Hypnokaséta (82U) is an outgrowth of what Yannis Kyriakides dreamed in the Corona lockdown. It is performed by Quatuor Bozzini, the fantastic string quartet in Montréal, Andy Moor (from The Ex, Lean Left, The Heretics with Anne James Chaton) on guitar & tapes and Kyriakides himself with electronics. The tapes play an essential role in the quartet’s interplay with Moor’s improvised interludes. Because the “cassette theory of dreaming” is at play: Where we had thought there were dreams, there is only an unconscious composition process and an equally unconscious memory-loading process. It goes back to the cognitive scientist Daniel C. Dennett (1942-2024), whose naturalistic view of the world is free of ghosts, elves, Easter bunnies — or God. Universal evolution and what is called freedom and the self are based exclusively on the mechanisms of variation, selection and replication, on memes, leitmotifs and repetitions at the “centre of narrative gravity”. Kyriakides spins a narrative dream thread in six flowing passages: The government’s new cultural scheme / All roads to the airport are blocked / Everyone is nervous, everyone is lost… London is covered in mud… The reluctant hotel manager / She lifts the mountain… Bridges are being dismantled across the city… And delegates to Moor an unconscious composition process and an equally unconscious memory-loading process. Electro-acoustically interwoven, a hauntingly singing and emotive individual voice occasionally stands out from the dreamy, apparently also electronically swirled harmony of the strings — Clemens Merkel & Alissa Cheung on violins, Stéphanie Bozzini on viola, Isabelle Bozzini on cello. Contrary to the expectation of surreal plundering and collaging, the tape & guitar track etc. is ’only’ a vague noise film ’in the silence of the night’ and a wiry plonk or scrape. Quatuor Bozzini dreams early music into liquid fluctuations, lapses into repetitive arte povera or complex dissonances into bubbling or gentle droning. Sometimes it sounds like opera singing, then it booms again, bowed and electronic, elegiac and sonorous. Moor plinks towards glissanding mutations on an empty grid, and Pizzicato picks A harpsichord in a derelict palace. Whistling strings and creaky lutes mingle with fragile plucking and delicate strokes. The concert promoter complains that not much happens in the piece / Tranquilizer… Kyriakides follows his own dreams, not the wishes of others.