19 DECEMBER 22-28, 2022 westword.com WESTWORD | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | FIND MORE MUSIC COVERAGE AT WESTWORD.COM/MUSIC Waking Up MOLINA SPEAKS ON HIS DREAMS LIFE AND TIMES IMMERSIVE ALBUM EXPERIENCE. BY EMILY FERGUSON “The pandemic was a telekinetic portal — a costly one,” says Denver artist Molina Speaks. “As we exited, I was like, ‘We have an oppor- tunity to reimagine everything.’ We had the time, the solitude, the knowledge, the power, the leverage to demand new social, cultural and economic realities. For the most part, it’s back to business as usual — but we are still in a period of social upheaval and possibility. We can redesign this entire reality and our impact on the planet. If we choose to.” Molina made his choice, and now he’s taking us on a journey to a more enlight- ened consciousness with his installation at Understudy, Dreams Life and Times Immer- sive Album Experience. Although it’s been decades since listening to records from front to back was considered a regular communal activity (unless you’re a hipster), “That’s the experience I wanted to bring back,” he says, explaining that he was “exhausted” and “frustrated” from “putting out music that is old news the next day.” Instead, the music and spoken-word poetry of his Dreams Life and Times album will disappear altogether when the installation closes on December 31 — at least until Molina fi nds another place to present it. “I don’t know if that experience of walk- ing into the record store and unwrapping a package [is] coming back. But there are future ways to bring that vibe — like the physical experience of an album,” he says. “That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to create a world... where you can just come in and you want to spend some time, and you could sink into the music, away from the chaos of the city. Every- thing is so fast-paced, but here in the heart of the city, you can just come and zone out.” During a weekday after-work rush, peo- ple are hurrying to catch the light rail at Stout Street while cars jam up on 14th Street on the homebound commute, passing by the cool blue lights and muffl ed bump of music coming from Understudy. But once you enter this space tucked into the Colorado Convention Center, the outer world disap- pears as you become entranced by a physical illustration of Molina’s album, years in the making, and the dreamscapes it embodies. The atmosphere is cozy: Plush rugs cover the fl oor, plants hang from the ceiling, yoga mats invite stretching and PicassoTiles invite play. There’s a cabinet with paper and markers for drawing, magazines and scissors for collage; in the corner are a hot water heater and tea bags. And, of course, there are plenty of comfortable couches and chairs for watching Molina’s album come to life on a television screen and in a projection above it, with digital renderings by the artist Fanny Pack. “It invites people into a musical experience in a way that I think people are hungry for right now,” Molina says of his installation. “You know, the attention economy is so draining. Even in your own phone, how many photos or videos that you’ve taken do you even actually return to? It’s just overload. But here you can just come vibe. I imagine that there will be other spaces where this album pops up around the city or around the country. I want to keep this dreamscapes lounge going; there will be different iterations of it. But again, with this fi rst one, I just want to make it as comfortable as possible to just come in and just be.” When he began making Dreams Life and Times during the pandemic, Molina had no idea that it would result in an immersive installation; in fact, he says he started with no concept for it at all. But every time he shared snippets of his music with friends or collaborators, a greater intention began forming and expand- ing. One of those friends was the late artist and activist Stevon Lucero, with whom Molina painted the “In- digenous Futurist Dreamscapes Lounge” at Meow Wolf’s Convergence Station. “It’s evolved a lot, and this was during the time that I was deep into an experience with my dreams. I was working on the ‘Dreams- capes Lounge’ project in Meow Wolf with Stevon Lucero, and we were talking a lot about consciousness and dreams,” he recalls. (Lucero’s infl uence didn’t end there: Molina bought a sketch of the artist’s, which became the album’s cover.) Meanwhile, the sound was coming together like a stream of conscious- ness, he says, leading to a “set of dreamscapes.” Molina, a prolifi c artist, poet, musician and activist whose work earned him a Westword MasterMind award in 2017, says he let go of more control on this album than he ever had before, handing over 100 minutes of material to longtime collaborator DJ IceWater to mix into the 45 minutes of smooth hip-hop and spoken word. He emphasizes that the project wouldn’t have come to fruition without his collaborators, including Edwina Mabel, who provides vocals on one track and whom Mo- lina mentored at Youth on Record while she was in a fellowship program. The album also features spoken-word poetry from Ramon Gabrieloff-Parish, Afrofuturist professor at Naropa University, and his wife, Michelle. “I recorded their poems at my home in Decem- ber 2020,” Molina says. “DJ Icewater paired his poem with a beat by Felix Fast4ward as an intro to the track ‘Museo’ — though, as you heard, everything kinda runs together as cascades of questions, visions and dreams.” The result, he says, is his “best album to date.” “It’s an invitation to dream; it’s an invita- tion to explore consciousness, and really, to get to decide what kind of dream you want to live,” he explains. “We’re living in the dream- scapes of all these different characters — the politicians, the authoritarians, the polarized realities of race and politics, all these different religions that come before us. There are these different infl uences — there are the worlds of money and fame, there are the clubs, there are all the commercials on TV. There are all these dreams that are already laid out, right? “But what is your dream of reality? I think a key lyric in this album is ‘You got a chance to fulfi ll a dream. What would you fi ll with your time? You got a chance to fulfi ll a dream. What would you fi ll with your space?’” The lyrics and poetry position Molina as the Alan Watts of his generation. And similar to what Watts does in The Dream of Life, Mo- lina asks us to confront not just duality — that the existence of love also means the existence of pain, that there is both good and evil — but all that exists in between. It’s in that space, he says, that we can fi nd a balance that begets ac- tion more aligned with consciousness, rather than raw emotion or passion. “Reality is fi lled with joy and it’s fi lled with pain,” Molina notes. “We are born and we die. And in this culture, we have a hard time ac- cepting the ends of things. It makes us stuck in all sorts of ways; it gets in the way of our purpose on this planet. And everybody has their own purpose to discover and fi gure out. I think that exploring not only duality, but the grayscale in between — that’s the full-color spectrum, right? And the more that you kind of sink into that and accept the gritty nature of reality, the more you’re going to be able to get comfortable in your own skin. No matter who you are, where you come from, what you look like, what you’ve been given — what do you want to do? I think that exploring con- sciousness and duality and the multitude of truths within and externally, it increases our capacity to fulfi ll our mission.” As an almost robotic voice directs be- tween the songs and poetry, listeners are positioned in the future, when the album has been uncovered in “the Dream Station, what was then known as Aurora.” “There is a narrator from the future. Her name is Madame Es- MUSIC continued on page 20 A still from Dreams Life and Times. COURTESY OF MOLINA SPEAKS
