It’s conceivable that for a chunk of our planet’s population, any exposure to music will, at some point lead to The Beatles. If you were born any time in the last 80 years, it’s hugely likely that a band active from 1960 to 1970, releasing 13 albums along the way, has featured somewhere in the soundtrack of your life.
Clearly, rose tinted spectacles were the order of those days, a time of cultural upheaval, political agitation, peace, love and war… From the dystopian tinged future viewpoint of 2025, the late sixties looked like the birth of the modern world, the place where, for a moment, creativity and open mindedness dared to dream a better world.
All this wide-eyed curiosity and hallucinations of Sgt. Pepper’s, and Yellow Submarine quickly fragmented into the existential scrapbooking of The Beatles (aka The White Album) and the internal fighting of Abbey Road and Let It Be…
The Beatles demise echoed the times, as the dream of the 60’s gave way to the far moodier 70’s. Auralgraphic Entertainment by Dreamies is a lowercase paranoid soundtrack to this exact fissure.
Auralgraphic Entertainment is an album we’ve loved for years, an album that proudly stands adrift from more standard overview of the times. Filed alongside albums like Kenneth Higney’s Attic Demonstration or Paul Marcano’s 10001 Dreams, it’s a work that seems to exist on the very outer fringes of pop music, created in isolation and an unhindered bubble, driven by pure open-minded creativity.
Like these releases, free of big label demands and designed as a platform for unbridled imagination, Auralgraphic Entertainment is an experimental pop fever dream. Two side long tracks, painstakingly built at home by Bill Holt in 1973 and originally released the year later, taking samples and sound effects, combined with moog, guitar and voice. Holt, a salesman for 3M, had simply become engrossed in assembling this bedroom symphony, left his square job, threw out his suits, and lost himself in this new world.
What happens in this 52-minute passage of music is nothing short of head bendingly spectacular. Somehow impossible to follow, or actively designed for you to get lost in, both side long suites – Program Ten (in six parts) and Program Eleven (in seven) play out like the soundtrack to your imagination.
We have snatches of JFK discussing the moon mission, slithers of Oh Darling and All You Need Is Love, gun fire, snippets of radio, planes flying overhead. Everything is layered around Holt’s guitar and voice, and peppered with electronics, as it gathers into a plaintive ballad, but nothing is in focus for long. All these loose ends co-existing, drifting past and melting into each other – like a dream solidifying into reality.
Both side long suites offered up like further, slighter easier on the ear explorations of The Beatles Revolution 9, explaining the 10 and 11 in the titles of these tracks. Revolution 9 was created as an avant-garde tape assemblage; the real meaning was more about its conceptual nature as a piece of Fluxus art. A slither of the experimental, media fluid movement, despite the fact that it would rarely be played by many more than once, was present in millions of homes.
Program Ten and Program Eleven however, feel way more repeatable and user friendly. A soundtrack that plays out like an acid spiked nostalgia, a foggy mental drift through every event that plotted a world that had turned on, then off, and the resultant crumbling hangover.
It’s impossible to imagine how Auralgraphic Entertainment sounded when it was released. But despite that fact, it was a time of upheaval and uncertainty, rooted in times and ideas now almost half a century old, it still feels like a hermetically sealed package that arrived from a future we’ve still not fully realised.
Auralgraphic Entertainment by Dreamies is out now in vinyl by Guerssen
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