수면의 주기와 무의식, 삶의 꿈을 연결한 첫 SoundCloud 앨범
The album was inspired by the contents of sleep in Psychology. Through this project, I tried to learn extensively by learning the AP psychology(Further, I’m preparing Psychology Olympiad. The entire course of the psychology subjects were very interesting to me, I still inspired a lot by the psychology stuffs). The structure of the album itself is a process of sleep. It begins with insomnia, then non-REM and REM intersect, entering deeper and deeper sleep, and then waking up again. While non-REM is time to organize information, REM is time to give meaning to that information.
The tracks were deliberately sequenced to follow the architecture of a real night of sleep. In reality, sleep is not a single continuous state but a cycle. We drift from light sleep into deep non-REM sleep, then rise into REM sleep where dreaming occurs, and this cycle repeats several times before waking, with each round growing richer in dreams. I mapped this exact rhythm onto the album, so that moving from the first track to the last is structurally the same as moving through a full night of sleep, cycle by cycle, until morning.
The structure in which these two steps are repeated alternately was transferred to the flow of the songs in the album. Dreams were also inspired by the fact that the unconscious mind works without censorship. In the album, Love, Money, and Peace each represent one value. Love means love itself, Money means material value that defines class and reality in modern society, and Peace means an ideal utopia that does not exist anywhere else. These are not just themes but the forces that quietly govern what we long for, and in dreams they lose their masks and reveal themselves as they truly are.
Like what we encounter in a dream, these three appear sometimes sweetly, sometimes in confusion, and sometimes violently. There is the vague expectation of SWEET, where longing has not yet taken shape. There is the anxiety of MONSTER, where emotions fluctuate as the mind struggles to process new information it does not yet understand. And there is the wandering and noise of INSOMNIA, the restless state before sleep where nothing settles and every thought drifts without direction. Each track is a different stage of the same restless night, a mind turning over its own unresolved material.
The album also includes an instrumental track called Nightmare, which has no vocals. Its main synth was built from a sound I have heard since childhood, a noise that would surface like an auditory hallucination during the states of panic I sometimes experienced at night. I reconstructed that sound as the track’s central synth and built the entire piece around it. By turning something that once frightened me into the core of a composition, I tried to face that memory rather than escape it, letting the most unsettling sound of my childhood become the foundation of the music itself. It is the darkest point of the album, the moment in sleep where the mind confronts what it most wants to avoid.
The album ends with a track called Dream, where the listener finally encounters the dream they truly wanted. After all the confusion, the fluctuation, and the noise, this final track arrives like the moment of deepest sleep, when the mind stops fighting its own material and finally gives it meaning. It was a work that reinterpreted the changes that occurred in me over a year in a way called the arrangement of dreams.
ABOUT SOUND DESIGN These ideas were not just conceptual but built into the sound itself. In MONSTER, I drove the track with a heavy sawtooth-wave synth as the main voice, using its harsh, jagged texture to create a sense of violence and unease, the sonic equivalent of a mind overwhelmed by information it cannot control. In contrast, after REM, the track SW33T DR3AMZ is carried mostly by soft sine waves, the purest and smoothest of waveforms. This was a deliberate detail rooted in science as much as feeling: the gentle, rounded waveforms echo the slow, regular brain waves the mind actually produces during deep sleep. By matching the shape of the sound to the shape of real sleep, I tried to give the album a layer of precision beneath its emotion, so that the listener’s body, not just their mind, would sense the shift from turmoil into rest.
In addition, in the end, I realized something unexpected. The entire process of confusion and wandering, when heard as a whole, sounds strangely warm to the human ear. It reminded me of pink noise, the uniform sound that holds every frequency in balance and is often used to calm people and help them sleep. That is why I set the album cover to pink. Just as pink noise contains all frequencies at once, I wanted this album to hold everything from that year, the sweet and the violent, the clear and the confused, within a single warm sound.
Through this album, I wanted to give shape to the insomnia and restlessness that so many people in our time quietly carry. But more than that, I wanted to play on the double meaning of the word “dream.” The album moves constantly between the dreams we have while sleeping and the dreams we chase while awake, letting the two blur until they become inseparable. A dream is both the unconscious residue of a night and the deepest hope of a life, and I wanted the music to hold both at once. In the end, the album is a wish, that after all the noise and wandering, everyone might finally arrive at their own SWEET DREAM, in sleep and in life alike.