Huysmans, René Baptist: Antiretroviral Dreams (2017)

Michael Bonaventure, organ - Yung-Tuan Ku, percussion - concept, texts, voice & electronics by René Baptist Huysmans - mix by Reinder (Put into Sound)- Live performance at Orgelpark, Amsterdam, 7-10-17 as part of the concert ‘Line Management’ with Robert van Heumen, Yung-Tuan Ku, Luiz Henrique Yudo, Michael Bonaventure & Felipe Ignacio Noriega ‘Antiretroviral Dreams’ is a piece for organ, percussion, voice and electronics. The organ and percussion parts were devised in a collaborative and synergetic process with Yung-Tuan and Michael. The electronic soundtrack has as its basic material a recording of my voice narrating various dreams, of a particularly vivid and psychedelic kind. Such dreams are often cited as a side-effect of antiretroviral drug therapy as used in the suppression of HIV. Bizarrely enough, a street drug called ‘whoonga’ or ‘nyaope’ which is used in South Africa is said to contain HIV medication—but this is in all probability an urban legend. Cover art courtesy of EMBL-EBI http://www.ebi.ac.uk/