Antonymes 'Licence to Interpret Dreams' – Luna Kafe

Excerpt: “Antonymes is Ian M. Hazeldine – designer, photographer, conceptualist and musician. He’s “making music from the wilds of North Wales, a very strange, fantastic, ultimately unreal place of mountains, streams, woods, villages and obscure wilderness”, to quote Hidden Shoal. The Licence To Interpret Dreams is ambient, grandiose minimalism, built around Hazeldine’s fragile piano magic…. Now, here’s The Licence To Interpret Dreams (great title, btw), a full album presenting 12 compositions – 12 songs floating and hovering. At the same time they sound like being astronautic, or cosmic, as well as sounding submerged, being performed underwater. Like it’s the music guiding a slow-motion, unearthly ballet. These are meditative compositions – minimal and stripped, yet sentimental, naked and quiet, yet massive. The piano-beauty is computer-distilled, while a sparse layer of sound and some (spoken) vocal/voice sequences appearing like minor scenographic parts. The Licence To Interpret Dreams is like an exotic travel, lasting months and months, years and years, while the album clocks in at a bit under an hour. The Licence… is slow, sandy windstorms through endless deserts. It’s like paragliding over foggy landscapes, where you barely get to see some glimpses of what lies below. Or, as mentioned earlier, taking place in the aquatic element. Like scenes of scuba diving, swimming through slow-waving seaweed. The label’s got fitting description of Antonymes’ music: “…Composition takes form through patience, probing, occasional accidents, spontaneity and a form of focused daydreaming.” One might also add unfocused, random night dreaming…. Antonymes really is an interpreter of dreams, or a translator of dreamlike sound-escapades. The Licence To Interpret Dreams for sure is translations of dreams. It’s almost like being field recordings of dreams. From inside someone’s head. A massive masterpiece.”

Luna Kafe