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I left my betters the task of analyzing glacial drifts, drumlins, and gremlins, and kremlins, and for a time tried to jot down what I fondly thought were "reactions" (I noticed, for instance, that dreams under the midnight sun tended to be highly colored, and this my friend the photographer confirmed).

                                                              V. Nabokov

There is a saying that revolutions are never televised. Offline people seldom even know about them, at least not at first. I’m not trying to convince you to get connected, I guess you’ve already made your decision about that. I just want you to learn a new word. DREAMLIN. Only a year has passed since it first appeared on the search engines, but now the time has come to make room for it in your vocabulary.

So what’s it all about? And what’s the connection between all this, American folklore and Stephen Spielberg? OK, I’ll start from the very beginning. During the second World War, when technicians of the U.S. army were unable to control or repair their machinery, they blamed their problems on Gremlins, weird and malicious creatures that derived great pleasure from spoiling things. Back then there were no computer viruses to blame. With the appearance of consumer electronics in every home has come a gremlin invasion – the little critters spend their time causing mysterious technical malfunctions and moving small objects such as pens, glasses and rings from place to place.

In 1984, Stephen Spileberg even produced the a movie about this disgrace. A Christmas tale about a dad who gives his son a present of a furry little creature with the following warnings: 1) Don't get him wet. 2) Don't expose him to sunlight. 3) Never feed him after midnight. Naturally, every one of these rules are broken and the result is a gang of nasty gremlins who decide to tear up the town on Christmas Eve. The movie's ending may have satisfied Spielberg, but it is not even the beginning of our story, because our heroes did not have more that 4 years of age at that time.

It came to pass in the year 2000 that some of the Gremlin population, courtesy of the information superhighway, reached the territory of Belarus. But the long journey and high radiation levels caused some changes in the creatures: something incomprehensible occurred to the first letters of their name, their fur cover and spreading ears disappeared and their true nature was finally revealed (see picture).

In Belarus, one of the new Dreamlins selected one of the computers in Minsk as its newfound habitation. Of course, this particular creature was not satisfied with just inhabiting a computer. This new strain of a monster became capable of causing complete disorder not only in the physical world, but also into people's thoughts and dreams. Thus his new name. He took complete and absolute control the people who were using the computer and it did not take long for the result of this collaboration (electronic music) to appear on the pages of the Internet.

There’s no doubt that even the finest magicians need time to learn their trade, but even during this period, they turned a lot of heads – numerous enthusiastic reviews, and a prize at Cyberpunk 2000, a festival of contemporary mode and electronic music in Minsk. To cut a long story short, DREAMLIN was just another name of an electronic band well known in the narrow confines of underground electronic music the world over. Until in June of 2001, Dreamlin's songs (unexpectedly to the musicians themselves), shot at #1 in the overall chart at ampcast.com , the site that leads the online digital music revolution.

Wait, you say, you thought that site was Napster? Well, it was, but the age of Napster is over, and besides, it was always just a new way of distributing old music. What about mp3.com? A bit closer, perhaps, as they did represent new unsigned and independent artists. But since the purchase of mp3.com by Vivendi Universal, independence and freedom there disappear on a daily basis...

For our heroes the revolution has just begun. They successfully collaborate with artists all over the world, everywhere from Hawaii to Finland. Reviewers compare their music with the pieces by Autechre, Thievery Corporation, Tommy Guererro, Fugees (!?), Tristeza, HIM (?), G-love, Diggable Planets, Brubeck and Bele Fleck. Well, some of those names do not mean anything even to me, but it doesn't matter, as most listeners agree that there are no 2 songs by Dreamlin that sound the same, and that their style, which tends to guitar trip-hop and fluctuates from breakbeat to ambient and drum n bass, is in any event their own and completely original. Broken beats, guitars, sometimes a couple of lines into the microphone, the sounds of analogue synths that have nothing to do with synths or analogue in their origin… Anyway, Egor Kunovsky and Denis Korobkov, the members of DREAMLIN, are going to bring forth a new term to match with such titles as 'French House' and the 'Bristol Sound' in the critics glossary: 'Belarussian Chill Out'.