Nick Das has worked on a number of musical ventures in recent years – including co-writing and co-producing Maggie Rogers’ 2017 single ‘On + Off’. He began working on solo ‘post-post-rock’ project DreamTX in 2019 and is now set to release his debut album under that name, ‘Living In Memory Of Something Sweet’, next month.
The singles from the record – ‘Elated’ and ‘In Too Deep’ – have a kind of dreamy, degraded feel to them, which comes from the laborious process that went into creating them – Das intentionally working slowly on his writing and recording.
“What happens to a song when you rewrite it one hundred times over again?” he asks. “With each subsequent track, I dedicated longer periods to produce them. I spent nearly nine months on a single song. I wanted to learn how that song might unfold, to see how many of my own hands could touch it. Our impressions, ears, perceptions are changing all the time”.
“I wanted to make whole songs that feel like they contain all of me”, he goes on, “the quiet, erratic, raw, inward, obscure and bristling power that passes through me. I wanted to notice these changes and document them. Some artists think their best songs are written in fifteen minutes, but for me, I’m not so sure”.
As for how new single ‘In Too Deep’ came together, he explains: “’In Too Deep’ is out of time and placeless now, looking back on it. I conceived the song on New Year’s Day, programmed most of the drums in public libraries in Dallas, and wrote and recorded everything else in a DIY studio inside a pool house designed by Vanilla Ice. I’m not sure what I was thinking about then, but there was confinement in my existence. Dallas, barista, living with mom”.
“I was extremely pilled by the millennial new age movement… attending zen temple every week for an hour of meditation, and micro-dosing LSD every few days”, he goes on. “I was tight, wound up, constricted, and maybe this song was some externalised way of breaking free. It’s the song that broke the album, where I discovered that sampling all the awful songs I was writing could be turned into something grand and beautiful, expressive”.
‘Living In Memory Of Something Sweet’ is set for release on 26 Jul. Watch the video for ‘In Too Deep’ here:
