What better way to revive obscure cuts of Prog Rock than spinning a soft yarn around an elaborate video and hosting it through a web series called Polyester Dreams?
The series, created by and starring Andrew Harrison as DJ Warren Orlando, recently completed its eight-episode first season, and is in production for a second. Warren likes to dream in music videos. Retro music videos. Not quite as old as the bands he’s dug up, but at least back to the early days of MTV, or maybe even old cable access.
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Each episode has Orlando spinning for his radio show (the aptly dubbed Polyester Dreams), where he gets to dust off lost classics from The Idle Race, Coven, Saturnalia and Aphrodite’s Child, among others you didn’t know you forgot about until you heard them again here.
It’s no Yacht Rock, but the music’s actually not bad. It’s pretty damn good, in fact. Harrison may have come up with an effective backdoor strategy for views by hooking viewers into forgotten tunes that manages to keep them around despite not especially meaty storylines. Viewers might also be intrigued by the ways Warren’s eccentric musical tastes play out. By nature, Polyester goes for the bizarre.
Episode 5’s ‘Warren the Crusader’ has Warren visiting the remains of ‘Holyland USA,’ a theme park presided over by the heroin-chic-meets-Ondine-like Bill Hind as ‘The Holy Man.’
Meanwhile, when he’s not belittling his general manager Asher (Chris Nuñez), Warren finds other adventures outside the station, whether it’s confronting his ex-girlfriend, the fetish model for slandering him outside the Oscars, borrowing a neighbor’s cat to fight off a rat problem, or getting entangled with Brazilian death metal band Os Cadáveres (featuring Dallas Coyle, the series’ associate producer, as lead singer Tiago).
Warren is never far from conflict. So much so that by the end of season one he gets his full comeuppance – not for any great misdeed in particular so much as, well, maybe being a selfish dreamer? But, for Warren, and for Harrison, in the end it’s mission accomplished, because the dusty ol’ prog rock vinyl gets its air time, and that was really the only goal all along.
Relive some classics at PolyesterDreams.com.
