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Writer's pictureThe Record Press

“I just hope I’m not dreaming”: Escapism and the Multimedia Soundscape

The Sheffield trio, Brunch Box, gives us Dreaming, a track that depicts escapism, memory and longing. The lead singer Andrew Thomas writes the lyrics “pick me up from my hometown, and take me to your playground, and we’ll forget about everyone, and everything tonight, we’ll go back to the place we both set this fire alight”. Thomas’s opening rhythmic spoken word introduces images of escapism and desire of returning to the past. The memory his lyrics alludes to, “the place we both set this fire alight”, opens the furthered ideas of forgetting reality and stepping into a dreamlike state where one can travel back in time, infused with seeds of doubt in the repeated clause, “I just hope I’m not dreaming”. The images the lyrics carries out is certainly emulated in the music. The guitar riffs reference the relaxed lyrical indie sounds of summer; associated with bands such as Cassia and Two Door Cinema Club. The band has tightly tied all of these concepts together as their artwork depicts a pink cloudy sky, divided by a cable running from one electricity post to the other. Referencing back to the opening image of a rural hometown: a landscape that holds familiar memories to escape to.


I have chosen to pair Brunch Box’s track with an artwork created by the multimedia artist Pippa Tyler, also known as P.J.T. Media. Tyler manipulates colour and image in the digital medium, exploring memory, emotion and how these in turn decays the past. This piece in particular explores a dreamlike landscape conveying a longing for escapism. Tyler is heavily influenced by musicology and presents an interdisciplinary kaleidoscopic variety of surrealist works. Tyler describe themselves as “weird glitchy art”, which is a perfect phrase for her use of photo manipulation, warped perspective and graphic design. Throughout Tyler’s work a constant thematic thread is the manipulation and disfiguring of reality through digitality, the colliding of photography, colour and light presents the world as if it were a dream.


This artistic and musical pairing needs not a large explanation, and for purpose of affect I won’t delve into a large amount of analysis. The marrying of these works elevates the concepts into the multimedia soundscape; bringing the viewer an aural and visual landscape that explores the illusive nature memories and dreams, where the two bleed into each other, in both their beginnings and endings.


LOUD ART LIVE, a digital exhibition where music meets art. CLICK HERE to view P.J.T. Media’s artwork and PLUG IN to listen to Dreaming by Brunch Box.





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