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Dreamchild Interview with Joey Iacono of Sphere Gothic Magazine

JI: Cheryl's vocals are stunning! Was there any voice training here? And if so, how long?

Cheryl: I had several years of formal voice training whilst doing madrigal singing in a select chorus. I left the program when my teachers tried steering me to operatic voice techniques. The rest of my development came from working in many different contexts as a vocalist.

JI: The music creates very elaborate sound scapes....are you trying to create any specific imagery with your music?

Frank: In a nutshell, music from dreams and nightmares is what we do. The varying images come from wordless emotions, specific dreams, visions, moods and stories. Our goal is to create books for your ears. A story is told through the music and your imagination fills in the "missing" pictures, thus personalizing each listening experience.

JI: Do you think your music fits into any of the scenes in your area?

Frank: Our music is not scene driven, so there haven't been any perfect matches of scene and music. However, there has been a welcome receptivity to elements of what we do in several scenes. The local goth scene has accepted what we do and we've had success in playing our music in theatrical venues as well. We're looking forward to doing some things with the artsier avant garde scene, although there seems to be less of that here than say, in New York City.

JI: There are many "sea" references throughout your tape. How does this connect with you personally

Cheryl: When I was a child, a teacher played Debussy's "La Mer" without identifying it by name and queried "What does this sound like?". I readily recognized and was swept away by this evocative tone poem of the ocean. Mer creatures in their otherworldly setting under the sea have inspired many great artists and literature (e.g. Poe, Shakespeare, Wagner, traditional balladeers, Debussy, etc..) and inspire us as well. There is a great deal of power and mystery in the sea as thousands of writers before us have shown. Clive Barker's reference to Quiddity, the Dreaming Sea, in both The Great and Secret Show and Everville showed another side of the sea that we felt we could work with. Tying the sea imagery to a source of dreams and hopes/inspirations works well for us in a mythological sense.As dreams can become nightmares, hope and inspiration change when moved from the realms of dark and night to the harshness of daylight and reality. The sea, too, moves from being a source of hope and dreams for many as the harsh realities of a life at sea are faced. "Gates To The Sea", in some senses, deals with the ways people return to the source of life, of hope and dreams and commune with that power. In "Through The Gate" we offer a lament for those who have lost the ability to return to that source and whose lives lose the richness it provides. As regards the childhood influences, mostly this has more to do with children's natural sense of wonder and discovery and the intuitive connection to things. As we re-enchant our own lives, through music, stories and the like, we recharge our sense of wonder and the mysteries of life open themselves up to us.

JI: Does any of this music stem from influences when you were children?

Cheryl: Well, Lewis Carroll's Alice books and the writings of Edgar Allen Poe come to mind.

JI: Are any of the songs tied together by other themes ?

Frank: While not blatantly obvious to the listener (again, to allow for individual interpretation/participation) three of these songs were inspired by the Titanic. In "Steel Tomb" there is the building of a great piece of technological wonder, man triumphant over the elemental forces. Yet, even as the work is being done, there are bad omens.. There is a knocking sound and rumor has it that in their haste to meet the deadline, they have trapped a worker inside who hammers from within against the hull of the ship to make his presence known. "Murias II" paints a picture of life beneath the sea (Murias, the great undersea city of the Tuatha da Danaan, comes from the writings of either Fiona Macleod or WB Yeats, depending on your historical take, both great Irish mystical poets.)and those creatures surfacing as the mighty ship passes by in the North Atlantic. As they watch the spectacle unfold, the second part of "Murias II" kicks in with the sound of the ship scraping against an iceberg and filling with water. Panic ensues and ends with the Titanic sinking beneath the waves and returns to silence. In "Down From The Air", the undersea creatures, mermaids in this case, view the bodies and artifacts falling to the sea bottom in cold detachment as they try to understand what those things were/are. There is a vast amount of traditional lore that deals with mermaids as cold and heartless beings who would seduce weary seafarers to a watery grave. We felt this presentation needed to be restored to the popular imagination to offset things like Disney's Little Mermaid and other ventures in saccharine sentimentality.

JI: Are any other songs drawn from traditional material?

Cheryl: "Silver Brow" and "Sea Horses" both derive from the Western Mythological tradition (often referred to as Celtic). "Silver Brow" is the tale of Ceridwen scrying in her cauldron and foretelling (but not fully comprehending) Gwion Bach's transformation into the bard Taliesin (aka Silver Brow). "Sea Horses" tells of the hero Bran's meeting with the sea god Mannanan MacLir and the differences in their perceptions of Mannanan's realm: Bran views an ocean landscape while Mannanan sees himself on a chariot in a great field.

JI: For all your traditional inspirations, you use a great deal of technology in creating your music.

Frank: We work with technology and use it to enhance what we do while retaining a sense of that inspiration. Thus we have no problem using digital looping devices, guitar processors and the like. We do some sampling as well, but all the music and samples you hear when we play live are all created at the time. And we will use instruments like the wire strung harp in juxtaposition to all the modern gadgetry.