DREAMS OF SNAKES — BLACK LOTUS featuring GEERT COPPENS
 

Black Lotus returns with Dreams of Snakes, the first release from the forthcoming concept EP In a Room Full of Dreams, a new chapter in the project’s evolving avant-goth world. Released under Anthem Crown, Thai of Black Lotus is joined by Belgian musician Geert Coppens of Micrart and Micrart Studios in an audiovisual collaboration spanning music, vocals and video.

A collective of avant-goth artists working across music, film, photography, movement, installation and performance-based visual art, Black Lotus develops each release as its own sonic and visual environment. Rooted in gothic art rock and gothic art metal, its music moves freely through post-punk, wave, dark pop, noir pop, industrial, rock, metal and experimental forms rather than remaining within a single genre. For In a Room Full of Dreams, that world moves deeper into surrealism, noir pop, wave and experimental electronic sound while retaining the project’s gothic core.

At the centre of the EP is synesthesia: a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sense can involuntarily evoke another, such as experiencing colour through sound or perceiving music, words or other sensory information as colours, shapes, textures, movement or spatial impressions. The EP expands that idea into dreams, symbolism, memory, altered perception and the temporality of perception, where clocks split in two, numbers slip away, shadows divide, rooms seem to listen, and familiar objects begin behaving according to the logic of dreams. One of the EP’s central songs, Synthesia, takes its name from a deliberate play on synesthesia, merging interconnected perception with the project’s synthesizer-driven electronic language.

Coppens is a pioneer of Belgium’s early experimental electronic, darkwave and coldwave scenes. Through projects including Twilight Ritual, Autumn, Linear Movement and Faceless 50, he brings decades of experience in experimental electronics, minimal synth, darkwave, coldwave and atmospheric electronic music into the collaboration.

A love of older records and album art also feeds the atmosphere of In a Room Full of Dreams: once inside it, you enter analogue time. Records glow. Telephones ring. Clocks forget themselves. The visual concept grew partly from Thai’s affection for physical records and album artwork, and Coppens immediately connected with it through his own memories of spending time in record stores, handling albums and studying their artwork as closely as the music itself. That connection to older music culture also runs through Coppens’ influences and artistic world, including Bowie, Kraftwerk, Gary Numan and Depeche Mode, artists for whom sound, image and identity were often inseparable. Their legacy sits naturally alongside the EP’s mixture of analogue memory, synthesizer-driven experimentation and contemporary noir-pop atmosphere.

On Dreams of Snakes, Coppens and Thai perform together as a vocal duo, making the track one of the most direct collaborations on the record. Coppens is also creating the full-length music video for the song and contributing to other visual and video work surrounding the EP, extending the collaboration beyond sound.

Thai brings a background spanning music, professional dance, photography, video, installation and performance-based visual art. Those disciplines increasingly converge inside Black Lotus, where the aim is not simply to produce songs but to build immersive intermedia works in which image, movement, character, atmosphere and music become parts of the same artistic environment.
Thai is also developing the solo project Lotus in Black, moving farther from Black Lotus’ heavier rock and metal foundations into noir pop, avant-pop, synthpop/electropop, dream pop and experimental electronic music. Elements of that more intimate and avant-garde language have begun feeding new colours back into Black Lotus, particularly on In a Room Full of Dreams, where avant-goth, noir pop, wave, gothic atmosphere and surrealism are deliberately allowed to collide.

The result is an unusual meeting point between two artistic histories: Coppens’ roots in Belgian experimental electronic music and Thai’s evolving world of gothic music, noir pop, visual storytelling and performance art.

Dreams of Snakes opens that door.

Dreams become symbols.
Sound becomes image.
Memory becomes unreliable.
And perception begins to slip.

Dreams of Snakes is the first release from the forthcoming Black Lotus EP, In a Room Full of Dreams.