PREMIERE | Tiny the Dream, "Dot Com"
The creatively evolving world of Tiny the Dream; press photo courtesy of Kenny Axford.
The world wide web can be something of a spider’s web for our consciousness. The real life world carries on forth with its daily regiments, from commuters making their way to and from places of occupations and home, builders constructing artifices and edifices before our very eyes, contractors developing and maintaining properties, first responders and everything that makes up the bustle and hum of everyday living. In the backdrop there are shifts in seasons, flora, fauna, days and nights that determine the depths and dimensions of our daily/nightly/weekly/monthly/yearly schedules, the natural order of the earth and bio sciences that continue far beyond the scope of surficial observations. The real, tangible, visceral world is always at work just as the nebulous online world of constant connection is always buzz with whatever trend/device/application has the attention of the masses for the moment.
On the heels of the debut danced up single “Many Selves”, Suzanne Bonifacio’s latest pop project Tiny the Dream are the latest to take on the inherent perplexing paradoxes that lay within the IRL/URL zeitgeist. If Bonifacio’s initial offering from the new artistic outlet was an art house techno romp through the funhouse of mirrors that make up identity — “Dot Com” is a piercing view into the causalities of the post-tech, post-pandemic landscape of finding our place[s] in these constructs of extended universes.
Adhering to math rock chord progressions with a prog album pop vision; “Dot Com” delivers more than the squelching static of a dial-up toned experience. Suzanne funnels the feelings into something fiercer than a fiberoptic cable, delving deep into the disconnects between our life experiences in the miscommunication between online diversions and the natural order that does not adhere to the binary and digital codes of web dev distinction. Tiny the Dream tears through the psychological streams of thought that are torn between internet induced perceptions and solar/lunar light emanating from the physical earth outside. A track that grows in intensity and a heaviness that increases in both size and scale; Bonifacio conducts a modern metal core opera on the dissonance in human connections in the wake of a tech bubble collapse that has rendered much of healthy communication in a compromised state. “Dot Com” observes the organic becoming overtaken by the ubiquity of artificial intelligentsia attempts at poor expressionism.
Suzanne Bonifacio provided some exclusive thoughts on the on the inception and development of the new track:
"Dot Com" came into the periphery one day when we were goofing around during practice and I was messing with some vocal tap delay with Adam and Brian's rhythmic parts. We played it a lot live before we recorded it and it slowly evolved each time we played it. A lot of the stuff we've been making we've been playing live before getting in the studio which is a new way for me, personally, and has given me time to sort of fully realize the song's intention. The lyrics came together very late in the game and, for me, are about the idea of getting stuck on the internet.
Reflections by Tiny the Dream; press photo courtesy of Kenny Axford.
We get stuck and so deeply sucked into whatever we are doing online or on social media that we can no longer hear the reality of life anymore in all its beauty and curiosity. We forget about how even just existence in itself is worth paying attention to. Much of my lyrics lately have come back to the struggle between living life in the world and getting stuck on the internet and what that means for our minds. For me, this song has been one of the pieces of the puzzle in sorting through that idea.
Tiny the Dream’s “Dot Com” is available now everywhere.