Molina Speaks Is Blowing Minds With His Free Immersive Album Experience

"The pandemic was a telekinetic portal — a costly one," says Denver artist Molina Speaks. "As we exited, I was like, 'We have an opportunity to reimagine everything.' We had the time, the solitude, the knowledge, the power, the leverage to demand new social, cultural and economic realities. For the most part, it’s back to business as usual — but we are still in a period of social upheaval and possibility. We can redesign this entire reality and our impact on the planet. If we choose to."

Molina made his choice, and now he's taking us on a journey to a more enlightened consciousness with his installation at Understudy, Dreams Life and Times Immersive Album Experience. Although it’s been decades since listening to records from front to back was considered a regular communal activity (unless you're a hipster), "That's the experience I wanted to bring back," he says, explaining that he was "exhausted" and "frustrated" from "putting out music that is old news the next day." Instead, the music and spoken-word poetry of his Dreams Life and Times album will disappear altogether when the installation closes on December 31 — at least until Molina finds another place to present it.

"I don't know if that experience of walking into the record store and unwrapping a package [is] coming back. But there are future ways to bring that vibe — like the physical experience of an album," he says. "That's what I wanted to do. I wanted to create a world...where you can just come in and you want to spend some time, and you could sink into the music, away from the chaos of the city. Everything is so fast-paced, but here in the heart of the city, you can just come and zone out."

During a weekday after-work rush, people are hurrying to catch the light rail at Stout Street while cars jam up on 14th Street on the homebound commute, passing by the cool blue lights and muffled bump of music coming from Understudy. But once you enter this space tucked into the Colorado Convention Center, the outer world disappears as you become entranced by a physical illustration of Molina's album, years in the making, and the dreamscapes it embodies. The atmosphere is cozy: Plush rugs cover the floor, plants hang from the ceiling, yoga mats invite stretching and PicassoTiles invite play. There's a cabinet with paper and markers for drawing, magazines and scissors for collage; in the corner are a hot water heater and tea bags. And, of course, there are plenty of comfortable couches and chairs for watching Molina's album come to life on a television screen and in a projection above it, with digital renderings by the artist Fanny Pack.

"It invites people into a musical experience in a way that I think people are hungry for right now," Molina says of his installation. "You know, the attention economy is so draining. Even in your own phone, how many photos or videos that you've taken do you even actually return to? It's just overload. But here you can just come vibe. I imagine that there will be other spaces where this album pops up around the city or around the country. I want to keep this dreamscapes lounge going; there will be different iterations of it. But again, with this first one, I just want to make it as comfortable as possible to just come in and just be.”

When he began making Dreams Life and Times during the pandemic, Molina had no idea that it would result in an immersive installation; in fact, he says he started with no concept for it at all. But every time he shared snippets of his music with friends or collaborators, a greater intention began forming and expanding. One of those friends was the late artist and activist Stevon Lucero, with whom Molina painted the "Indigenous Futurist Dreamscapes Lounge" at Meow Wolf's Convergence Station.
“It's evolved a lot, and this was during the time that I was deep into an experience with my dreams. I was working on the ‘Dreamscapes Lounge’ project in Meow Wolf with Stevon Lucero, and we were talking a lot about consciousness and dreams,” he recalls. (Lucero's influence didn't end there: Molina bought a sketch of the artist's, which became the album's cover.) Meanwhile, the sound was coming together like a stream of consciousness, he says, leading to a “set of dreamscapes.”

Molina, a prolific artist, poet, musician and activist whose work earned him a Westword MasterMind award in 2017, says he let go of more control on this album than he ever had before, handing over 100 minutes of material to longtime collaborator DJ IceWater to mix into the 45 minutes of smooth hip-hop and spoken word. He emphasizes that the project wouldn't have come to fruition without his collaborators, including Edwina Mabel, who provides vocals on one track and whom Molina mentored at Youth on Record while she was in a fellowship program. The album also features spoken-word poetry from Ramon Gabrieloff-Parish, Afrofuturist professor at Naropa University, and his wife, Michelle. "I recorded their poems at my home in December 2020," Molina says. "DJ Icewater paired his poem with a beat by Felix Fast4ward as an intro to the track 'Museo' — though, as you heard, everything kinda runs together as cascades of questions, visions and dreams."

The result, he says, is his "best album to date."

"It's an invitation to dream; it's an invitation to explore consciousness, and really, to get to decide what kind of dream you want to live," he explains. "We're living in the dreamscapes of all these different characters — the politicians, the authoritarians, the polarized realities of race and politics, all these different religions that come before us. There are these different influences — there are the worlds of money and fame, there are the clubs, there are all the commercials on TV. There are all these dreams that are already laid out, right?

"But what is your dream of reality? I think a key lyric in this album is 'You got a chance to fulfill a dream. What would you fill with your time? You got a chance to fulfill a dream. What would you fill with your space?'"

The lyrics and poetry position Molina as the Alan Watts of his generation. And similar to what Watts does in The Dream of Life, Molina asks us to confront not just duality — that the existence of love also means the existence of pain, that there is both good and evil — but all that exists in between. It's in that space, he says, that we can find a balance that begets action more aligned with consciousness, rather than raw emotion or passion.

“Reality is filled with joy and it's filled with pain," Molina notes. "We are born and we die. And in this culture, we have a hard time accepting the ends of things. It makes us stuck in all sorts of ways; it gets in the way of our purpose on this planet. And everybody has their own purpose to discover and figure out. I think that exploring not only duality, but the grayscale in between — that's the full-color spectrum, right? And the more that you kind of sink into that and accept the gritty nature of reality, the more you're going to be able to get comfortable in your own skin. No matter who you are, where you come from, what you look like, what you've been given — what do you want to do? I think that exploring consciousness and duality and the multitude of truths within and externally, it increases our capacity to fulfill our mission."

As an almost robotic voice directs between the songs and poetry, listeners are positioned in the future, when the album has been uncovered in “the Dream Station, what was then known as Aurora.”
“There is a narrator from the future. Her name is Madame Esquire Ixchel. We don't really know what she is. Is she a curator? Is she AI? Is it a human? What's going on in this futuristic reality? We're in the year 2099; she came across this collection of music, a cache of stolen files, and she's presenting this music to the world for the first time, and so she comes in as a narrator throughout the project and helps to tell the story," Molina explains. "When I created this collection of music, I didn't really have a solid conception in mind. But it all kind of comes down to just the present reality — social conditions, the vibe in the streets, the vibe in our lives, juggling between real life and digital life, you know? I was just really trying to come from a place of raw consciousness. And the story does present this futuristic trip through my consciousness, and that's just what happened to come, in terms of just trying to document reality as it is right now."

He confronts the political with a spoken-word piece, “Own This City,” which was inspired by his collaborations with the nonprofit organization Warm Cookies of the Revolution. "There was this whole series called Own This City, and the prompt was like, 'What does it mean to own a city?' Because truly, as citizens, the shit is ours. And we've lost a lot of public space over the last decade or two, nationally and definitely within the city. We've lost a lot of public space. It's been privatized, it's been corporatized. And through gentrification, we've lost a lot of spaces that used to have the heart and soul of the city, you know?" Molina says. "And so [the song pays] homage to that, but also says it's still ours. This dichotomy between 'old Denver' and 'new Denver' — I kind of wanted to just dissolve that and be like, it's something in between and it's something beyond. Because we still have the power to make the ship what we want it to be. What would it mean to own this city?"

By the end of the album, you will feel rejuvenated and refreshed — and will likely want to stay for another listen. But you may be worried when Madame Esquire Ixchel says that this is Molina's final album. "I am always going to make music, and I'm always going to be an MC," Molina clarifies. "Hip-hop got into my heart as a teen and kept me alive and moving through many lives. It's not always going to be for spectacle or public consumption."

Even so, the public turnout for Dreams Life and Times has been gratifying, he says, sharing a moment that emphasized the message of the immersive experience. It was the evening of the Parade of Lights, and two very different groups came in. One consisted of college-age kids, who wanted to turn up the music and were taking TikTok and Instagram videos. The other group was made up of younger teenagers, who were happy with mellowing out to the music and playing with the PicassoTiles. “To me, all of that's relevant," Molina says. "However you experienced this, if it affirms you, then good. That's what it's for.”

Dreams Life and Times Immersive Album Experience, 1 to 7 p.m. daily through December 31, Understudy, 890 C 14th Street; admission is free. Join Molina Speaks at Understudy for a Winter Solstice Artist Talk from 7 to 9 p.m. on Tuesday, December 27.