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SALT LAKE CITY — After taking a two-year break, dream-rock band DulceSky has released a new compilation album that features the last 10 years of its music.
The idea came to members of the band as they started playing more live shows early this year, and they saw that some of the people coming to their shows weren’t familiar with DulceSky’s catalog of music.
“We tried to put on whatever we thought people would have a connection with, and it would give people a better picture of who we are,” Oliver Valenzuela, the band’s lead singer and guitarist, said.
The album, titled “Spies of the System,” features many songs that the band is currently playing live, as well as “I Dreamt of You,” a song that has heard through over a half-million views on YouTube.
“For some reason that song connected with some people,” Oliver said. “It was totally unexpected because we didn’t release it as a single or anything.”
The band has been playing for over 10 years with only small changes in the line-up. It started with Oliver and his brother, Daniel Valenzuela, but drummer, Mitchell Razon, was soon added. The three band members are natives of Chile.
“Years ago, I saw DulceSky was featured in SLUG Magazine,” Razon said. “I read the interview and I saw that Oliver was from Chile, so I sent him an email and we started emailing, and I started going to their shows. I became pretty much their biggest fan. When they asked me to join I didn’t even let them finish the sentence before I said, ‘I’m in.’”
The band played like this for years with Oliver’s wife on guitar, but when she had the couple's first child in 2008, they saw they needed a new band member. Soon after they found Brett Kocherhans, who fit into the band’s sound seamlessly.
DulceSky
While Kocherhans is the only member of the band not from Chile, he served a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Chile, and Oliver said he acts just as much like a Chilean as the rest of them.
Though the Valenzuela brothers and Razon didn’t know each other or live close to each other in Chile, they all came to the United States around 1995, and were all influenced greatly by new wave and shoegaze music. They all played music while there, even though it was much more difficult.
“Back in the day just to get a guitar or get a guitar effects was really expensive and really hard,” Oliver said. “You would have to piece things together from your friends if you wanted to play.”
But after years of playing together in DulceSky, the members of the band decided they needed a break from it all.
“We’ve been doing it for so long that we kind of lost sight of what we were doing, and we didn’t know if we wanted to continue,” Oliver said.
After a two-year break, Oliver contacted the other members to see if they wanted to start up again, and since then they have begun writing music, playing live shows, released its compilation album and are in the process of working on an album with completely new songs.
“There’s a new energy and we’re writing again, and it’s a lot more fun than it was during those years,” Oliver said.
All members take part in the writing process, and each brings something different to the music.
“Oliver kind of brings in that skeleton of the song, then we come in and build from there,” Kocherhans said. “I play guitar and the keys, so there’s a lot I kind of do with both of those things.”
DulceSky is scheduling performances for this fall, starting in late August, and hope to release its next album early next year. You can find its last album and previous albums at dulcesky.com.
Brock Allen is a Montanan and a communications student at Brigham Young University-Idaho. Formerly a KSL.com intern, he regularly contributes as a music writer. Contact him at olaf.sant6@gmail.com.
