Dreaming For Miles

An album by Discovery Zone and John Moods

Anamnesis is a force of recollection, a road into the world of memory. It literally means “to make a past event present now.” This album is a little portal, a mechanism by which we ended where we began – making music together.

Dreaming for Miles is a collection of songs that were written over the past ten years or so by Johnny and me, alone and together, and recorded between our basement practice space where we started our band Fenster many years ago, and at our home in Berlin. After spending over a decade living together and playing music together, our lives began to pull us in different directions. During the process of separation, we decided to make a last record together. It felt impossible at times, but ultimately, extremely rewarding to work through the archive of our life in this way, and in doing so, let go of a lot, to be able to meet each other on the other side.

While making this record, I was also in the process of leaving Berlin after living there for most of my adult life. Having moved there with only a suitcase, I was leaving with about 5 boxes, and was also in the process of getting rid of a lot my stuff, physical and otherwise. It took me a few trips back and forth between my hometown New York City, and Berlin, to clear out my flat and finish the recordings, spending a couple extended periods in Berlin between my other solo US and EU tours to work on this album.

We ended up finishing 10 tracks. There were definitely more songs that we couldn’t finish and maybe it’s for the best. Like for example there were a bunch of demos we made one night after getting rejected from a club in 2018 - this one in particular I had stuck in my head for years but and even though we did attempt to re-record it, it didn’t make it onto the album. Johnny is playing guitar and I’m playing a Yamaha synth and it’s probably like 3:00am.

We played, produced and mixed every song without trying to be too precious about anything. It was mostly recorded on a Tascam Portastudio 488 between the winter of 2023 and 2024. Some of the songs were old demos we never finished, plucked from obscurity, and some were newer songs that came about during the recording process. It’s an imperfect attempt at making an album during a breakup, at saying farewell to a life we shared, and at starting a friendship as different versions of ourselves, changed by one another.

We’re doing a super small run of 50 cassettes and 25 CDs only for now, as well as digital download via Bandcamp.

Everything feels so bleak in the streaming sphere, we’re trying a little experiment and we hope you’ll understand :)

A big THANK YOU to Anton and Mansions and Millions for putting out this unusual record - Anton has always been a champion of the Berlin music scene that we were a part of all these years. We know it’s a lot of hard work for not a lot of financial reward, and we appreciate all the things that go into a record like this, and trying out this experimental release style feels kinda fresh. Let’s see if it works, haha.

Also big thank you to Janosch for doing the album artwork <3 We’ve both been collaborating with Janosch for many years, making music videos and playing shows and doing all kinds of silly things together.

Thanks to Amande for all the support!

And thanks to you, of course.

Dreaming For Miles, the collaborative album between John Moods and Discovery Zone is now available exclusively through download and physical copies (Cassette and CD) CHECK IT AND ORDER OUT HERE

We also made a micro-run of 6 exclusive shirts. Each is a carefully selected vintage T-shirt, hand-pulled screen printed on the front and back in the Mansions and Millions studio. No two are alike: colours, placements, and small imperfections make each piece unique. You can check them out and buy them HERE

and a last little clip from one of the tracks on the record called Everytime You Leave thanks for making it this far haha :)