Dreamies by Auralgraphic Entertainment, AKA Bill Holt, is ranked at #37 on MOJO magazine’s list of the “Top 50 Most Out-There Albums of All Time.” Pitchfork gave it an 8.7 review and compared it favorably to the early work of The Residents.

Dreamies is one of those long fuse “outsider” musical masterpieces, known only to elite crate diggers before being re-released on CD to a world—well, admittedly a pretty small world—finally ready to hear it. I love the shit out of this album. I read about it on an audio blog and from the description alone, I knew that I was going to love it even before I heard it. There’s nothing else like it.

In the early 1970s, Bill Holt, then in his late 20s with a young family and living in Delaware, quit his job, bought the necessary gear and musical instruments and taught himself how to do the things he needed to be able to do to record Dreamies, his one and only album. “Dreamies” refers to manufactured dream sequences, a term coined by Isaac Asimov in a short story called “Dreaming is a Private Thing.” The LP consists of two long tracks, “Program Ten” and “Program Eleven,” clocking in at about 26 minutes each. Holt was greatly inspired by The Beatles’ “Revolution #9” sound collage and saw his own work as picking up on that thread (hence the numbers). He was also clearly influenced by John Cage’s “Williams Mix” and “Fontana Mix” pieces (John Lennon had obviously heard them, too.)

Bill Holt still makes music today at his Dreamies.com website, often with a political bent (see below for the most recent example). A new vinyl version of Dreamies has just been released by Out-Sider Records.
 

The first part of “Program Ten”
 

The promised Dreamies DVD will marry visuals to a 5.1 Dolby surround mix. How I would dearly love to hear that.