Shima33 is a virtuoso of the futuristic. As one of the few pioneers and a platform builders for an entire genre he has at the age of 25 secured a place in music history. I can’t tell you what’s going to be on the golden oldies in the 2030’s but I can say this is music with legs. Dreampunk is entrenched in experimentation and open for more. It’s also psychologically accessible foundational music. It’s fertile artistic ground.
His real name is James Harrison, he lives in England, and started making music when he was 14. His stage name is an homage to Tetsuo Shima, a character from the anime Akira. And 33 a simple nod to the famous 33 1/3 rpm our LPs spin at. I’ll make a quick digression to point those who don’t know to Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s beautiful soundtrack for the film.
His latest full length release is As You Are. On the graphic I made above it’s on the bottom left of the squares. Here’s a picture of the actual album cover.
Shima33 states, “When I promo’d it, the tagline was “lonely night city music for secluded people. listen to quietly while doing other shit, staring out of a window, or otherwise questioning the nature of existence”, so like, it’s designed to be background music in a sense”
Readers of my blog will know that I am a fan utilitarian music, especially when the function doubles as meditative or atmospheric but also holds up under close scrutiny. This checks all these boxes and more.
I took a quick liking to the opening track:
https://dreamcatalogue.bandcamp.com/track/steve-jobs-shared-death-hallucination
So I asked him the following question about it:
I really like the opening track on As You Are, Steve Jobs Shared Death Hallucination – it starts so lush and dreamy and then it dissolves into something quite discordant
I’m interested in both the process and the name
where do those opening sounds come from
and what’s with the title – it seems like it could be a statement about late stage capitalism or maybe the Mandela Effect or just general surrealism
what’s behind the sound and the name?
To which he replied:
Thanks for the compliments – the dissonance on Steve Jobs was intentional, I like painting outside the lines when it comes to music, generally speaking.
The opening sounds come from an AI continuation of the Mac OSX Bootup Chime – I’m big into my AI music (I’ve made an album or two of it under my Black Banshee name) and I figured it’d be cool to sample one of those and flip it into it’s own tracks.
The title comes from, well, me researching a lot into Steve Jobs at the time, and also some research about the Jonestown Massacre I did where, some people who used to live there who escaped during the massacre got the aura that the massacre had happened before the news actually broke… I thought it was deep.
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This sent us down a little rabbit hole where I asked if he knew a song with a certain sample related to the cult and he was able to identify it as Ram by Zoviet France. We talked about Jim Jones a bit.
This is another track from As You Are:
https://dreamcatalogue.bandcamp.com/track/pray
Q: Have you collaborated with musicians living in other countries?
A: Sure – I’ve got Eulalie in Japan, Ex Aquis in France, Muzk in America, and Hard K in Canada. Dreampunk is a global movement; anyone who’s stood alone in the rain in the middle of the city at night knows what Dreampunk is, because they’ve experienced it, right there. I find that a lot of the cats in our scene are open to collaborate and put their strengths together. It’s been a great honour to work with so many awesome artists over the years. But yeah; Dreampunk worldwide, forever.
Q:
Have you seen these reviews:
https://birdboyblizzard.music.blog/2021/05/18/white-by-white-banshee/
A: Lmao, I hadn’t, no! Glad to see that someone out in the ether enjoyed Fat American Freeway – there’s rumbling in the group chat of us making a sequel some time in the future, and we plan on it being even more rambly and incoherent.
Q: Do you ever perform live?
A: Last time we performed live was pre-covid, Glove That Fits, November 2019. One hell of a night, that was. Generally speaking I’ve only done 7 or 8 live shows throughout my entire career – not that I don’t want to do them, I just think I’m blackballed from calling everyone in the music industry “loser hippie dipshits” and things of that ilk.
Q: Are they loser dipshits and is hippie an insult?
A: There’s a certain subsect of them that definitely are, yes. You see the types; industry heads, label heads, and people who somehow think that they’re the 0.001% of artists that make it and not the 99.999% of artists that get thrown into the meat grinder and forgotten in 6 months. You get a lot of petty behaviour backstage too from these kinds of folks, because they believe the world should rotate around them. I worked General Manager at Dream Catalogue for several years, and lemme tell ya, the amount of self-entitled pricks we had to deal with on a weekly basis is beyond belief. The difference between hippie and punk is in the vapidness of it. I consider a “hippie” to be the peace and love, tie dye, kinda airheaded 20something influencers who post photo’s on Instagram all day and then end up in a K-hole on the first day of the festival, lmao. I especially don’t understand how you can preach “peace and love” when we’re in the middle of a world war. Has about all the effectiveness of a paper straw. I think that me and HKE are the only real punks left, these days. Everyone else is far too pussified and overly sensitive to actually understand what a punk life is like, let alone live one. Especially with all the synthetic drug, my goodness 21st century hippies are INSUFFERABLE. Legit not a single coherent thought in their fucking heads.
Q:
i want to get into to your early music accomplishments
How did first stake a claim in the dreampunk world?
A: Well, I helped invent the fuckin’ thing, lmao. If you look at my RYM you’ll see my discography goes back all the way to the early days of Vaporwave (and even further back if you count all the unreleased albums from when I was first learning how to make music). In terms of Dreampunk, Dream Catalogue is the mothership, and I worked hard over 3 1/2 years to put as much shine on that diamond as possible. Considering some of the stellar releases we’ve put out over the years, I’d say we’ve done a pretty good job. I don’t really care for personal fame as much as I did when I was younger. I’m still in love with music, don’t get me wrong. But all this industry bullshit and snowflake bastards can get to fuck. I didn’t fall in love with any one of these fools.
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I then asked for some historical background. I’m getting tired of copy and pasting so I’m going to toss is in a screen shot. He’s a smooth writer so it comes across well unedited.
A lot is owed to what is still considered the magnus opus of Dreampunk, 2814’s Birth Of A New Day. That album is like, Dreampunk from concentrate. A lot of Vangelis’ stuff for the Blade Runner soundtrack works too. 90’s Pure Moods New Age CD’s. The threads of this tapestry have been laying around for quite a while – we’re just weavers of fate.
Me: I love that record.
Shima33: I’ve never listened to that album in full. Which, I know, a lot of people will consider blasphemy considering my position in the company and community, but with my personal relationship with music I like to listen to obscure shit only. I haven’t listened to a single Radiohead album. Nor a single Led Zeppelin album. Name your favourite album? I’ve never heard it. However! Some super-obscure 1960’s African polyrhythm Jazz, or some background tune from a flash game nobody played in 2004? That shit’s right up my alley. Music’s so broad and so vast that you can never possibly hope to cover it all. I see books like “1,001 Albums To Listen To Before You Die”, and then I look into it, and I see that these music industry studios are paying, in some instances, up to six figures to appear in these books. Okay, so it’s not the original title, it’s moreso “1,001 Albums We WANT You To Listen To Before You Die”. I’ve heard Pet Sounds, obvs, but I’ve kinda made it a life mission to never hear a single Radiohead song in my entire life, lmao. I don’t want what my idea of “good” is to match what anyone else’s idea of “good” is. I want it to be unique to me, and I think other people should strive towards that too. It comes back to originality, and individualism. I’m sure if I heard one of their tracks, I’d love them. But that’s the problem – so does everybody else. There’s so much unique music in the world that doesn’t even get heard, let alone loved. Why keep chewing on the same blades of grass, when there’s a whole field full of grass to explore? Not only that, but think about how much music someone forgets in their lifetime. Music they heard once and never again. In passing at a house party. In the background of a bar. On the radio on the drive to work. Once, and never again. Life’s temperamental like that, so I guess that’s why people hold onto certain albums for their whole lives – it’s a sort of reference point of stability. I have the same relationship with The Bluetones’ “Expecting To Fly” album. But, as a spectator in this world, observing people, I feel like I have some comments to make on the human condition, and one of them is thus; If you find something you love, fight tooth and nail to keep it. There are many demons in this world, and angels are hard to come by.
Me: I think it’s an important point that once you experience something there’s permanence in that you will always have experienced it.
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I ask about money. He hasn’t made much from music as of yet. I personally think more will come but this was what he said about the money from the music:
Now, as regards money – I mean, I made enough to keep a teenager happy with buying pocket money and rounds of drinks for nights out, but now that I’m getting into my Mid-Late 20’s and I see people my age with careers, cars and saving up for mortgages, I cannot rationally consider this music shit my “career”, because it doesn’t pay enough to be considered as such. I’m just another one of millions of names that has been chewed up and spat out by the music industry beast, but y’know what? I’m leaving on my own terms, I’m not bitter, and I had fun along the way. Can’t say fairer than that.
Warmth Highest 