Hearing is here-ing.

French composer, guitarist, and sound designer Paul Behnam, aka The Rainbow Machine, presents his full-length album, “Water and Dreams,” a site-specific performative rendition of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard's "L'eau et les rêves" (1942) and his poetics of elemental living. Through his electroacoustic and ambient compositions, Benham explores sounds as dreaming bodies. First conceived as an audio-visual collaboration with Spanish painter Rocio Ligero Del Rio and Polish filmmaker Jan Luis Gottwald, the piece was presented in Venice (Cosmo, 2021) and Paris (FTMA Festival, 2022). Later it developed into a full-length album on the Cosmogram imprint, a Venetian opening to an imaginative dreamscape where the invisible becomes palpable through our inner vision.



Equipped with field recording gear and an acoustic guitar, Behnam first set about capturing his sonic palette during a six-month residency at Cosmo, a production space located in the former Church of Saints Cosmas and Damian on the Giudecca island in Venice. The tacit beauty of everyday Venetian life served as Behnam's primary source of material: the lagoon, the waves lapping on the Lido, the creaking wood of the gondolas, the cacophony of tourists, the rumbling horns of ships, even the last protest of Venetians against cruise ships before they were banned from the city.
 Bringing these diverse soundscapes back into Cosmo, he set about editing the recordings into liquid, ephemeral filaments. To interact with them in space, he created a multi-channel diffusion system using the reverberant apse of the deconsecrated church. This way of using the acoustics of the church to combine layers of water with the textures from his guitar and loop pedals became foundational for “Water and Dreams".
The unique results can be heard in the initial track, "Crystal Water," a symphonic balance between light and time, and between the sensory and musical worlds. Shiny chords and waves of reverberation gradually unveil the intention of this album, subtly suggesting the listening mode that is best suited to connect with it. The suspense builds steadily over the first introductory crescendo, distilling into the first tonal center of the record at the 15-minute mark with the twilight of "Drop of light.”

Paul Behnam magnifies the acoustic properties of liquid through his musical lens, transporting us through the refractions and resonances of the Venetian canals, through the tides that embrace the foundations, between the rowing boats raised and lowered by the rhythmic, roaring motion of the Giudecca Canal. The only human voices we hear during the record are in "Allegria Laguna," a brief breath of air where protesters from the city can be heard protesting against the last huge cruise ships still running through Venice. As this final glimmer of the present world reflected in "Water and Dreams" decays, we are once again plunged into the aquatic pulse of "Apsodia" and "Crystal Ocean," closing the cycle of this underwater current with a palindrome form.