The Brooklyn Rail

Don’t go to the Dream House prepared to relax. This is not “dream” as in ideal, or as in sleep. Instead remember, when you climb to the third-floor landing at 275 Church Street, that “dream” is meant in the ancient Vedic sense of fundamentally real. And, as we all know, the very real can be very hard.

That’s not to say you may not feel good in the Dream House. Marian Zazeela’s magenta window scrims and complementary lighting of unintrusive mobiles are not designed to shock, nor is the incense and projected, perforated light with which the third member of the collaborative Dream House team, multi-disciplinary artist Jung Hee Choi, frames the two galleries and narrow hallway that comprise the architecture of the Dream House.

But you should feel challenged, and unmistakably, when in the main gallery, the imposing portrait of the great Indian classical singer Pandit Pran Nath—to whom both Zazeela and La Monte Young were apprenticed—underscores what no visitor to the Dream House can miss upon entering: the sound. In a word, it’s a drone. In musical parlance, drone is a single chord or note sounded throughout the entirety of a composition. A composer working with drones plays upon harmonic resonance to amplify and expand the variable vibratory fields of the sound revealing information about what La Monte Young—interviewed in Berkeley in 1989—called our “relationship to time and universal structure.”

What makes the Dream House and La Monte Young’s work continue to feel contemporary after sixty-three years in existence, multiple international chapters, and thirty-two years at the MELA Foundation on Church, is that the format of his drone compositions—structured around prime number relationships within the harmonic range of his chords—offers continued insight into our societal entanglement with technology in an elegant, evolutionary form. The apparent complexity of the sound produced in the Dream House is best experienced and understood through the movement of one’s body through the space. Bending, kneeling, twirling, and lying down—which the throw pillows scattered on the wall-to-wall carpeting invite us to do—are all advisable. In other words: you should move, which is precisely what contemporary technology tends to fail at encouraging. Sound, by contrast, generates movement. Technology can be a means of evolution and sound connects it to the body.

If this reminds you a bit of your local yoga class, and possibly the Big Bang, then you are not far off base. The idea that all forms are cyclically recurrent, and that in dreams we find the expression of underlying structure defining what we call reality emerged prominently in Hindu and Buddhist thought, anticipating by a measure of millenia concepts to which we are now reintroduced in myriad fields from archetypal psychology to particle physics. This encompasses and answers the pressing question, “Where are we going?” which we may pose daily to the oracular Magic 8 Ball, available on every iPhone. The answer is: where you have been.

Our technology will naturally supply information enabling a harmonious relationship to cyclical time if—the rub—we learn to interact with our tools properly. For example, the Rayna interval synthesizer, which breaks up and distributes the thirty-one frequencies in Young’s composition, was cutting edge at the time Young used it. While the field of sound engineering has continued to evolve, the idea at the Dream House is that future programming will enable its sound to live and evolve in time.

When I say programming, you may think computers, but I mean live performances, one of which will celebrate Young’s ninetieth birthday in October, meant to interact with and enhance the sound that is already there. How can you have a concert in a soundscape? By carefully composing the interaction. Significantly, I noticed that despite the overwhelming presence of the drone in the Dream Room, I was still able to hear with perfect clarity the crumpling of the paper on which I wrote.

Perhaps this line of thought appears a bit irresponsible—a kind of futurism in disguise. A good point. But I don’t have a better explanation for why Dream House stands forth from the field of Minimalism from which it emerged, beyond the contradictory suggestion that Young’s grounding in ancient tradition opens his work toward the future through binding it to the past. If you’d like to discuss the idea further, I’d suggest a seat on one of those pillows and, if you can, take in the good vibrations.