Dreamphone. Photo by Eli Edwards

Floating on Musical Waves with Dreamphone

The Brooklyn-based alternative duo Dreamphone is a collaboration between vocalist and composer Hattie Simon and composer, producer, and instrumentalist Seb Zel. The two met in 2015 while Simon was studying music at the New School and Zel was pursuing classical composition at New York University. Long-time admirers of each others’ work, Simon and Zel began writing music and performing together at house shows shortly after they met. With time on their hands in 2020, they decided to go all in on Dreamphone. They released their first EP Softer in 2021 and have performed at venues like Elsewhere Zone 1 and Brooklyn Made. Ahead of their December 13th show at Umbra, COPY sat down with Simon and Zel to chat defying classification, dream worlds, and embracing emptiness. This interview has been edited for clarity.

COPY: How did you come up with the name Dreamphone?

Hattie Simon: We were literally just pairing different words together because we wanted it to be two words. It sounds really dumb now.

Seb Zel: No, no, no, it's not, because it's two of us. It's two words. We have a dynamic that feels very yin and yang.

HS: There is this very technical, electronic part of it. We put so much energy into the production and making it crazy. But then we have this whole dream aspect of it where it's very floaty. It’s like technology paired with the amorphous.

SZ: A lot of this is about contrast and sections that are very different from each other, like soft vocals over loud instrumental parts. It scratches the itch about putting unlike things together and making meaningful combinations.

COPY: Do you feel like one of you is the “dream” and one of you is the “phone”?

SZ: Within individual slices and sections of what we do, yes. But holistically, no. In a creative sense, I approach things with a very “every idea is potentially a good idea” mentality. And then Hattie steers it meaningfully and gives me a lot of direction and focus. But when it comes to actually running shit as a band, it's more the opposite, where Hattie has a lot of ideas.

HS: He's definitely the gear person and I’m the email person. Every band needs both.

COPY: How would you describe the partnership and how it's developed over the course of the nine years that you've known each other?

HS: I would say about five or six years of really working together and four-and-a-half of Dreamphone. We try to get together at least once a week to just create and push things further along. We always try to have some time to just be vulnerable making music.

SZ: We've both cried in each other's arms at various moments in our friendship and we've seen each other go through a lot. Obviously, that's going to affect the music. So working not only on the music but on our friendship is always important. That sets the groundwork for us to write music in a way that is vulnerable.

HS: A lot of times, we will start something from scratch in person, but then there's been plenty of scenarios where I write a thing, voice-note it, and send it to Seb, or he makes a beat and also records some verses, and then we just start from there. We're very accepting of each other's ideas, but there's no pressure to say yes to everything.

SZ: Holding space for each other as people lets you feel acknowledged and seen and safe. That makes it easier for you to make art without your ego.

COPY: How would you describe your sound? When I saw Dreamphone at Brooklyn Made, I thought your music was very emotional, but reflective in an intimate way versus outwardly cathartic.

SZ: We have a goal to write music that's accessible and that people will actually want to listen to if that's true to us. We try to have the more heady, conceptual, music-nerdy aspects of it be buried deeper within.

COPY: Can you clue me in to some of the music-nerdy elements?

SZ: The music-nerdy aspect that feels the most integral has to do with textures and creations of ambience. Our music is meant to have a rich setting. We want all of it to feel like a vignette of a place. Not necessarily a literal place, but a mental place or a mood place. If you listen, there are so many non-music sounds in every song, and there are these sections that stay firmly in one place. And then it will have another section that is firmly in a different place. We rarely do things that morph gradually over the course of a song.

HS: Oh, that's so true.

SZ: I think of it like scenes in a movie.

HS: It's also very ocean-oriented. We both grew up by the ocean. In those scenes, there are waves, clouds, coastline… I gravitate to that when we're thinking about music.

COPY: Do you feel like you're creating this dreamscape, or the place is a dream?

SZ: We want it to feel real in the way that when you're in a dream, it feels like you're actually in the place where the dream is happening. You're with people who don't know each other in a place that doesn't exist in an impossible time, but you don't question it. It feels real and valid to you.

COPY: Do you feel like the lyrics also act to evoke this ethereal, otherworldly quality?

HS: A lot of them are about yearning for things, wondering about whatever is out there…

SZ: Or big existential questions that don't have solid answers. The lyrics are actually the most focused aspect of it. The instruments and sounds can justify being all over the place because the lyrics are focused and the melodies are really strong and simple. It's part of the accessibility that gives a listener something grounding.

COPY: How do you feel like Dreamphone’s music itself has evolved?

SZ: I feel like it has gotten weirder. I was more concerned with it being banger-y in early stages. Now I let it flow between being that and being soft and intimate.

HS: In some ways, we've actually been really consistent with our music. But the melodies… I try to think outside of the box of what I would normally do.

SZ: This is definitely a project where “generically good” is not something we're interested in. We're trying to make things that feel refreshing, like when you finally listen to a Mitski song after listening to only rap all day.

COPY: Who or what are some of your influences?

SZ: I love this producer called Machinedrum. I love James Blake. I love music that is sound-design-forward. I love Smino and Saba. Oh, and definitely huge influences when we were first starting were Sufjan Stevens and Gabriel Kahane.

HS: We're doing a Björk cover on Friday. That just makes sense given who we are. FKA Twigs, Kimbra, and Charli XCX are also big influences. Then for me, coming from a jazz background, I always listen to a lot of great vocalists—people like Sarah Vaughan and Abbey Lincoln.

SZ: A lot of this is inspired by anxiety and the types of questions that anxiety leaves you with. I think we both ride that roller coaster pretty frequently.

HS: I was just joking last week about how we're never spiraling at the same time, which is great because then one person is spiraling and the other is able to be like, “Let's make music out of this.”

COPY: What’s in store for your upcoming show?

HS: For the show on Friday, we're actually doing our duo set.

SZ: Which is more singer-songwriter-oriented. There’s just bass and vocals and then other electronics.

HS: We've been working simultaneously on an EP of songs that are more like that. They're sort of like ballads.

SZ: We don't have a name for the project yet. But Friday we're playing with our good friend Lucas Saur on cello and our good friend Nicole Davis on trumpet. It's going to be a nice little weird, quirky chamber music moment.

COPY: Is there a song that you’re excited about?

SZ: I always like playing this song called “Second Time” that Hattie wrote because when Hattie wrote it, it really came out all at once.

HS: It's about getting platonically ghosted.

SZ: It's really pure—it feels like playing music in the way that humans have played music for hundreds of years.

HS: It feels very intimate, and it's like verse-chorus, verse-chorus. There's some nice bass and guitar melody and vocals isolated and then nothing else going on.

SZ: It's been good to peel back the layers and give our attention to the most simple, earthy version of it.

COPY: I’d love to hear more about the EP you’re working on.

HS: The plan for next year is we're going to release a few singles that will feature artists that we've worked with, and then we want to put out this body of work as a new EP. It’s the ballads.

SZ: I think about it as not being concerned with hugeness or filling up the whole frequency spectrum.

HS: There can be empty space.

SZ: In this whole body of music generally, we're trying to leave room for emptiness, even leaving emptiness in ways that make you feel uncomfortable. The curveball is that there's less than you expect rather than that there's more. Things that you would expect to be there are missing as part of the creative voice of the project.

Dreamphone. Photo by Oliver Zel