Is this recording an environmental activist art statement or ambient spa music? Maybe both?  The fourth release from São Paulo label Lugar Alto is not a Brazilian production but it still has strong ties to the country, it is the psychotomimetically heuristic ambience of The Dreambird by Mitar Subotić (Suba) & Goran Vejvoda. The album was produced in Paris in 1987 and 5 years later was the first release by Suba in Brazil as a limited edition CD put out by the Brazilian Catholic label Paulinas COMEP.

Listening to The Dreambird is a deeply immersive organic experience. It is ambient music that actually integrates with your environment. Bird calls and shrieks intertwining with lush synth tones, imagine late seventies Tangerine Dream in a tropical hothouse while sliding into a floatation tank located in the Amazon, an environment of rich and strange sounds. The Dreambird harks back to a time when environmental recordings were being discovered as forms of music, as David Toop writes in his book Exotica “... some recordists stuck to the idea of birdsong as music, a notion that is surely as old as music itself”.

The album was made while Goran Vejvoda was living in Paris. Relaxed days were spent sitting around, tinkering with sounds, going out, having lunch, coming back and playing some more. Pascal Humbert, bass player from the French band Passion Fodder, joined the duo for a day. Goran had a Japanese field recording CD called Bird Island Seychelles that contained the exotic bird sounds and sea waves used to create the organic textures of the album. Suba left with the 8-track tapes and rough mix cassettes and adapted the music for a sound art installation/happening by the Danube in Novi Sad where The Dreambird was played, climaxing with a laser show.

The Dreambird was actually only known by that name in Brazil as the record was never actually intended to be public. The names of the tracks released back then were different from those used on this release, which are taken from the masters maintained by Vladimir Ivković. Moreover, the tracks released on the CD in Brazil were shortened and only 4 of the 6 original tracks were on the CD. This release contains the 4 tracks released in Brazil in their original full-length form, plus the two never released tracks that are available exclusively in digital format. Included as a bonus are Goran Vejvoda’s liner notes translated into French, German, Serbian and Portuguese. New artwork, with drawings by Arthur Longo, a French snowboarder and artist, was commissioned for the album and was conceived by the design studio Sometimes Always, who have worked with Lugar Alto since their first release.

It’s challenging to trace the story of this project precisely, very little information is available and what we have are diffused fragments of memory from different actors. So, we return to the initial question: what is The Dreambird? It doesn’t matter if it is either an environmental statement or simply relaxing spa music, what it does is evoke sensations that elevate your mind to a higher and more emotional plane and from there you can travel wherever you like.