Dreamscapes Dobrawa Czocher

• Dobrawa Czocher (b. 1991):
• 1Czocher: Prologue03:09
• 2Czocher: Doppelgänger03:04
• 3Czocher: Chasing the Now05:22
• 4Czocher: Forgive04:33
• 5Czocher: Zima04:18
• 6Czocher: March03:13
• 7Czocher: Voices03:35
• 8Czocher: Lullaby05:43
• 9Czocher: Prayers05:07
• 10Czocher: Epilogue02:29
• Total Runtime40:33

Info for Dreamscapes

All over the world, dreams exert a fascination on people and inspire artistic creation. How these inventions of the unconscious mind feel both dreamlike and real at the same time, how they are able to twist real time, shorten or expand it in an experiential time, or the connection they might have to our waking lives - these are all questions that have inspired musicians, painters, literary figures from Claude Debussy to Salvador Dalí to Franz Kafka.

In a very similar way, these models have provided the impetus for Dobrawa Czocher's debut album, which appropriately bears the neologistic title "Dreamscapes" ("Traumschaften") and thus contains space and time within itself. On it, the musician takes her audience on a journey into the unconscious. In addition to her technical brilliance on the cello, which she has continuously developed since the age of seven, there is a naturalness with which Czocher works compositionally. Finally, alternative approaches to recording technique and sound find their way. All this fires the listener's imagination.

Dreamscapes" illustrates how comfortable the cellist feels oscillating between classical and neo-classical music. Influences ranging from Johannes Brahms to Philipp Glass can be perceived in her compositions.

For the new album, Czocher worked with producer Niklas Paschburg, who used layering techniques as well as effects to give the music a cinematic quality.

Although not strictly linear, the ten tracks on "Dreamscapes" follow a set order. The journey begins with Prologue, which opens with its high-pitched harmonics of wide, spacey sounds that allude to the process of falling asleep and immersing oneself in the world of dreams with all its boundless wonder and mystery.

"The feeling and atmosphere matched an open-ended adventure that is yet to be clearly defined," Czocher says of the piece. The music lures the listener into this universe - with the help of recurring motifs, improvisatory arpeggios, mysterious bass lines and glissandi that paint spatial notions of confinement and/or expanse in each new track.

But as figurative as the music may be, it transcends the field of vision and reflects deeper feelings. In the track "Forgive", Czocher touches on the dark recesses of the soul as if questioning the very meaning of dreams and the way they mysteriously help their viewer. "Are we able to act on our subconscious in a dream? Perhaps in sleep is the moment when we actually connect with it and it reveals to us special ways of working on inner conflicts?" the composer wonders. Clearly drawn from Glass' string quartets, the piece uses repetition as a way to draw listeners hypnotically deep and prayerfully into these reflections but also the composer's sound world.

While the first half of the album mainly serves to create atmospheres, colours and textures, the second half really gets going: "Voices" is undoubtedly the highlight of the journey - multi-layered and complex, the piece delivers a kaleidoscopic version of musical motifs "like many voices trying to push in this or that direction", the cellist explains. The fast and dynamic structure of the piece comes from a simple playing technique called détaché, which creates a dramatic effect - not quite nightmarish, but disorienting.

The piece is followed by "Lullaby", which provides the necessary relief. Long, peaceful and lyrical, the piece forms an ode to the universally accessible magic of slumber. There is a clarity in the cello part here, as if pointing to the truthfulness that dreams can hold, even if they are fleetingly short-lived.

"Prayers" continues the soulful nature of "Lullaby", but now an intensity begins to bubble around the melody, building with arpeggios.

The last track on "Dreamscapes" called "Epilogue" is the only one without any post-processing. It represents the return to awakening, a sobriety without the complete fantasy of dreams, where Czocher uses pizzicato lines on the cello to simply sing the melody. The return to reality is nevertheless not entirely recessive, wrapping the album in more questions than conclusions. "What happened in a dream, are we still here? Are we the same people? Do dreams change us? Where have we been?" asks Czocher.

Dobrawa Czocher, cello

Dobrawa Czocher
is a Polish cellist born into a musical family who started playing at the age of 7. She soon became inseparable from the cello and from there it was a natural decision to dedicate her life to music. She is graduate of two prestigious music universities: Chopin University of Music in Warsaw as a student of Professor Piotr Hausenplas’s class and Hochschule für Musik in Detmold in Germany under Professor Alexander Gebert. She is also the winner of several solo and chamber music competitions. She has participated in numerous international master classes and music festivals.

Between 2008 and 2010 she was a scholar of the National Fund for Children On. In 2017 Czocher became a member of Junge Deutsche Philharmonie and in September the same year she became principal cellist of the Neue Philharmonie Berlin . In 2018 she joined the Szczecin Symphony Orchestra as a solo cellist. Czocher has also performed in many prestigious concert halls in Poland and abroad including in Germany, Lebanon, Serbia, Austria, Turkey, Portugal, United Kingdom and many more.

As a musician Czocher loves to expand spectrum of cello sound, oscillating between classical and contemporary music. Her long career as an award-winning chamber and orchestra musician means she feels comfortable mixing philharmonic music with more alternative approaches. Her major talent is to combine perfect cello technique with limitless imagination and expression. For many years she has been collaborating with her good friend, pianist Hania Rani. In 2015, they released album Biala Flaga, featuring their arrangements of Polish rockstar Grzegorz Ciechowski’s music, giving them a taste of recording success and leading to the yet more ambitious Inner Symphonies released by the Deutsche Grammophon. She has also collaborated with friend Hior Chronik playing among others at Eurosonic Festival in Groningen, Nederlands. Dobrawa’s motto is to never stop growing and the last year she has lived up to this once again as she started composing her own music. One of her pieces entitled “Timelines” was included in “Project XII” created and released by the legendary Deutsche Grammophon. Her debut solo album „Dreamscapes” will be released in 27th January by BMG / Modern Recordings.

This album contains no booklet.