Dreams may be among the strangest territories available to us. Each night, the mind constructs worlds without asking permission from physics, geography, biography, or common sense. We meet people who never existed, return to places that vanished years ago, fall in love with strangers, lose ourselves, recover ourselves, and wake carrying the emotional residue of events that never occurred. There is something almost miraculous in this private universe, because within it we are briefly released from the limits imposed by circumstance. Thought offers a similar freedom. We can imagine nearly anything, even when reality permits us to accomplish only a fraction of it.
For Venus Volcanism, the Iceland-based project of Crete-born vocalist, musician, and producer Rena Rasouli, dreams become both refuge and research subject. Her new song, “Dreams,” inhabits the uncertain region between waking life and the private worlds that continue behind our eyes.
Rasouli created the song exactly one year ago as the first snow settled across the peaks surrounding Siglufjörður, Iceland’s northernmost town. She keeps a journal beside her bed, recording complete dreams when possible and preserving stray images when that is all sleep leaves behind. Before sleeping, she gives herself a small invocation: “As I close my eyelids and sleep takes me, gently or not, please show me something that will help me understand myself a little better.”
Dreams drifts somewhere between dark pop, ambient composition, experimental electronics, and neoclassical music, with affinities to This Mortal Coil, Julee Cruise, Penelope Trappes, and Zola Jesus. Rasouli’s voice occupies the center while drones, synthesizers, arpeggiated figures, and suspended textures create an unstable sense of location. Beauty and unease coexist. The song seems to hover between desire imagined and desire remembered.
Its love story belongs to an imaginary lover, though imagination hardly makes the emotion less consequential. Desperation, longing, idealization, and obsession can become perfectly real experiences even when their object remains beyond reach.
“Have you ever found yourself dreaming with your eyes open? I honestly don’t know how many times I have done it while diving into Icelandic pools,” says Rasouli. “Especially during winter, I feel like I am balancing somewhere between the conscious and the unconscious, and sometimes I don’t even know how the day has passed. I am and I am not. I exist and I do not exist. I do everything I am supposed to do; I move through the day as I should, but if you know me well enough, you might see it in my eyes: I am somewhere in between.”
This suspended condition also governs the video, directed by Tassos Gkoletsos with help from friends and members of the Siglufjörður community. Northern Iceland’s long winter darkness turns ordinary routines into strange repetitions: tending plants, bathing, working, exercising, moving through familiar rooms while another existence unfolds internally.
“During those months, I always find myself somewhere in between,” Rasouli continues. “I do everything I need to do and I’m relatively functional, but everything feels like autopilot. At the same time, another scene is taking place inside my head. I dream and imagine other things while going through the ordinary routines of everyday life, like watering my plants, having my bath, working, and going to the gym.”
Perhaps this is why Dreams feels so intimate. Rasouli treats imagination as a parallel dimension of daily existence, one without measurable coordinates yet capable of altering everything that happens after we return.
Watch the video for Dreams below:
Listen to Dreams below and order the single here.
Follow Venus Volcanism:
The post “Somewhere in Between” — Venus Volcanism Blurs the Boundaries of Love and Consciousness in Video for “Dreams” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
