Black Lotus returns with Dreams of Snakes, the first release from the forthcoming concept EP In a Room Full of Dreams, a surreal exploration of synesthesia, dreams and altered perception. Released under Anthem Crown, the EP brings Thai of Black Lotus together with Belgian musician Geert Coppens of Micrart and Micrart Studios in an audiovisual collaboration spanning music, vocals and video.
An avant-goth collective working across music, film, photography, movement, installation and performance-based visual art, Black Lotus develops each release as its own sonic and visual world. Rooted in gothic art rock and gothic art metal, with elements of post-punk, dark pop, wave and experimental music, the project shifts its language from release to release. In a Room Full of Dreams moves deeper into noir pop, wave, dark electronic and experimental territory while retaining that gothic core.
At the centre of the EP is synesthesia, a perceptual phenomenon in which one sensory experience can involuntarily evoke another, such as hearing sound as colour or perceiving music as shape, texture or movement. The EP expands that idea into dreams, symbolism, memory and the temporality of perception, where clocks split in two, numbers slip away, shadows divide, rooms seem to listen, and familiar objects begin behaving according to the logic of dreams. One of the EP’s central songs, Synthesia, takes its name from a deliberate play on synesthesia, merging interconnected perception with the project’s synthesizer-driven electronic language.
Belgian musician Geert Coppens, whose work with Twilight Ritual, Autumn, Linear Movement and Faceless 50 reaches back into Belgium’s formative minimal wave, darkwave and coldwave scenes, joins Thai on Dreams of Snakes as part of a vocal duo and contributes to the wider musical and visual development of the EP, including video. Thai brings a background in professional dance, photography, video, installation and performance art into Black Lotus, extending the project beyond a conventional band format and toward an increasingly audiovisual and intermedia immersive world.
That visual language also draws on a shared affection for older records and album art. The original In a Room Full of Dreams imagery grew partly from Thai’s love of physical records and their artwork, an idea Coppens immediately connected with through his own memories of spending time in record stores studying album sleeves as closely as the music itself.
Once inside A Room Full of Dreams, you enter analogue time: records glow, telephones ring, clocks forget themselves.
Dreams of Snakes becomes one of the meeting points between two artistic histories: Coppens’ Belgian experimental electronic roots and Thai’s evolving world of gothic music, noir pop, visual storytelling and performance art. Dreams become symbols. Sound becomes image. Memory becomes unreliable. And perception begins to slip.
Dreams of Snakes is the first release from In a Room Full of Dreams, forthcoming from Black Lotus.
