Dream Chambers & Co. Think Big With The Blossoming

Over the past 20 years, new generations of players and fans have come to appreciate music built around synthesizers, from synth-pop to experimental music to various flavors of funk and beyond. Though synths were out of fashion among casual music fans in the ’90s and early Aughts, whole constellations of synth-centric scenes and subgenres have flourished more recently. Atmospheric, mostly instrumental works that convey emotion with slowly shifting electronic soundscapes — particularly under the guise of ambient music and its cousin New Age — were scoffed at for a good while. But the ongoing work of artists like Beverly Glenn-Copeland and Tim Hecker is now decidedly cool, and rap hero André 3000 dominated internet discourse with his recent spiritual jazz album New Blue Sun.

In the ambient realm, Nashville has long had its own cadre of musicians pushing the envelope (not to mention the envelope generator). That includes New Zealand-born Jess Chambers, who makes extensive use of contemporary modular synthesizers under the name Dream Chambers. On a recent video call, Chambers and her fellow Kiwi Sonya Waters were enthusiastic about working together on a unique project. The two composers collaborated with Nashville avant-classical chamber ensemble chatterbird on The Blossoming, a concert program that Chambers will perform with the group Nov. 30 at East Nashville’s Emerson Hall; Flooded Sun Liquid Light Show will provide visuals. The work features new arrangements of six pieces for voice and synthesizer, supported by traditional orchestral instrumentation, all based on works Chambers originally wrote for solo performance. Waters and Chambers worked together to turn them into something far more ambitious, musically speaking, than Chambers could perform on her own.

“I became friends with Carissa Stolting, who is on the board of directors of chatterbird ensemble,” Chambers explains. “And she put me together with Celine [Thackston, chatterbird’s founder and artistic director], and they invited me to present some work for them to perform with me.”

Chambers expressed a desire to work with a composer who was a woman, and hoped to find one from her home country. She spent eight months in New Zealand this year, and took the opportunity to connect with Waters.

Waters has more than four decades of experience as a writer, composer and performer. She played keys in two-tone-era ska band The Instigators, releasing a pair of singles that now fetch high prices from collectors. Her work with ’90s San Francisco psychedelic pedal-hoppers Orange put her on tour with artists like Brian Jonestown Massacre and Mazzy Star. These days Waters is back in New Zealand, where she releases her own musical projects and scores short films. During Chambers’ stay in the country, Waters lent her some gear.

“I didn’t actually know anybody — especially another woman — that was doing modular synth music, or any kind of synth music actually, in New Zealand,” Waters recalls. “And I was just really struck by how gorgeous the music was, and just how incredibly relaxed you look just operating the modulars,” she says to Chambers.

During our chat, both artists keep coming back to describing their musical relationship as “sharing the same language.” Their collaboration with chatterbird opened up a whole new dimension to that lexicon. Before delving into the world of synths, Chambers had been a singer-songwriter in a folk-pop mode — “Island,” the opening song from her 2008 solo debut, was a finalist for the prestigious Silver Scroll songwriters’ prize — and she’d always wanted to hear her music interpreted by a bigger ensemble.

“To have chatterbird accept me into this collaboration and offer me that opportunity is just a dream,” Chambers says. “To have the budget to hire someone who’s wonderfully skilled like Sonya — to just add that element for me — and then to create the scores, which is a big deal!”

Waters notes that her approach to writing has an orchestral perspective. “When I compose on my synths,” says Waters, “I’m always really drawn to the big string pads and the sort of clarinet and oboe sounds. Even though I love blips and bleeps and strange, unusual noises.”

Chambers, on the other hand, writes and plays with a certain baroque harpsichord-esque quality, reminiscent of the raindrop-rhythm keyboards of Keith Emerson’s 1960s prog-pop band The Nice; years before Emerson, Lake & Palmer, The Nice was known for performing high artworks like Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony and the Sondheim-Bernstein compositions from West Side Story. Technology-driven music can sound cold — often intentionally, for artistic effect — but Chambers’ work is full of warm, organic emotion, alternating between tuneful musicality and raw, spiritual fervor.

“I’m playing expanding patterns of sound with my synthesizer,” Chambers says of the pieces in The Blossoming. “And then I have my voice — which is processed and granulated and synced to the patterns. And then we have these classical instruments that are in conversation with what I’m doing.”

She and Waters explain that the layers of texture and melody that Chambers creates will weave into and out of the chamber orchestra, taking listeners along their meandering paths. While the composition itself is set, Chambers points out that there are some elements of chance.

“I sequence the notes on my sequencer, so they’re not improvised in this concert,” she says. “So the improvisation comes more from the timbre of the filters. And how long the sustain and decay is on the synths, for dynamic improvisation.”

“It’s immersive,” Waters chimes in, with a grin. “It’s not like you can just follow a melody through, like a song. There’s a synth droning, and then there’s these flutes playing over — you know, that just seems weird.”

Waters won’t be present for the concert in Nashville, but the pair is planning to reunite and team up with an ensemble in New Zealand in January for an encore performance. Meanwhile, the community around emotive electronic composition and performance in Nashville continues to grow.

“I think there is a movement in Nashville for ambient music,” Chambers says. “I’ve been a part of that community for the last 13 years. I think Nashville is ready for it.”