Crossing Bridges – Dreamcore OST
Dreamcore OST
Crossing Bridges
Album
Electronic
Liam Murphy
January 1, 2025
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January 1, 2025
Tracks in this feature
Tracks in this release
We live in such a saturated age that even our societal understanding of dreams – once thought to be the most unique experience a person can have – takes on a recognisable uniformity. Games such as the forthcoming Poolrooms and the super-viral Backrooms or social media pages awash with balloons in liminal locations and desolate Chuck-E-Cheese parlours, the absence of people, parties or the deep-dish treats mentioned giving the image a banal disquietude.
Artist Crossing Bridges has been exploring these phenomena for a while now, the OST series taking listeners inside the mind-bending beige innards of the Backrooms and down the vibrant skittles-coloured slides of weirdcore.
As this latest outing emerges, an unnerving film of fuzz covers dulcet bells, the methodical circadian rhythm of the mind in slumber. Mind-made images coalesce as a melody sways with a snoozy stupor to then climb to an angsty catharsis. Familiar, but strange. Real… but abstract. This is the sound of dreams; not so much a personal journey through the artist’s head, but a dissection of our societal understanding of dreams, communicated most recently through the aesthetic title of dreamcore.
Things aren’t all hazy cliches of dreams though. it was right there has cavorting, bright strings pulled into playful plastic formations. Not content to show the concept of dreams with vague allusions to haziness and fugue. Here we have a dream bewildering with uncanny brightness, until this gets pulled like taffy into a pitched-down sound.
Monolithic notes stand proudly everywhere the listener looks on everything so tall. That childlike sense of fear and an inability to move freely emanates from the harsh melody. The listener is rendered as helpless as a child, a victim of their mind’s habit of wandering into dark, abstract areas.
The specific notion of dreamcore is never too far away though, the imagery – prolific online – of empty play places or photos that just seem a little off. The emotive melodies of there isn’t much noise outside today is there cascade elegantly in reverse and are reminiscent of the soundtracks to strange, often AI-generated, short-form videos of impossible places and nostalgic ephemera. It is the same on visitor towards the end of the album, where pillowy bells reach through a soft muddy noise. The elementary nature of bell sounds is a stalwart feature in cultural representations of dreams, their texture and simplicity calling to the wandering mind in the throes of a dream.
Crossing Bridges breaks from the quaintness that has come before as the exploration comes to an end. the light consumes all opts for a grandiose melody as a farewell to the dream world. Blinding illumination swallows these popular representations of the dreamscape. Are we waking from our slumber, or are we simply moving on from a scroll through a strange internet aesthetic?
The gradually growing art movement of dreamcore – powered mostly by sometimes interesting often cliche AI work – tries to make sense of the nonsensical. But here, Crossing Bridges seems to take the good and the bad in the stride of an imaginative work. With moments of genuine brilliance paired with phases that give into the most predictable of sounds and sonic sights, each part of this soundtrack fits its muse, the contemporary banality and simultaneous intangibility of dreams.
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