Super
Aliens

02 / The author's memories

Dream
recorder.

Super Oleg
frontman, Super Aliens

“

As a child, I would wake up upon hearing music from dreams. I would scramble to record the melody on a voice recorder (and jot down the lyrics on whatever scrap of paper was handy). The music would slip away so quickly that I didn’t always manage to capture it. I even tried placing a glass of water by my head at night—sometimes that helped. But water, unlike technology, cannot hold onto a dream.

Back then, I dreamed of creating a device that could record dreams. As for song lyrics, I usually heard voices in my head; it was they who staged theatrical productions and provided the lyrics for many of the songs I created. Did I say “I created”? That’s not entirely accurate. I am more of a medium, transcribing songs from the information ether. Much like a user connected to a game or the internet, I received information from a sort of “vacuum.” Once I processed it, I would create works of art—music, theater, books, technical prototypes, and so on. It was as if I could hear long-dead authors, along with the voices and music of the upper and lower worlds.

In that sense, I am not truly the author. Can a router consider itself the author of the data passing through it? Can a drop in the sea consider itself the ocean? We are simply interconnected parts of a whole. Of what, exactly? I have spent my entire life searching for the answer to that question, and I still haven’t found it...

Curiously, the music and voices would come to me at random moments during my childhood, and a sheet of paper and a pen (yes, back then people still wrote with pens) were rarely within reach. I would fill my mobile phone’s voice recorder to capacity. I remember holding a funny old monophonic mobile phone, walking through the city, and recording those voices...