Bill Holt’s ‘Dreamies’ Return With ‘Program 13: Thought Train’
Bill Holt was not supposed to make one of the great lost American head records. In the late ’60s he was working for 3M in Philadelphia, a young sales and marketing executive in a three-piece suit.
As he later put it, if you know ‘Mad Men’, that was him. But America was changing faster than any office could explain. Between the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, Watergate, television news and The Beatles tearing up the rulebook, Holt felt the culture tilt. In 1972 he quit the straight job, went home to Delaware, and followed the noise in his head.
The result was ‘Dreamies’, recorded in 1973 and first released in 1974 on his own Stone Theatre Productions label. With the subtitle ‘Auralgraphic Entertainment’, Holt was saying what the record did: it made pictures out of sound.Holt wanted pictures in sound. Armed with an Ovation acoustic guitar, a Moog Sonic Six, tape machines, mixers, primitive electronics and a lot of nerve, he built two side-long pieces, ‘Program Ten’ and ‘Program Eleven’. The title ‘Program Ten’ nodded to The Beatles’ ‘Revolution 9’, but the world of the record was Holt’s own: Delaware nights, television news, political dread, acoustic songs and hand-built tape collage. It’s more homespun, more frightened, more American.
‘Dreamies’ moves like late-night television leaking into a dream. JFK speeches, news fragments, boxing commentary, commercials, NASA chatter, crickets, breaking glass, acoustic folk-pop, Lennon-ish vocals and buzzing Moog tones all drift through the frame. ‘Program Ten’ still carries the glow of song. ‘Program Eleven’ gets darker, stranger, closer to bad sleep. It’s psychedelic, but not in the usual sense. It’s psychedelia as media overload, the private mind catching the national signal and failing to turn it off. Pitchfork later called Holt an “untutored auteur dissecting his own mind in the basement on reel-to-reel”, which gets close to the odd bravery of it.
Nobody much heard it at the time. The album was self-released, mail-order, and commercially doomed. Holt went back to work, later finding success in electronics, alarms, home theatre and inventions. But ‘Dreamies’ became something else: homemade pop art with political undertones.
Holt returned with ‘Program Twelve’ in 2006, shaped by 9/11, and now ‘Program 13: Thought Train’ brings the dream into the age of streaming, January 6 and disinformation. Holt is back inside the dream, though the dream has changed shape. Tape has become Logic Pro. Mail order has become streaming. The Cold War dread of ‘Dreamies’ has mutated into January 6, disinformation, moral collapse and what Holt calls “a new kind of mind war.” His method remains his own: songs, spoken fragments, political dread, odd humour, private memory, public crisis. The basement has gone digital, but the signal is unmistakably Bill Holt.
“Truth is up for grabs.”
Bill, it is great to be back in touch. In your note, you described this new release as a “42-minute trip down a rabbit hole of true and false.” That phrase really struck me, especially given how prescient ‘Dreamies’ was about media saturation. When you were piecing this new journey together, did you find it harder to distinguish “truth” today compared to the 1970s? Back then, the threat was the Bomb; today, it feels like the threat is confusion itself. How did you translate that feeling into sound?
Bill Holt: Great to hear from you, Klemen! And a happy 2026. Down a rabbit hole indeed. Difficult to translate what’s up; it’s so unprecedented. Something has gone seriously wrong with our national moral compass. Not sure this new record, ‘Program 13’, translates it. Maybe more like it reflects the insanity of today.
Truth is up for grabs. Character no longer counts. Basic core values like “no man is above the law” seem kind of quaint these days. You asked about truth today compared to truth in the 1970s. All I can tell you is that in the 1970s there were plenty of different opinions, but still there was always only one truth. Politicians couldn’t get away telling the kind of big lies we tolerate today. Any politician saying American elections are rigged because they lost would have been laughed out of town.
In the 1970s, the American family had three TV networks, all fact-checked, all required by law to give equal time for political candidate opinions. No big lies permitted. We all watched ‘I Love Lucy’ and the Evening News together. E pluribus unum. We had a shared reality; now we don’t. Today, anybody anywhere in the world with a computer can broadcast to the American people. FCC regulations and fact-checking don’t apply to cable or the internet.
The Bomb means doomsday, but at least we all die fast together. The January 6 attack on the Capitol, ordinary people with minds so warped by disinformation that they feel compelled to attack their own Capitol? That was more than insurrection. J6 was the opening shot in a new kind of mind war. Never thought there would be a greater threat to freedom than communism. But here we are. Translating the way I feel about all this is pretty much impossible. Driving me crazy, maybe ‘Program 13’ reflects that.
I’ve been thinking about what you told me last time, how you physically glued tape loops together in your basement to make ‘Program Ten’. It was such a tactile, physical labor of love. Now that you’ve released this new work directly to streaming services, bypassing physical media entirely, how does that feel for you as an artist? Do you miss the “weight” of the tape, or is there something liberating about sending this music out as an invisible signal?
I am tempted to answer like an old-school analog purist, but truth is, digital is liberating, much better in many ways, especially for a one-man band like me. Liberating is a good word for digital. There’s still a tactile labor-of-love element with computers. Building a dependable computer music setup with the right software, the right hardware, that lets you create without glitches, learning how to use these new tools fluidly, is a labor of love, with enough cables and connections to satisfy the tactile nerd.
The transition from physical distribution to streaming is also great. Although it would be nice to figure out how to make money streaming. It used to be a creator could earn $5 on a CD sale or an Apple Music album download. Now you need a zillion streams to earn $5. Overall, working with digital is a recording artist’s dream come true. Thank you, Apple and Logic Pro.
“Over-polishing and never finishing is a great temptation with digital.”
You mentioned before that the constraints of your early gear, using a stopwatch to time drum hits, actually helped shape the unique sound of ‘Dreamies’. With this new project, I imagine you had access to infinite digital tools. Was it a challenge to stop yourself from “over-polishing” the work? Did you have to intentionally leave in some rough edges to keep that human, outsider spirit alive?
Over-polishing and never finishing is a great temptation with digital. The choices are endless. Then again, not sure if over-polishing is a digital problem or a problem caused by not having a producer, a record company, or a deadline. As far as sounding rough or polished, I just want it to be a good listen, entertaining. Thought-provoking. Difficult to comment on rough edges and the human outsider spirit, except to say I create these recordings the best I can. I love making these records. The part I don’t like is exposing my inner world to the outside world.
One of my favorite details from our previous talk was how you recorded your own environment, popcorn popping on the stove, crickets in the Delaware night. It grounded the sci-fi sounds in reality. For this new “rabbit hole,” did you return to harvesting sounds from your personal life, or is the texture of this record more digital and abstract?
Should have titled it ‘Rabbit Hole’. A lot of my environment these days is listening to audiobooks. Mostly mystery, historical fiction, detective stuff. I enjoy writers like Donna Leon, narrators like Scott Brick. I was struck by the words of wisdom packed into these stories. Whenever I heard something I thought was profound, something touching on truth, honor, good vs. evil, J6, integrity, great quotes, funny things, weird stuff, sex, I would screen-record the sound bite with my iPhone. Never sure how I would ever use all those sound bites. Over the last few years, I recorded around 500 of my favorites. Edited each one, normalized the volume, then filed them all by subject. That way, after the music tracks were in place, I could paint the sound bites in. If I wanted a sound bite about Russian gangsters or good and evil, I knew where to get it.
You were quite candid with me last time about not loving the sound of your own voice on the original records, often burying it under the Moog or news clips. I’m curious if your relationship with your voice has changed on this new 42-minute trip. Have you made peace with being the narrator of these stories, or do you still see the vocals as just another texture in the collage?
Nothing much has changed as far as vocals go. I’m finally old enough to not care so much about how I sound. ‘Dreamies’ is meant to be a nice solitary trip, a soundscape; the songs naturally are part of it.
‘Dreamies’ was born from the shock of the JFK assassination, and ‘Program Twelve’ was a direct response to the trauma of 9/11. You mentioned this new work is “inspired by the times.” Was there a specific moment or feeling recently that triggered this new creative surge? What was the spark that made you say, “I need to make another one”?
My recordings do express my politics, my worldview. There’s never been a more urgent time for us, even those who don’t like political talk, to take heed. Of course, it was J6 and what came after that did it for me. That’s why ‘Program 13’ features a trip into J6 violence. The January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol hit me harder in a sicker kind of way than even JFK or 9/11. The sight of mind-warped Americans vandalizing our beautiful, sacred Capitol of the USA, trying to overthrow a national election, was the worst. J6 was a stab into the heart of democracy. A spit in the face of the revolution that we are heirs to.
Then, four years later, when the majority of American voters picked Trump after what he did on J6, it was clear to me something was terribly wrong with our national moral, ethical compass. Information war has that power. The power to reduce a functioning nation into a state of chaos. The internet is the new super weapon. That’s what we’re in the middle of right now. A George Orwell kind of thought war.
I found all these sound bites about good and evil, truth and lies comforting. People lured down the rabbit hole should listen to ‘Program 13’. It’s a reminder that truth, honor, honesty, integrity, dignity, humility, character are core values for a moral society, and we have strayed.
You’ve always operated more like a painter than a traditional musician, trusting your instinct for originality over virtuosity. Now that “sampling” and “collage” are the dominant languages of modern music, do you feel a sense of validation? Does it feel like the culture has finally caught up to the fragmented reality you were painting back in 1974?
Hmmm. Deep thought here. As far as validation goes, I’m just happy ‘Dreamies’ found a little niche in the music world. Has culture finally caught up to ‘Dreamies’ reality? Only in the sense that back in 1970 I thought for sure cannabis would be legal any day and ‘Dreamies’ would fit right in. Instead, it took 50 years. So there’s that.
We talked before about the happy accident of the ‘Dreamies’ title connecting to that Isaac Asimov story about selling manufactured dreams. If your 1974 album was a “dream” for the Cold War generation, how would you classify this new release? Is the “rabbit hole” a darker kind of dream, or is there still a sense of wonder in it for you?
Here we go with politics again, but this is not the time to be shy or keep quiet. I do think we are in a darker and more insidious time. It seems now to me like the Cold War is fired back up, complete with a malignant dictatorship in Moscow threatening the Free World again. The same goons in Moscow that were pushing communism are still at it. Unlike the Cold War days, this time Moscow has friends in the White House. The rabbit hole we’re in now is darker than the early days of the Cold War. That’s why we need all hands on deck.
To anyone who considers themselves a patriot, a good citizen, it’s time to pay attention. During the Cold War, in 1962, we worried about the Russians putting missiles in Cuba. Now we’re worried that they have a grip on our White House. The Cold War was about a foreign ideology, a foreign power out to destroy what the American Revolution created.
The original ‘Dreamies Program 10’ featured JFK telling America the same human rights our ancestors fought for are still at issue today. That’s as true now as it was then. Russian madman Putin must have loved watching brainwashed Americans attack the heart of American democracy on J6.
The great hope was that the internet would make people smarter than ever. We assumed that the average person can sort out the lies and not be gullible enough to get suckered by propaganda and disinformation. Turns out people love lies. It’s the great dilemma of these times, for sure. Not sure about my sense of wonder these days. More like a sense of nausea knowing so many minds have been warped. Makes me sad to know we’re surrounded by people who are without a moral compass. Some unfortunate victims of mind war so fucked in the head that they can’t even bring themselves to say Trump lost.
Constructing a single 42-minute continuous piece is a massive undertaking. It’s a marathon for both the creator and the listener. How did you approach the pacing of this one? Without the physical limits of a tape reel, how did you decide when to let the music breathe and when to dial up the intensity?
Glad you appreciate the marathon effort. Sure was. Listening to hours of drafts, then edits over and over and over, fitting the sound bites in, all gets mind-boggling pretty quickly, so I have to get away from it for days, then come back with fresh ears. The pacing and intensity combine the songs, politics, morality, and oddball humor, hopefully in a way that guides the listener to an enjoyable, non-stop listen. In the end, the only way I could figure out how to do it was just doing what sounded good to me.
You have lived such a unique journey, from the “Mad Men” corporate suit to the starving artist, and then to a successful inventor. You’ve seen the American Dream from every possible angle. Does this new album offer a verdict on that dream? Is the “rabbit hole” a descent into cynicism, or is there still a light at the end of the tunnel, like the “heirs of a great revolution” message you planted in your debut?
Thank you for letting me express my political mind. So glad you remember that I am pushing the message that we are the heirs of the great American Revolution. I am a true believer. This time’s different in the sense that it’s not Americans all together faced off against a foreign enemy. We saw the craziness of cults during the Cold War with Charlie Manson, Jim Jones, the Moonies, all kinds of crazy shit. I never imagined that kind of cult insanity could morph into a major political movement like MAGA.
This is the first time ever I worried about the American Dream. Between the war on truth and the rise of the billionaire superyacht, the American Dream is in danger of becoming a spectator sport for most Americans. Add Epstein to the toxic brew and one could easily think we are fucked. But having survived assassinations, riots, wars, oil embargoes, Nazis, fascists, and communists, and now election deniers, there’s always been the light at the end of the tunnel, and we, the heirs of the Revolution, always manage to find that light.
FDR called it our rendezvous with destiny. The Founders called our good fortune divine providence. It’s going to take a major moral-compass reawakening to set what is wrong in the USA back to right. I am an optimist still. A believer in divine providence. Plus, being a pessimist doesn’t sound like much fun.
The blessings of the internet are obvious. There are more opportunities to pursue that elusive American Dream than ever before. The world remains an amazing place. Where else could a guy make ‘Dreamies’ on his iPad Pro, then publish it to Apple Music and the world with a couple taps on a screen? As soon as Americans get over the Trump bullshit and Putin is gone, things will really be great again.
Klemen Breznikar
Auralgraphic Entertainment: Dreamies | Interview | Bill Holt
