cloud collecting #52: Dream Crease
+ Blue Hour in the Living Room music video premiere 💙
Excited to have Dream Crease, the project of Marina Aguerre on cloud collecting + share the premiere of her new music video. Marina and I know each other from the not-as-big-as-you-think Los Angeles ambient + experimental music community. Her new album via New York-based PFR Records, Blue Hour in the Living Room is a gorgeous synth-drenched collection of songs with features from several LA staples, including the magical Nailah Hunter and Lisa Sonoda who have both been featured on previous cloud collecting interviews. I’ve featured Marina on many women of ambient mixes over the years and she created a mystical track with Aisha Vaughan on the gentle voices compilation I curated alongside Anita Tatlow of Echoes Blue this past March. Happy to finally have her on cc!
Drawing from otherworldly visions, reoccurring dream landscapes, and surrounding nature across the globe, Los Angeles-based powerhouse Marina Aguerre (Teal Pop, Spaceface, Dumbo Gets Mad) brings us a realm of ambient and electronic music. Composed with digital synthesizers and organic sounds—using voice and field recordings as both instrument and element— the music of Dream Crease is an ethereal soundscape that flickers like dust in sunlight, fleeting yet luminous, energetically reaching toward the unseen across genres.
Aguerre got her start in the Los Angeles DIY scene booking and DJing on radio under her catch-all moniker The Witching Hours, with over a decade of collaborative and community work. Constant exposure to new sounds combined with years of touring and writing with bands naturally progressed to this solo project, which launched in 2019 with her debut album “Nocturne Chalice” via Mutation Records. Since becoming more active in the project, she has toured the US and Japan and has made two appearances at Bonnaroo. In 2025 she scored the indie film “El Rebote” starring Jim O’Heir. She has also provided featured vocals for Spaceface, Marco Benevento, and Mating Ritual with future collaborations consistently releasing. Her new album Blue Hour in the Living Room is out in full on September 17th via PFR Records.
1. Your new album, Blue Hour in the Living Room via PFR Records is built from recordings you made in your own backyard. Were there any key pieces of gear you used and what was your workflow like? And as a fellow reverb lover, what is your favorite reverb?
I’ve been teaching myself to produce on the computer and it’s a lot of fun, but I missed working with analog elements. So the album is full of “field recordings,” but it’s nothing fancy. I went around my backyard with my iPhone and collected textures on my Voice Memo app - steps on pebbles, caressing branches, leaves crunching in my hands ten different ways... I then mapped the sounds to my MIDI keyboard and played away. A lot of those natural textures ended up becoming the beats in the album. I also recorded bird calls on my phone from my homes of Los Angeles, Mar del Plata, and Raiatea, at sunrise and sunset; they’re in almost every song, even if hidden under a lot of effects. Personally, my favorite reverb is the Walrus Audio SLO Reverb Pedal - I use that on pretty much anything!
2. What brought you to making ambient music and are there any albums you heard early on in your love of the genre that you still go back to?
What first drew me to ambient music was that it seemed as if there weren’t any “rules.” I’ve never formally studied music, so I was very intimidated to try, but I felt I had these vibrant real worlds in my dreams (and memories of them in my waking life) that needed to be re-created. I tried visual art as well, but music is what fully allowed me to carve these atmospheres out of sound in a clear manner. I grew up listening to video game soundtracks and also a lot of Enya.
3. How do you cloud collect (connect to childlike wonder) in your creativity?
Cloud Collecting is such an important practice! The true magic lies in being completely open-minded, to seeing without your eyes and feeling deeply. For me, the practice of making ambient music is an exercise in childlike wonder. What world will appear before me today? How can I get there, what tools do I need? I’ve never tried this tool before, maybe it will reveal a different path? Exploration in dream realms through sonic experimentation. Using what’s around me and the knowledge I’m slowly acquiring to expand my boundaries.
Blue Hour in the Living Room music video premiere!
Officially released today! Here is the video premiere and a behind-the-scenes look at Marina’s beautiful music video.
Behind-the-scenes from Marina:
A living room is a defined space but also a room where you spend your living hours. Personally I spend a lot of time outside, but I also spend a lot of time inside, nesting. I love to decorate, redecorate, burn scents, tidy up… sometimes it feels all very “human” to be inside doing all this. Unnatural or maybe even meaningless when you zoom out on a cosmic scale. But then I realized every critter makes their home, whether it’s a bug or a bird or a coyote or a human. We’re one of nature’s maximalists in terms of home-making, with our big concrete wooden houses and all our comforts. I think it’s important to remember even when we are inside, living our mundane moments in life, that we don’t forget we are living animals as well. This instinct to live in your room is as important as staying fed or periodically sleeping. I wanted to bring nature and instinct into my living room, by producing a song and also an album that was very synthetic and digital but also natural and organic in its composition. It’s also music for bugs. I think bugs would like it.
Sequoia and I shot this video in one night in my backyard; we wanted the narrative to tell of a caterpillar human who transforms into a moth human, how we can bring the outside in to metamorphose ourselves.
Starring: Marina Aguerre
Directed by: Sequoia Wolfe
Filmed and Edited by: Sequoia Wolfe
Music by: Marina Aguerre
Title Cards by: Marina Aguerre