KKTO · Woven All of Dream and Error

An album of hallucinated trains, trumpet echo, and guitar drone

‘Dream 1’—the lead track from Woven All of Dream and Error

“KKTO’s Woven All of Dream and Error is an unprecedented record, fusing computer-hallucinated sounds of non-existent trains with shimmering compositions of trumpet echo and guitar drone. It is the outcome of a wider artistic process, ongoing for half a decade, now made available as a series of unique, one-of-a-kind lathe-cut records.”

—Estovers Editions, from the publicity material for Woven All of Dream and Error

Woven All of Dream and Error · An introduction to the project
Woven All of Dream and Error—lathe-cut record series Woven All of Dream and Error · lathe-cut record series

Album launch concert: Friday, 20th June, 2025 · 8pm
Soft Canyon · Voigtstrasse 36, 10247 Berlin-Friedrichshain

Between 2020 and 2024, the artist duo Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty—often also referred to by their abbreviated moniker KKTO—went on a series of walks. They walked along the pathways of now-abandoned railway routes in Berlin and Brandenburg, which they filmed as they went. In these walks, they also carried portable speakers, playing the sound of machine-learning-generated audio of invented trains: sound that has been hallucinated by machines, or by what we have generally come to refer to as artificial intelligence.

In parallel, they recorded and produced a series of compositions on trumpet, guitar, and bass, and combined them with these alien train sounds. These recordings were first presented as part of the artists’ exhibition at Hošek Contemporary in Berlin, Germany, in September 2024, alongside videos, prints, film-still grids and other materials.


These recordings foreground the slow swells, the humming amps, and the tangible messiness of analogue tactility. Careful listeners will hear not just iridescent drones, but also the scraped strings, the shuffling footsteps, and the wavering imperfections of soundwaves moving air molecules in a room with microphones.

At the same time, these sounds form a crucible to hold the presence of another entity, a layer of dreamlike and eerie sound—non-existent trains, or rather a ghostly apparition of machines that have only ever been computationally dreamt. Drawing on lineages of drone, dub, and ambient music, Woven All of Dream and Error aims to overlay a bed of thrumming drones and swells with these contemporary sonic machine ghosts.

Versions of these sounds were initially presented as a soundtrack for videos, during the original exhibition. The machine-learning-generated part of the sounds are the results of a patient process of building and training a machine-learning model from scratch, which Kata and Tom undertook together with their collaborator Kris Slyka. They nicknamed their model Dreamsloth (it dreams, but lazily and slowly). This model spits out sounds that are recognisable, but sounds that also have glitches and flaws—they strike our ear as something familiar, yet uncanny.


But... why trains? What makes these sounds worth generating, worth dreaming? Woven All of Dream and Error was partly inspired by the idea of overlaying two eras of technology—one historical, and one contemporary: railway networks, and machine-learning networks. One has bequeathed a layer of remnants and vestiges to the world, over the course of the last two centuries, both physical and social; the other contains potential future ruins and vestiges that we can only begin to guess at.

These sounds, and the exhibition from which they derive, draw their title from a line of a sonnet written by the Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa, first published in 1918. Pessoa’s words, juxtaposing dream and error—hallucination and disaster—were the conceptually apt encapsulation that the project adopted.

These compositions are now being given a more general release, and this sonically unique set of recordings has been given a similarly-unique physical form: as a set of fourteen lathe-cut records, one for each track on the album. The fourteen records in the series correspond to the fourteen lines of the sonnet, with each track titled after a line in turn.

These records, released by Soft Noise Acousmatics, in collaboration with Estovers Editions, were cut on the unique transducer-based SL-24 lathe, at Nuclear Lighthouse Studios in Berlin, by Kris Slyka. Each record in the series is cut into eight-inch square transparent polycarbonate sheets, housed in custom hand-made covers.


Woven All of Dream and Error is not only a unique set of records, and the conclusion of a sustained multi-year project, but it is also an attempt to grapple with our emerging technological reality, to consider the artistic implications of thinking machines, and to imagine it as a kind of trace or remnant left for the future. Pessoa’s poem concludes: Yet we think on, knowing we ne’er shall know.


Woven All of Dream and Error—lathe-cut record close-up view Woven All of Dream and Error—lathe-cut record close-up view

Views of one of the records in the lathe-cut record series


Listen now
Stream and listen to Woven All of Dream and Error now on Bandcamp
Buy now
The lathe-cut record series for Woven All of Dream and Error is available to purchase on Bandcamp
Labels
Woven All of Dream and Error has been released by Soft Noise Acousmatics, in collaboration with Estovers Editions
Production
See details of the SL-24 transducer lathe
Exhibition
See details of the originating exhibition for Woven All of Dream and Error, from September 2024, on the website of Hošek Contemporary
Read the exhibition’s gallery text and the accompanying book, Woven All of Dream and Error: Hallucinations and Remnants by Harley Aussoleil
Read details of the exhibition’s accompanying event on artificial intelligence, traces of violence, and the use of German weapons in the Gaza genocide.

About the artists

KKTO (Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty) have worked as a collaborative duo since 2011; they live and work in Berlin, Germany. 🍉

Their work combines elements of durational and time-based art, minimalist movement, and electroacoustic music and sound. They are interested in processes, sounds, and movements that come close to imperceptibility, and the ways in which this material can be transformed through repetition, patterning, layering, and archiving.

Their work has previously been exhibited and presented at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Serralves Museum, Porto; National Museum of Contemporary Art (Chiado), Lisbon; Ars Electronica, Linz; Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin; and Digital in Berlin’s Kiezsalon series, Berlin, among others.


More:

  • Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty · website
  • Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty · Instagram
  • Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty · Mastodon
  • Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty · mailing list sign-up form
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Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty