It was through a discreet post on Reddit that we discovered the existence of The House protects the Dreamer.
A user by the name of Frater_57910 reported that a third party had uploaded to Archive.org some tracks that he and a friend had recorded some twenty years earlier.
Entitled Meditationsmusik and uploaded on September 5, 2023, the item on Archive.org was presented as follows:
On Reddit, Frater_57910 explained that his musical buddy, whose commentary can be seen under the name Secret France on the Archive.org page, had warned him about the release of these old tracks:
"The craziest thing about it is that we never released these tracks officially. Only a few friends had copies on cassette, like most of our demos or rehearsal recordings. Apparently someone made copies for his own friends, and so on."
The few tracks offered on Archive had a mysterious charm due essentially – not that the music was in itself boring or bad – to the sound of the recording, incredibly lo-fi and primitive, and this not thanks to digital effects or the manipulation of parameters on a current DAW, but quite simply to their recording conditions: it was clearly a cassette recorded with a tape recorder equipped with an internal microphone.
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We got in touch with the people behind the Bandcamp account Gaimundas, a discreet netlabel offering ambient demos quite close to German Kosmische Musik or projects such as Burzum in the Filosofem era (an influence claimed by the band).
The Archive.org Autumn Calls account, which had published some of the tracks, already offered, before uploading them and obviously without knowing it, several tracks also produced by the netlabel.
The description of what Gaimundas produces, in their own words, is both clear and brief:
"Digital reedition of private tapes. Localist and primitive ambient."
In the course of our discussions, we learned that all the tracks would be re-released online over the following weeks, on their Bandcamp account. It's now a done deal. These few surviving tracks from countless improvisations – many of which, if we are to believe their authors, have never even been recorded – are in any case representative of the ambient style typical of the '90s, at the crossroads of the black metal scene and the post-industrial world, now integrated into that undifferentiated melting pot known as "dungeon synth".
Why did you choose the phrase "The House protect the Dreamer" as a title? And why isn't there a project name as such?
B. : It comes from a quote by Gustave Bachelard, which we posted on Bandcamp with the release:
"If we were asked the most precious benefit of the house, we would say: the house shelters reverie, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows us to dream in peace."
F. : There's no name for the project, because when we recorded these tracks we hadn't given the matter any thought, as we weren't planning to make them public; and there's no reason to invent a name for ourselves, twenty years on. So we chose this phrase as both name and title.
The Hanweiler and Gewhuse projects, on the other hand, each have their own name.
F. : Yes, for the simple reason that these demos were published at the time. Very few copies, but they were published nonetheless. So we needed a name under which to present them to the public. The House Protects the Dreamer, on the other hand, has never been released until now, as I've just said. We had no intention of releasing this music as a "demo", with a "project name", a "cover", a positioning in a "scene" and all that. We were past that stage.
B. : We released demos and albums, under various names, and with various collaborators, but at some point we felt the need to withdraw from any public existence and keep our music to ourselves and a few friends.
F. : What we played was first and foremost music made to support daydreaming, which we listened to ourselves to prolong certain states of consciousness or, more banally, to fall asleep.
What prevented you from taking your music public? What bothered you about evolving within a scene?
F. : We realized that all the effort required to exist publicly within a scene – duplicating cassettes or CDRs, printing covers, advertising with flyers, or in fanzines, or on the Net afterwards, the need to have "good relations" with as many other players in the scene as possible, the pecuniary aspect of it all, etc. – was boring us deeply and increasingly interfering with our creative life and our life in general. So we finally gave up. Becoming "famous" or "respected" wasn't our goal anyway. On the contrary, the very idea of the underground, the secret, private, exclusive aspect of it all, was very appealing to us, but experience showed us that it actually contained, in miniature, everything that is repulsive in the mainstream world.
B. : To be truly underground is to be invisible, even to the official "underground".
Do you know the person who uploaded part of the demo to Archive.org? Without her, I imagine there would be no reissue...
F. : She gave us her e-mail address, so we got in touch, and yes, it turns out that although we don't know each other very well, we were moving in the same circles and in the same region at the time. Which explains why she has our official demos (released on home-engraved CDRs at the time) and why a mutual friend may have copied private recordings for her. The "dark" scene in Eastern France (Alsace-Lorraine) isn't exactly gigantic.
Private recordings? So you gave copies of your rehearsals or that sort of thing, to third parties?
F. : To certain friends and correspondents, yes. We couldn't store everything we wanted online back then. We had to put out releases on cassette or CDR. Between official releases, we'd let our contacts listen to our new compositions by sending them a track or a few tracks from time to time. Some of these songs ended up on official releases, others remained unreleased. Or disappeared altogether. On the occasion of a hard drive failure or that sort of thing.
B. : We also have friends who came to rehearsals or improv sessions at our place back in the day, and I know some of them made recordings. I'm sure there are some we don't have ourselves. We probably don't lose much...
F. : In the case of The House Protects the Dreamer, we thought we'd never release it, so we made a few copies on cassette for friends.
You say "rehearsals at our place" – did you live together?
B. : Yes, today (and for a long time!) we each have our own apartment, and in fact we don't even live in the same town any more, but back then we lived in a community with other people. The membership list has changed a lot over the three or four years we've been together. There were usually half a dozen people living in the house, which had several bedrooms and a converted cellar (where the home studio was also located). You could call it a flat-sharing arrangement, and it's a commonplace thing today, but there was an artistic and spiritual dimension to it. Music was just one aspect. Many of us were painters and/or sculptors. Mostly in a neo-primitive style.
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(Photo: examples of works made by residents)
We were a community interested in spirituality, the arts in general, and with a certain rule of life that was an integral part of our spirituality AND our artistic practice.
A rule of life? That sounds very monastic.
B. : I wouldn't say that our youth was monastic (laughs), but you could say that we had developed our own version of "Ora et labora", yes. Every member of the community had to help out with household chores, of course, but also with the vegetable garden and all kinds of outdoor work, so that we had to rely as little as possible on the shops, or even earn a bit of money at the local markets. There were also specific times for meditation or guided dreaming sessions. It wasn't compulsory – we weren't a cult – but it was as much a part of everyday life as eating or sleeping.
F. : Everyday life, even in its most trivial aspects, had to be lived in a "certain way".
What made it stop?
F. : There wasn't any particular reason. I guess at some point everyone just got fed up and wanted to move on. And certain material realities, professional realities, etc., also imposed themselves.
Getting back to the music: you talk about improvisation. Were you systematically improvising?
B. : Not systematically, no – Eintritt in ein kosmisches Ordnungswissen was composed from A to Z, for example – but most of the time, when we tried to construct the pieces in a more composed, methodical way, it didn't work. A lot of work and an extremely unintuitive, unenjoyable way of composing, for a result that was banal at best. Having said that, most of the impros didn't produce anything, or not much either; but the point of the process was that, sometimes, even if it was only for a few minutes, out of a whole afternoon of jamming, there was a moment of grace.
F. : We ended up not recording at all and just improvising together, trying to reach this kind of state of grace as quickly and as often as possible. The few demos and anonymous recordings we have today are a tiny fraction of what our musical activity was.
What does the name of your netlabel, Gaimundas, mean?
F. : Gaimundas is neither a label nor a netlabel. We're not going to produce any new releases, and we're not active in any "scene". It's simply a Bandcamp account that allows us to make old recordings available. We no longer compose and have no interest in the current scene.
B. : It's the name of the town where we spent part of our youth. Its old name. In the same way as Gewhuse or Hanweiler are places. We made this choice at the time so that our music would be truly local and rooted. We're not interested in names inspired by Tolkien or some distant mythology.
Is rootedness important to you?
F. : Yes, undeniably. Not in a "patriotic" way or anything like that. It's something more carnal, more immediate. Something politically inexploitable. The German word "Heimat" is more appropriate than "Fatherland" as far as we're concerned, because the Heimat is our childhood home, the bed we slept in as children.
Always the theme of the house...
F. : Yes.
B. : We grew up in a region where the past is visible everywhere. From Gallo-Roman remains to 19th-century industrial ruins and a fortified castle, in just a few square kilometers you get a glimpse of two thousand years of history. It creates a certain state of mind. And something you might want or need to express or illustrate through music, or painting.
F. : It seemed natural to us to use this heritage, for the names of our projects, for example, rather than drawing on Tolkien's work like fifteen thousand other bands in this genre.
"Want or need" – don't you miss an artistic life?
B. : As I said earlier, music was only one aspect of our creative life at the time. As far as I'm concerned, I've pursued photography, vegetable gardening and woodworking – artistic or artisanal. I do it for myself and don't feel the need to publicize what I do.
F. : On the one hand, I have a very busy professional life; on the other hand, when I have time to work on personal things, I now prefer the written word. I still compose a little, unlike B., but I do it alone; it's not the same experience at all.
You use the term "atmospheric" to describe your music; doesn't the dungeon synth appellation that has come into vogue over the last decade or so suit you?
F. : Dungeon synth is a meaningless term that I can't stand hearing anymore. And even if it did mean something, we have nothing to do with this Dungeons & Dragons nonsense. Neither thematically, nor musically. There are no pseudo-medieval or "epic" antics on The House, nor in our other releases.
B. : We listened to and hung out with (mostly from a distance, by mail as it used to be) artists in the late 90's who today are retrospectively described as dungeon synth. It's a totally artificial label, authoritatively lumping together people who, at the time, were clearly not part of the same scenes, the same mental universes, or had the same influences, the same aesthetic, spiritual, political and other projects.
On the Gaimundas page, you link this release to the "pagan ambient scene of Eastern France". Can you tell us more about it?
B. : That's a bit of a misnomer, actually. I admit it is. But we were very influenced by the folk pagan scene in Slavic countries (Perunwit, Kraina Bez Wiatru, Lord Wind, etc.) and by more ambient bands from Eastern countries too, like Sammach, or Baltic countries like Wejdas.
They all had, explicitly or otherwise, a very pagan feeling, whether in the spiritual sense or in the more prosaic sense, i.e., "earthy", rooted, folkloric, national-romantic (to use the term used by Ulver at the time). At the time, there were several projects in the Eastern region that could be described as ambient, in the very broad sense of the term (essentially synthetic music, devoid of rhythm, etc.), and which obeyed this spiritually or prosaically pagan vision of the world.
F. : Most of them, of course, were linked to the black metal world. A few others, though rarer, were linked to the industrial/dark folk scene.
Did you listen to dark folk too?
F. : Dark folk in the English sense of the word, very little, actually. I don't like the obsession with World War II or militarism in general that exists or has existed in this milieu. Nor the social-darwinist nonsense of Boyd Rice. I was more into the aforementioned bands, or folk like Hagalaz Runedance.
B. : I had bought and really liked the collaboration between Freya Aswynn and Patrick Leagas (ex-Death in June). It was unintentionally close to the atmospheric black scene, rather than the usual post-industrial scene.
What about black metal?
B. : We listened to black metal all through our teenage years, but by the time we recorded our own atmo demos in the early 2000s, it was no longer our preferred genre. It was more of a gateway to other genres and other worlds, for us, than a goal in itself.
F. : Our most important musical influence was the German Kosmische Musik of the 70s. Today it's something that doesn't really interest me any more, but for teenagers of the 90s and early 2000s, (re)discovering Tangerine Dream or (especially) Popol Vuh is an extraordinary experience. Aguirre is one of the greatest musical shocks of my life. But the gateway for us was Burzum and its ambient tracks: Tomhet and Rundgang Um Die Transzendentale Saule Der Singularitat. We never thought we'd hear this kind of music, let alone on a black metal record. It was totally hypnotic and fascinating.
It's become complicated to love Burzum today...
F. : Yes, and for good reason. Vikernes is clearly a sick man. But I can't deny what his music evoked, almost thirty years ago now.
You mentioned Hagalaz Runedance and Patrick Leagas a little earlier; they too were/are avowed neo-pagans, practicing magic – what was (or still is) your experience in this field? Archive.org mentions the Pagan Federation...
B. : We've never had the slightest connection with the Pagan Federation or any other structure.
F. : We were into a form of spirituality with no doctrine, no deities or entities, no concepts whatsoever. It was a very pure thing.
We could just as easily describe this "spirituality" as a poetic relationship with the world, couldn't we?
B. : Absolutely. To the world and to everyday life, hence our way of life at the time.
Coming back to the title of the release, what significance does this quote from Bachelard have for you? Is he an important author for you?
F. : To be honest, I don't know much more about Gaston Bachelard's life and work than that. I remember leafing through his Psychoanalysis of Fire and understanding absolutely nothing about it. But yes, this quote has stayed with me over the last few years, along with a few others:
"There will always be more in a closed box than in an open one. Verification makes images die. Always, imagining will be greater than living."
"We suffer through dreams. We heal through dreams."
"A simple image, if it is new, opens up a world."
"We also know that in the clearest hours of our daytime life, all it takes is a little solitude for us to fall into a reverie that joins the dreams of the night."
"It's because memories in old homes are relived as reveries that the homes of the past are imperishable in us."
"Man mirrors himself in his past; every image is a memory for him."
This importance, this nobility, conferred on the imaginary, touched me enormously. Imagination is an area of life often decried as a weakness or characteristic of childhood, which a reasonable adult should put to death. It's a monstrosity in our eyes. We've always practiced meditation and daydreaming exercises, and we continue to do so. Not because we think we're making "supernatural" discoveries, but because it connects us to Life itself.
Hence, then, what you said above about music as a support for daydreaming. From what I understand, altered states of consciousness play an important role for you.
F. : Yes, we've always practised meditation as well as the directed dreams I just mentioned, but also automatic writing, the use of a Dreamachine, the repetition of mantras, anything that in fact promotes altered states of consciousness. Certain types of music – whether played or listened to – also enable this. My first memory in this field is a completely involuntary, unexpected experience I had as a teenager, listening to this ambient piece on Filosofem, entitled Rundgang Um Die Transzendentale Säule Der Singularität. A piece I've already mentioned above, and which I still consider to be one of the rare examples of absolute perfection. I used to listen to it regularly on my walkman, along with other atmo and black metal albums, while wandering in the woods – mostly in Germany. And one day, as I strayed from the usual path into a stretch of forest mostly populated by young fir trees, I had a kind of ecstasy, for want of a better word, with this track on my ears. I stood still for a long time, staring at the sky through a gap, with the very clear awareness that I was experiencing "something"; not a mystical vision or anything supernatural, but a completely altered sense of time and space, and of my own identity. It never happened again, but I remember it like it was yesterday.
Would it be fair to say that your music aims to recapture such a state?
F. : Yes, clearly.
Are there any other personal, intimate experiences that inspire your music?
B. : A lot of things. The night in autumn and winter, walks in fields and orchards, candles, incense, silence and near-darkness in the house, the crackling of the fire, domestic rituals, the proximity of the Germanic world and its paganism, night skiing, rainy days and white skies, drops on the windows, fruit fermenting on the ground, in the yards, contemplation of the stars.
You mention your proximity to Germany – or at any rate to the "Germanic world". Could you elaborate on the importance of the Germanic world to you?
F. : A fundamental importance. Our region has been torn between it and the Latin world for a thousand years. But culturally it's clear that we lean towards the Germanic world – I don't like saying "German" because it evokes Prussian imperialism and a certain mustachioed Pangermanism that I personally detest. Germans in the broadest sense, who have been badly Christianized, and belatedly, have a big New Age and neopagan culture, whether they're aware of it or not, which expresses itself less in religious practices than in a certain way of life, a way of being together, of caring about ecology, wellbeing, health, tradition, etc. I find them more "incarnate" than the French, who have a very cold, abstract, ideological relationship to life. And less aesthetic.
B. : I'm a French citizen, but I clearly feel German – for want of a better term. I'm talking about culture and lifestyle, not nationality or loyalty to some government. But I don't feel anything in common with other French people, really. I've got nothing against Brittany or the Basque country, but it's not my culture.
Getting back to the music itself, what synthesizers, or hardware in general, were used on these tracks?
B. : I can't remember everything, to be honest, but it's basically a Yamaha PSS 390, which has FM sounds, and an analog synth, I can't remember which one to be honest... We've accumulated quite a lot of equipment over the years, not counting that which we've rented or had friends lend us. We used quite a few effects, too: reverb, delay, chorus... And the instruments were plugged into an amp, which gives that warm, slightly saturated sound, even.
F. : Many bands, if not all (but there are counter-examples like Darkthrone), generally evolve from poor equipment and primitive recording conditions to something more powerful and professional. We followed exactly the opposite evolution: we started with recent, decent analog synthesizers, recording cleanly on PC, and gradually felt the need to dirty up our sound and record under more artisanal conditions. My mate B. had already bought a four-track (a Yamaha MT400) and we started using it again. As for me, I had a shock one day when I walked past the window of an electronics and hifi store, where a Grundig C480 tape recorder was on display. I had never memorized or noted its reference anywhere, but I recognized it immediately, as it was the tape recorder on which I listened to music as a child, and on which I recorded my very first musical attempts as a teenager. This totally unexpected reunion seemed to me to be a magical coincidence, a synchronicity of the kind you sometimes experience in life. So it was this tape recorder that was used on The House Protects the Dreamer.
On the subject of the equipment used, you seem to move considerably away from the Kosmische Musik groups that influenced you, who accumulated an astounding amount of gear in a maximalist approach...
F. : Absolutely. We love the lo-fi and naive sounds of old PCM keyboards or Yamaha PSS models, which were actually FM synthesis but very primitive. For us, and I imagine for everyone else, these sounds evoke childhood – they're exactly the kind of instruments you’d give a kid to introduce them to music. Thanks to various effects, you can transcend them, but deep down, their presets always carry that notion of childhood, naivety, and nostalgia – and that's very much part of what our music conveys.
Most of your tracks are based on a musical phrase repeated ad libitum, with an improvisation or a solo, let's say, played on top. Is this a formula you're comfortable with?
B. : It’s easier to improvise over a simple, repetitive accompaniment, yes. So it was the best way not to mess up constantly. Beyond that, we love repetitive music (we’ve already referenced a certain Burzum track twice...), and it’s through real, live repetition – rather than something programmed on a sequencer – that you reach a particular state of mind.
Why choose such a lo-fi sound?
F. : It's less of a choice and more the result of finding the tape recorder I used as a child. I was completely fascinated when I heard again the very particular sound it had: the frequencies, the constant presence of the noise from the motor itself... I still have tapes my mother recorded of my sister and me when we were kids. I can't imagine a document from that time in my life with perfect, smooth, neutral "Tascam" sound. As for The House, I didn’t specifically want it to sound "dirty" or "old," but I did want the sound to feel warm and alive. So, we recorded with the tape recorder placed in front of a guitar amp, which we had connected to the keyboards. We had no idea what the result would be, especially since the tape recorder operates quite randomly – it could just as easily have recorded nothing or completely distorted the sound. But the result is fantastic, and I don't use that word to describe our compositions, but the sound itself and the atmosphere it creates. I can’t imagine this release, either, with a smooth sound now.
B. : It’s a living, embodied sound. The listener is with us in the room. It is truly a recording, in the strongest sense of the word; a capture, not a calculation. Music composed on a DAW and exported isn’t really a recording, it’s a calculation, and I don’t think we’ve ever fully considered the philosophical implications of that.
With this synchronicity you mentioned earlier regarding the Gründig tape recorder, we’re still in the realm of magic...
B. : Yes, completely, but again, it's not about operative magic; it’s the magic of Life itself at work. We don’t try to understand it, nor even define it. And we’ve never tried to "provoke" anything. In fact, it’s the opposite – the more time passes, the more we let things carry us.
How many people participated in the recording?
B. : For The House... there were three participants. The third member left us – in every sense of the word – nearly ten years ago.
Did that influence the fact that you’re no longer making music today?
B. : Yes and no. I think it would have run out of steam sooner or later. But it probably sped things up.
Where do the photos on the album cover come from? The layout is quite unusual for a band from the black metal or neofolk scene and seems more reminiscent of productions from a label like Ghostbox. Was this a conscious choice on your part?
B. : It’s another example of synchronicity, perhaps less striking but still real. A few months ago, F. gave me a huge pile of analog photos ranging from his early teens to when he was about twenty-two or twenty-three. He had never scanned them, and I had offered to do it. In that pile, I found all the photos that are now featured on the cover of The House Protects the Dreamer. They were exactly the kind of photos I had been searching for, unsuccessfully, in my own collection. The garden of our house at night; local landscapes; and finally the moon in a bluish sky, blurred, almost abstract. It was perfect and unexpected. At that moment, I knew that reissuing these tracks was a good idea, even a necessity. But to answer your question, no, we didn’t consciously try to resemble Ghostbox productions.
F. : I went through a phase where I photographed houses a lot. Around our home or when I visited other villages or cities. Whenever a house caught my eye, I added it to my collection. I kept doing it even after we stopped living together. I have a few hundred shots now, and at one point, I curated a selection for an online exhibition on Flickr.
Where does this fascination with houses come from?
F. : I’m not really sure. Maybe it’s linked to the fact that from a young age – and the young age of my friends and musical partners – I’ve been involved in somewhat strange, out-of-the-ordinary, sometimes risky activities (in terms of people I associated with, or what we got involved in...), but all of it within the warmth of my parents' house, and later, the house where we lived as a community. We all come from a middle-class background; we were never homeless, in squats, and never lacked for anything. At least not at the time. But this comfort also allowed us to dive deeply into certain dreams, certain delusions, without risking anything or while still having a certain level of comfort – a kind of safe base, so to speak. I’ve always been very nostalgic, even nostalgic in advance, you could say. I think that by documenting the local architecture, the very concrete appearance of my everyday environment, I was already engaging in a kind of passive resistance to the increasingly rapid and inhuman changes we’re experiencing.
So, you’re not a fan of the recent "LEGO" houses painted in gray, with gravel on the ground and a Buddha statue near the entrance?
F. : You could sum it up like that, yes.
This contemplative, dreamlike, derealizing, and in a way demobilizing aspect of your music likely also comes from that material ease, doesn’t it?
F. : Neither our music nor our way of life had anything revolutionary or politically or ideologically engaged about them, yes.
B. : We're not political at all, that’s clear. We weren’t back then, and we’re not today. Politics is part of the problem, not the solution. It’s the personal relationship to the world, to things, to nature, to work, to activities, and to oneself that needs to change. And the first thing that must change is the ability – today stifled in most people – to create silence within, to meditate, to contemplate, and to dream.
This notion of comfort, of ease, also makes me think of the black metal scene, when you consider the major Norwegian bands of the '90s, who were pure products of the upper middle class and lived in very comfortable, sheltered environments.
F. : Very sheltered, yes, and probably stifling at the same time, since they felt the need for a harsher, more conflict-ridden, and more dangerous world. Which wasn’t the case for us. But yes, sociologically, there’s probably a similarity. We crossed paths with some local black metal bands or knew some from a distance, though we weren’t friends with them (like Helgrindr or Epheles, who lived just a few kilometers away). And they too, despite their musical radicalism, were pure bourgeois kids living with their parents – not exactly in a half-abandoned castle like the Légions Noires.
B. : Dungeon synth, which we talked about earlier, is the culmination of that social reality in metal and atmospheric music from the '90s. It’s really "bedroom music" in its purest form, the music of suburban middle-class teenagers, well-equipped, solitary, bored, who walk everywhere, and have little to do besides wandering in nature, reading, or playing video games or fantasy role-playing games. From that perspective – and only from that perspective – we feel connected to that "genre." The industrial and post-industrial scene of the '80s was probably a bit more dangerous and more real in its marginality, when you look at the lifestyles of people like Genesis P-Orridge or members of Coil.
F. : To wrap up on black metal and family homes, I "amused" myself a few months ago by looking up on Google Street View what the houses of people we corresponded with 20 or 25 years ago looked like. I wondered if their homes might reveal or help me understand anything about them. I haven’t decided yet if that’s the case or not. But it’s interesting, at the very least, to see, in all its banality, the daily environment of a musician, especially in genres so far removed from reality, or even hostile to it. When I was a teenager, it probably would have ruined the dream. Today, it’s the opposite. I look at these family homes, similar to so many others, perfectly normal, banal, sitting in the middle of their street or residential area, and I’m fascinated by imagining what secret gatherings, unimaginable to their neighbors, they hosted, what inner adventures they witnessed, what dreams they protected.
(For the sake of discretion, we have not indicated which black metal or atmospheric bands these houses belonged to—as F. pointed out: those who knew them will recognize the addresses.)