Romance & Dean Hurley - River Of Dreams

 After 2022’s In Every Dream Home a Heartache, Romance and Dean Hurley return with River of Dreams; continuing their prismatic dissection of the daytime soap genre with an examination into the dark corners of fantasy-based escapism.

Over the last 60+ years, serialized melodramas have played a critical role in shaping the way we think about, consume, and are affected by media. The daytime televised soap opera has without a doubt laid the fundamental architecture for contemporary dopamine capitalists’ dreams of harvested, monetized attention…and River of Dreams explores the psychological effects on the mind of its viewers. Whereas In Every Dream Home a Heartache spotlighted the external omnipresence of daytime tv’s persistent broadcasts, River of Dreams examines the interior havoc and mental unbalance sewn by obsessive viewership. The same waters that harvest and transport our buoyant dreams often funnel into nightmarish, tumultuous oceans…

Once again, broadcast television samples by way of vintage, bit-crunched YouTube codecs form the source material here…all artfully inlaid and mosaicked to form tear-stained compositions of troubled romance gone astray.