Traumdeutung, Diego Cortez

The Traumdeutung project began in 1999 with a one-hour recording of my snoring into a DAT player placed next to my bed in my N.Y.C. loft. My snores, re-contextualized here in musical arrangements produced by Arto Lindsay and Alexandre Kassin, range from the mild and blissful to the vulgar and catastrophic. My original intention was to turn something awful into something listenable or, at least, amusing. However in the mixing stage unexpected results were revealed and oblique references came into play. The human snore, if slowed down as we did several times in the studio searching for editing points, is almost identical to the sounds of plaintive underwater whales. In listening to these mixes one follows the moods, if not the actual narratives, of the dreamer – sudden changes in snoring clearly result from changes within inner narratives. These are abstract matters, as we can only witness such inner events through a series of filters.