With Flying Colors Presents “Dreams Dyed Blue: A Journey Through Dreams In Sound and Color”
by Timothy ‘ill poetic’ Gmeiner, Ben Guerrette, Mingyong Chang, LUX | LUMN, David Aguila, Natalia Merlano-Gomez & Anita Chandavarkar
“Dreams Dyed Blue” introduces live hip-hop to the immersive media space by presenting a spatialized audiovisual performance interweaving lyricism, beats, improvised electroacoustic musicianship and projected visuals. This experience explores the beauty, fear, adventure, sadness and loneliness of self-discovery, as told through the story of a small child’s journey through the stars.
About: Inspired by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s childhood classic “The Little Prince”, "Dreams Dyed Blue" is an immersive audiovisual hip-hop performance that explores the beauty, fear, adventure, sadness and loneliness of self-discovery, as told through the story of a small child’s journey through the stars. Through a synesthetic relationship of spoken-word lyricism, electroacoustic musicianship and dynamic projected visuals, this introspective performance reconciles the inner-workings of one’s unique imagination and the remembrance of loved ones lost to the universe around us.
Performance: This performance debuted on April 17, 2025 at UC-San Diego’s Experimental Theater. It was performed using a 32-channel soundsystem and full back wall projection screen. Real-time audio from vocal, acoustic and electronic elements were used to generate spatial and visual components of the performance. Conversely, visual projections informed performative aspects of the electronic music elements. With the goal of creating a truly dynamic and immersive experience, all multimodal aspects of this performance directly influenced the others in real-time.
Personnel: Timothy “ill poetic” Gmeiner - vocals, electronics // Ben Guerrette - visual director, visual designer // David Aguila - trumpet, modular synthesizer // Natalia Merlano-Gomez - vocals and vocal effects // Anita Chandavarkar - flute // Mingyong Cheng - visual designer // Lux | Lumn - visual designer // written & directed by Timothy “ill poetic” Gmeiner
Technical Specs: This performance is built around OSC dialog across two separate networks communicating from a single laptop running Ableton Live and various MIDI controllers to 1) a 32-channel Meyer Sound System via the Meyer SpaceMapGo application, and 2) two laptops running two instances of TouchDesigner. Visuals and spatial coordinates are triggered in real-time based on various electronic synthesis and resonance properties as well as acoustic properties based on live musician improvisation.
Examples of two pieces performed, including the live capture of the musicians, can be viewed below
With Flying Colors ft. Mingyong Cheng, David Aguila & Natalia Gomez "Do You Smile In Your Dreams?"
"Do You Smile In Your Dreams?" is a spatialized live improvised audiovisual performance that journeys through a mind with dementia to paint the walls with sound: music and words that poke through the fog and isolation to invite brief moments of colorful memory and human connection. In this story, indistinguishable murmurs from strangers in a hospital room heard by the patient are interrupted by a loved one's voice which cuts through the fog and confusion. This voice, presented in the piece as a Cherokee recitation of “The Lord’s Prayer”, provides the basic for recollection, represented by colorful reactivity in the patient's 3D MRI brain scan every time it’s heard. These brief moments of connection end with the patient's successful retrieval of a series of meaningful memories.
With Flying Colors ft. Anita Chandavarkar "Tree Tones"
In this electroacoustic piece, resonators are randomly generated across 32 channels of spatial audio and simultaneously mapped to visual raindrops of the same randomized coordinates. As the resonating notes increase decay, they become more melodic, allowing for variations in pitch and noise harmonics. These musical qualities are in dialog with various parameters of a concentric circle to alters it's shape piece by piece pending note decay, noise filtering and melodic movements. This improvisation is joined by floutist Anita Chandavarkar on bansuri, who dialogs directly with the electronic resonators. Essentially, the flute, electronics and visual elements are all informing each other in real-time.
Contact: Timothy Gmeiner: tgmeiner@ucsd.edu | Ben Guerrette: ben.guerrette@gmail.com