BILL BRENNAN AND ANDY MCNEILL - Dreaming In Gamelan

“Dreaming In Gamelan” is a project nurtured for years that has finally become reality, an album born of a shared passion for Indonesian gamelan. Its authors are the multi-award-winning Bill Brennan, pianist, composer and musical director with 130 albums to his name, and Andy McNeill, a Canadian musician with an impressive resumé and a leaning towards electronics (his debut album featured, among its guests, Isabella Rossellini).

The first seed of the work dates back to 2001, a soundtrack for a documentary on nanotechnology and biotechnology, short pieces functional to their role as backdrop for images, which gradually took on a life of their own. Later, through expansions, added instrumentation and a series of improvisations and reworkings of the original themes, the full album came to life.

The two musicians' intention was not to stop at the original ceremonial value of Indonesian gamelan orchestras, but to place it within a broader, more elaborate musical context.

Two metallophones (the panerus and the peking), a gong (Jengglong), a vibraphone and a percussion instrument (the bonang) are the resources used by Brennan and McNeill for a hypnotic, evocative imaginary mini-symphony.

From the very first notes of “Tunnels Of Light” acoustic and electronic elements merge with unexpected results, moving from chamber-folk solutions in a folktronica key (“Cloud Forest”) to hazy pages halfway between neoclassical and field recording (“Journey Ahead”), without ever fully crossing into ambient music.

Alongside more folk-oriented pieces (“Temple”) the duo alternates less conventional pages, enriched by Hugh Marsh's violin (“Tunnels Of Light”, “Morning Beams”), before entrusting the closing track's ten-plus minutes, “Reverie”, with an atypical and evocative deconstruction of gamelan music. A process of subtraction already underway in “Dawn Invocation” and in the ethereal “Golden Voices”, which in the final track of “Dreaming In Gamelan” takes the shape of an ambient layering in the footsteps of Jon Hassell and Brian Eno.

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13/04/2026