swimming across a snappy pulse while "Monochrome" sounds anything but single-hued when its jubilant female voices and charging breaks appear. The disc's full of steaming roller-coasters (e.g., "Our Future Salad Days," "Flashback, Temporal Bliss, Flashback," "Death to the Chuck I Hate") where blissful waves of strings and pianos are buoyed by swinging rhythms.

Blazevic's no lazy artisan who slaps samples and beats together and calls it a day. Instead, the intricacy of a given tune's construction reveals the workings of an immersive sensibility. Listen, for example, to the inspired tempo shifts in "Continue to Dream, If Only Sleeping" and how he deftly turns the beat around. He further distinguishes the Dreamsploitation style from the competition by eschewing synths and MIDI for natural-sounding materials that are often orchestral in origin and reveal a love for pop arrangers and film composers of the 1960s. At present, Dreamsploitation may be as obscure a name as the plundered materials constituting Soft Focus Sound of Today but, if there's any justice in the world, that won't last long.

October 2008
http://www.textura.org/reviews/dreamsploitation.htm - Textura.org

You might remember we featured the one man band - chuck blazevic - on the Nova Scotia mix, and I always meant to go back and get the whole record, but never did. Turns out, it's terrific music to keep you sharp at work or help you unwind with a glass of wine. Chuck's style is kind of like a subdued Caribou or maybe a more organic Kim Hiorthøy and his mix of beats, jazz, and textures is impressive, especially since he opts for combinations of sounds that float by almost unnoticed, instead of crafting head nodding beats.

Sure he still can lay down solid drum machine percussion (like he does on Our Future Salad Days), but instead of fueling your party, Dreamsploitation's best work reveals itself slowly, like a sort of time lapse photography. Even when the tempo peaks - like on the opening track, The Night Everything Changed - sounds and layers [s]till hold you close. Somehow, he makes IDM tracks like Our Very Own Harmonized Quilt seem comforting and warm...

[The] Soft Focus Sounds of Today is full of pleasant surprises (like the Euro pop feel he samples into Continue to Dream, if only Sleeping) and worthy of a listen. Check out a few tracks and take that first sip of wine and you'll actually start feeling the unwanted weight fall off your shoulders [...] Just go buy the record. - Herohill (June 24, 2008)

Dreamsploitation may sound like some kind of therapists' convention, or in musical terms may conjure up a lush electronic orchestra. It's neither though -- in fact it's the work of one man from Nova Scotia, who when he's not going by the Dreamsploitation moniker, is called Chuck Blazevic.

The sound is very lush though, created by many many tiny samples from recordings and acoustic sources, all manipulated and, as Mr. Blazevic himself puts it: "...transposed and re-contextualized into an ultra-melodic tapestry of soft-psychedelia, b-movie orchestral back drops, dusty drums, and loud quiet sounds."

To hear more, tune in to The Signal (10 p.m.) Thursday night as Laurie features the music... - CBC Radio 2 Blog

In the past 15 years, this reviewer's ears have had the pleasure of being introduced to some of the most ingeniously sample-based albums ever created - milestones of the genre, if you will - such as DJ Shadow's Endtroducing and Amon Tobin's Bricolage and Permutation. The impact of this novel way to create albums proved to be immense, although at the time, their effort was mostly recognized only by critics and connoisseurs of the scene they where active in. Today, I have the pleasure to discus Dreamsploitation's sample-driven debut release The Soft Focus Sound of Today. Cunningly forming his moniker with a hint to the exploitation cinema genre, this brainchild of Canadian Chuck Blazevic got the name just right to describe his 'cut & paste' re-interpretation of orchestral melodic sounds of the 60s.

This 23 year old multi-instrumentalist, dj, composer, producer, record collector and guitarist of The Heavy Blinkers hailing from Nova Scotia didn't leave a rock unturned in his quest for the ideal soundbites for this album. Tapping into a wide range of audiosources such as film scores and foley recordings, obscure and forgotten vinyl releases as well as self recorded material, and then re-arranging, tweaking, and - most importantly - using them in another context proves Dreamsploitation's intuition for the construction of a coherent composition. Built with more then merely a drumloop, a repetitive sample and a vocal line, The Soft Focus Sound of Today is a pleasant headrush of tiny samples constructed so that they form a blanket of Technicolour tints to crawl under and keep you warm. Like child playing with cute bears under her blanket, the unpredictability of this album is as surprising as it is coherent, no exuberant scratches but minimal shifts of creative playfulness.

Although scratch terms like scribble, flare and crab are slightly out of place when discussing The Soft Focus Sound of Today, this album contains quite some relish for the DJ-skill junkie. Samples looping in different measurements, cut up drumloops re-arranged on each passing keep a tempo in this album that will get to your sense of direction every now and then. The contrast of the Technicolour blanket of string and vocal samples and the unleashed drums don't allow much breathing space on the album, once the headspinning intro of the album is accompanied by its groove, it's a one way ticket towards the end. Although there are several drumless and downtempo pieces, there's always the confronting, psychotic edge of Dreamsploitation's signature sound - a sound filled with micro-samples, flowing yet always slightly abrupt.

And this is the greatest achievement - and perhaps, flaw - of the album. Dreamsploitation lures you in his own sound universe right from the intro towards the end, and it's a brilliantly designed sound spectrum you'll discover. But in the end you're most likely not to be able to point out what catches your attention the most, or what the thrills of the album were. The Soft Focus Sound of Today is much like a dream, an experience of memories viewed upon in a different, somewhat surreal way, something you want to remember in the morning when you wake up but most likely just end up wondering whole day what exactly happened. Dreamsploitation is not the new DJ Shadow or Amon Tobin, it's the third option; the new kid on the block that will amaze you and keep you wondering what will be next to come out of his absinthe-fuelled sampler.

-Jurgen Verhasselt - TheSilentBallet.com

The wickedly named Chuck Blazevic uses shuffling jazz drums, muted horns, pretty piano loops, and various vaguely New Agey samples to craft a truly awesome patchwork of textural melodies and percussive elements that roll and bump against one another. A must-see for fans of The Books. (ER) - Pop Montreal (ER)

Dreamsploitation, plundering the dreams of past eras, is Chuck Blazevic, a self aware connoisseur music vulture. It is a fair distance from John Oswald’s Plunderphonics concepts and, beyond the titling (being perhaps an ironic reworking of Blaxploitation), with seemingly no political point scoring here, is rather ’scoring’ in a compositional sense. Sampling here, acts as instrument for orchestration and arrangement, precise micro-samples arranged, overlapping into a lively display akin to 1960’s pop arrangers and film composers with whom he has an evident obsession. Blazevic utilises a Monome grid box sample cutting and re-arrangement tool in conjunction with a laptop and the instrument of sampling, having developed far beyond the tape splice and loop has become a sophisticated machine only too evident in the work.
As the focal point of sampling technique is no longer the fore grounded question, Blazevic concentrates on tonal quality, melody, precision in beat arrangement and holding together a multilayered complex form without the need for quirky attention grabbing sound bytes. To say it is classically beautiful is to say nothing, yet this is the realm which such words attach to sound structures like Dreamsploitation. Where the platonic dream of ideal form and all the repositioning of the dream/ideal throughout the ages have lead to a form of tyranny, it is a tyranny that we are only too willingly to succumb. ‘Give me beauty or give me death’, I know one is inevitable but could it come with a lullingly beautiful soundtrack?
Listening to the album, and I will not separate tracks for analysis as this seemingly goes against the grain of listening to such a text, is like turning a corner from a street lined with protesters complaining about the destruction of beauty to a brilliant little cul de sac of people consciously creating beautiful, light filled breezy works that reposition a person towards the world as a wonderful place.

author: Innerversitysound. (sept '08)
(http://www.cyclicdefrost.com/blog/?p=2288) - Cyclic Defrost