The car is a kind of drone environment. I think this characteristic of cars has played a significant role in shaping the way that music is designed for and heard in cars. I decided to use La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela's drone-based sound installation, the Dream House, as a point of comparison.
I also thought it would be a fun challenge - considering La Monte Young's apparent hesitancy towards distributing his work - to make a "compressed" copy of the Dream House to share with others. In this light, Dream Car is a celebration of La Monte Young's work and a sincere effort to share it with those who have not yet visited the Dream House.
On the other hand, and importantly, the Dream Car is a failure. It fails to repliate the deep auditory environment of the Dream House. It only bears a superificality to that place: beige carpeting, white walls, an approximately magenta lighting scheme, and a distorted reproduction of the sound. It's in a car. It engages with the Dream House in pop culture terms instead of on its own terms. This might give a good sense of why Young and Zazzela deliberately avoid reproducing their works in the first place.
Dream Car was first shown at Foo Fest 2009 in Providence, RI. Megan Elias helped with the installation.
Dream Car was shown again at Proteus Gowanus as part of their 2009 TRANSPORT theme on October 10, 2009.
"Amusing." - Marian Zazeela
The poster for the Tom Cruise movie "Days of Thunder" is an early precedent for combining a Zazeela-like magenta palette to the theme of cars:
There have been other dream cars before Dream Car. For instance, in 1975, the Ant Farm collective created the Phantom Dream Car, which was driven into a wall of TVs. Ant Farm also created many works that explore (and parody) the relationship between music and cars (World's Longest Bridge, Car-men in Sydney).
This "Magic: The Gathering" card circa 1994 looks a lot like the inside of the Dream House, right? (Credit: some unknown Dream House monitor.)
